Chennai: As India celebrated its success in testing an unmanned space crew module on Thursday, more than 170,000 Indians had another reason to be happy as a similar Nasa spacecraft carrying a microchip containing their names was brought back safely to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, US, on the same day after a space odyssey.
According to Nasa, a total of 178,144 space enthusiasts from India had their names recorded on the dime-sized microchip on board Nasa’s unmanned Orion crew module spacecraft, which was launched into space on December 4.
India stood second in the number of people sending their names after the US, which topped the list with 4,63,669 entries. United Kingdom (112,073), Mexico (51,505) and The Philippines (39,991) were in the top five. A total of 13,79,961 names from 230 countries across the world were recorded in the chip.
After travelling more than 5,700km above Earth, the exploration vehicle, built to take humans into space, plummeted through the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean before completing the final leg of its journey by land on December 18, arriving home at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, the American space agency said in a release. Nasa had in October this year invited the public to send their names on the microchip to destinations beyond low-Earth orbit, including Mars.
