When it comes to time capsules, they can prove to be worth exploring, especially when you take into consideration how time passes us by so quickly, it is nice to have something physical from the past to refer to many decades down the road. NASA intends to enlist public participation in their upcoming Asteroid Time Capsule, where you can send your tweets to space as well as share your Instagram photos for future generations to see what you have been up to in the past.
I suppose this is an opportunity which is too good to pass over, considering how you can actually play a role in a NASA mission without having to go through the rigorous training of being an astronaut. Basically, NASA will send social network communications from users on its round-trip mission as it goes about collecting samples from the asteroid Bennu.
The Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft is tipped to launch in a couple of years’ time, where it will spend 505 days after a rendezvous with the 493-metre diameter asteroid in 2019. Once its task is done, it will depart in 2021, making a 2 year journey back to earth.
You can hashtag Tweets and Instagram photos with #AsteroidMission, where these will then be taken into consideration for the time capsule. Stuff about food is not going to make the cut, since NASA intends participants to explore on how one might communicate with one another, even in the solar system, close to a decade from now. There will be 50 best Tweets and 50 best images from Instagram which will be placed in the capsule. Submissions close at the end of this month.