Somewhere out past Mars, Adolf Hitler floats through space — along with Elvis, Darth Vader and an advertisement for a porn website.
This unlikely cast of characters is hitching a ride on the U.S. space probe Stardust, which contains a list of more than 1 million names submitted by the public through a NASA website.
The names, etched on two silicon chips so small they can be read only with a microscope.
Though it was supposed to contain only real names, the list apparently wasn’t checked very carefully. It is riddled with fictional characters, the famous and infamous, hackers and crackers, and a few personal insults — “Marilyn Manson Sux,” for example.
The list is an accidental time capsule of popular culture at the time of Stardust’s launch in 1999. There are names that hogged 1998 headlines but are half-forgotten now, like the Spice Girls, Furby, Jeffrey Dahmer and Sonic the Hedgehog. But there’s no Eminem, no Osama bin Laden, no Britney Spears.
But think of any popular character from science fiction or fantasy, and they’re likely on Stardust. Frodo Baggins rubs shoulders with Count Dracula, Buck Rogers and multiple misspellings of Jean-Luc Picard.
NASA would probably prefer not to have the Dark Lord Satan aboard, but any satanic influence is likely counteracted by God, Allah, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mother Teresa and Joan of Arc, whose names are also on the chip.
There are also a few website and e-mail addresses — the first interplanetary spam? The most colorful is Bad-Kitty.com, which seems to have once been a venue for “Kitty” to cavort in front of a webcam wearing lingerie or less. Despite the out-of-this-world publicity, the site is not currently functional.
Besides being a space-bound billboard, Stardust performed some science during its seven-year mission. After examining an asteroid and sampling interstellar dust, the vessel fulfilled its main objective last year by grabbing a sample of dust from the comet Wild 2.
NASA hopes that the sample will give clues to the source of water and organic molecules that may have arrived on comets to jump-start life on Earth.
By Simon Burns