While more than 412,000 names and messages will hopefully be heading towards the Moon tonight onboard Japan's Kaguya spacecraft, you can submit your name again (courtesy of The Planetary Society)...this time onboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter...

http://planetary.org/special/fromearth/lro

HURRY! Deadline is March 31, 2008.

Signed in, but no love for Mac users on the certificate....

Tried Safari, Camino AND FireFox....

IIRC, the PS had this issue before on other certificates, but was able to fix it.

Really sorry about that. I'm not sure what the nature of the problem is, but it's been worked on, and we can't seem to make it work. The only thing Mac users can do is to download the certificate and fill in your name yourself. Make sure that it doesn't open in Preview, you need to open it as a PDF.

Really dumb, I know, but that seems to be the answer we've got for you.

--Emily

I could have sworn there was a workaround, as I have PDFs on my drive - but those may be from JPL instead now that I think of it....

FWIW, I was able to get Preview to accept the edits though by doing a "save as." That way I can make sure the proper certificate number is recorded.

Click to view attachment
If I read the certificate copy out loud, for some reason I feel the need to say "Now here's Emily back with some more Q&A" at the end.

Well, LRO will outdo Kaguya for number of names, anyway. I just signed up for the LRO program and got certificate number one million, one hundred and sixty-nine.



-the other Doug

Deadline changed to May 1, 2008. LRO should DEFINITELY have a lot more names onboard than Kaguya if this opportunity ends 7 months from now...

Odd... That LRO page was taken down. Perhaps Goddard Spaceflight Center changed their mind and didn't want the names of non-rocket scientists gracing their spacecraft? Or having TWO spacecraft orbiting the moon with the names of civilians onboard was a bit superfluous?

Turns out the release was premature; a few HQ hoops yet to be jumped through. Don't worry, if you signed up while the page was up, we still have your names on file. Stay tuned.

--Emily

Thanks for the info, Emily. I thought someone at Goddard wasn't as into the whole public relations thing as JPL and JAXA are...

Goddard is very much as on board as we, JPL, and JAXA are!

--Emily

That's great news. Well... For those who haven't submitted their names yet.