Lilienthal Children's Academy participates in NASA's Message in a Bottle campaign

In October, NASA will launch a mission to Jupiter. There will be a computer chip on board the spaceship where the names of several Lilienthal children will also be stored. Kale Schlaufuchs, the mascot name of the Lilienthal Community Foundation's Children's Academy, will also be immortalized there.

Jupiter is about 800 million kilometers away from Earth. It is the largest planet in our solar system, and it revolves around the sun with many moons. The journey there will take six years. The spacecraft, called the Europa Clipper, will orbit Jupiter and fly repeatedly past the moon Europa. The Moon likely hides a huge ocean beneath its ice sheets, several kilometers thick. The goal of the mission is to find out if there is life, such as bacteria, under the thick ice cover. Then there will be evidence that life on Earth is not an isolated case.

After learning about the mission, the Children's Academy submitted Callie Schlaufuchs' name to NASA. Some children who attended a workshop on the planets of the solar system at Lilienthal Children's Academy also sent their names to NASA. In response, everyone received a small sticker containing an image of a message in a bottle with their names written on it. Thousands of other people's names also go on the trip. NASA's spacecraft will not return to Earth, but will remain in the Jupiter system.

The Children's Academy devotes a permanent exhibition to the topic of astronomy and space travel in its workshop located behind the municipal building. On Saturdays from 3pm to 6pm, children can conduct and learn about astronomy-themed experiments. For the upcoming Jupiter mission, the Children's Research Center Lilienthal has made a paper deck of the Europa-Clipper space probe available for download at https://aktion.buergerstiftung-lilienthal.de/kinderakademie/experimente/.

To the home page