You Can Beam a Message to NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft for Historic Flyby!

By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | December 10, 2018 03:08pm ET

NASA's New Horizons probe is getting set for the farthest-out flyby in history, and you can provide some words of encouragement to help the spacecraft get across the finish line.

The mission team is asking people around the world to send greetings to New Horizons, which will zoom by the small object Ultima Thule on Jan. 1. Ultima Thule lies about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, the target of New Horizons' first flyby — which means the upcoming encounter will take place more than 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) from Earth.

"Traveling at light speed, the signals carrying these messages will reach the spacecraft about six hours after being beamed from the Applied Physics Lab's largest dish antenna, on the very same day that New Horizons flies by Ultima Thule!" New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. "How cool is that?" [NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures]

You can participate (for free) by going to http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Send-Greetings/. As Stern noted, your message — which you can't devise yourself but instead must choose from a set of six options — will be beamed out from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which manages the New Horizons mission for NASA.

More:
https://www.space.com/42682-send-greetings-new-horizons-ultima-thule.html