"And lo! Ben Adam's name led all the rest."

"Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling 'Kilroy was here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass."

-- William Faulkner

If you can't make it into space (the most recent space tourist paid about U$20,000,000 for his ticket on a Russian rocket for a few days on the International Space Station), you CAN send YOUR NAME into outer space!

NASA sent the names of more than a million people (including the names of America's military dead on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC -- about 52,000) into space stored on two microchips on the STARDUST space probe, launched on 7 February 1999. Those names will fly deeper into space forever. (Or maybe Aliens will find the spacecraft and read the names on the microchip.)

But here's another chance to send your name into space! You can submit your name today!

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I missed out on submitting my name on the STARDUST microchip. Are there any other space missions who are doing a similiar thing?

Currently, the Dawn mission is collecting names. Dawn is a mission to [the] main asteroid belt [between Mars and Jupiter] that is expected to launch in June 2006. You can submit your names here:

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/DawnCommunity/Sendname2asteroid/index_asteroid_blt.aspx

You'll get One Chance to spell your name correctly, just the way you want it to go into space forever. After you press SUBMIT, the next page will be a NASA certificate, ready for you to print and hang on the wall.

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NASA's Dawn Mission Statement

Dawn's goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system's earliest epoch by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formations.

[The asteroids] Ceres and Vesta reside in the extensive zone between Mars and Jupiter together with many other smaller bodies, called the asteroid belt. Each has followed a very different evolutionary path constrained by the diversity of processes that operated during the first few million years of solar system evolution.

Dawn has much to offer the general public. It brings images of varied landscapes on previously unseen worlds to the public including mountains, canyons, craters, lava flows, polar caps and, possibly ancient lakebeds, streambeds and gullies. Students can follow the mission over an entire K-12 experience as the mission is built, cruises to Vesta and Ceres and returns data. The public will be able to participate through the Solar System Ambassadors and through participation on the web.