Send your name to Pluto

hatredman writes "NASA is preparing to send the New Horizons probe to Pluto. It will be the first earth device to get intimate with the icy planet. And you can be there too - or, at least, your name. NASA is asking everyone to send them their names, which will be attached in the space device. The New Horizons probe will be launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt, in the outskirts of the Solar System. It is expected that the probe will return to earth in approximately 50 thousand years."

Re:50,000 years??

[m50d]

The data will be valuable so the probe might as well keep on collecting it. Sure, it will be relatively less important as time goes on - we'll know enough about most of the stuff out there to ignore it, but more data is always useful in science.

And I suspect it's simply a fuel saving to have it end up heading inwards, so point it at the earth, it might be useful.

Re:Kinda depressing

[KenAndCorey]

That it is going to take us 50,000 years to send a probe to pluto and back?

If you read the timeline [jhuapl.edu], it'll only take about 10 years for the probe to get there. I know you said "there and back", but your comment is still a little misleading.

Re:50,000 years??

[Anonymous Coward]

The probe isn't returning to Earth. The orbit it's on just happens to return to the inner solar system in 50,000 years.

It seems kinda pointless

[xaz0r]

By the time it gets there humans will have already established colonies and been living there for a long time. Faster space travel will have already been invented so we should wait till it is before we try something stupid like this. At least that way there will be someone there to receive it when it gets there.

Re:Binary CD?

[Gaima]

I'm inclined to the hope that any alien species sufficiently advanced enough to be space faring and catch the probe (and CD), would also be advanced enough to some day translate and understand the information.
What I'm not inclined to is the hope that the CD will last that long! Damn things barely last 2-3 years on Earth, let alone the radiation in space.

Will people even be able to read the names??

[panaceaa]

I doubt the average person will be able to read the list of names when the probe comes back. The Latin alphabet [wikipedia.org] has only existed for 2,700 years, and the probe is coming back in 50,000. In 50,000 years, it's almost inevitable that either humanity will be communicating without written words, we'll be using an entirely different alphabet, or humanity will be extinct.

So what's the point of putting the names on the satellite? Is it the Gen-Xer's version of Voyager 1 [wikipedia.org]?

Re:How will the probe come back?

[Nerull]

He never said it would be in Earth orbit.

The probe will be launched into solar orbit. Perapsis (the low point in the orbit) will still be near earth. It will eventually come back round to this point, hence it will come back to near earth, even if not to it.

That doesn't mean earth will be at that spot in its orbit at the time, of course.

Everything in earth orbit is already 'captured' by the sun, as the earth is orbiting the sun. Anything that reaches escape velocity and leaves earth goes into 'heliocentric', or solar orbit. Leaving the solar system takes a hell of a lot more power than it takes to escape from earth, thus its quite possible that it will, eventually, come back. It may even hit earth, if the orbit is right.