Saturn Spacecraft to Lift Off With Signature Load
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — More than 600,000 signatures from 81 countries--plus toddlers’ scrawls, baby footprints and pet paw prints--were attached to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft Friday for launch to Saturn.
“This is really not done for extraterrestrials who are going to find it, because that’s very unlikely,” said Charles Kohlhase, manager of science and mission design for the Cassini project.
“It’s done for the people who are signing,” he explained. “Some can’t journey into space, so they send their signature . . . others feel a little sense of immortality.”
The oldest signatures scanned onto the digital disk mounted onto the spacecraft were those of Cassini and Huygens, the 17th-century astronomers for whom the spacecraft and its moon lander are named, respectively.
The best known signatures: those of actors Patrick Stewart and Chuck Norris and some members of Congress.
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