In an attempt to engage the general public, NASA invites everyone to send messages and photos on social media that will be placed inside a time capsule aboard a space craft to be launched in 2016.

The Asteroid Time Capsule campaign, a space project collaboration with the University of Arizona, asks the public to send messages about how space exploration will look like today and beyond to 2023. Participants are asked to send their space messages via Twitter or Instagram.

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The lucky, selected entries will be etched on two time capsules in the form of microchips on board the satellite.

These microchips will look like one square inch silicon wafers. One will be affixed to the spacecraft and the other will detach and deliver back data and cargo of asteroid material to the Earth in 2023.

Selected posts can be anything about space exploration under science, technology, engineering from present day to future space exploration predictions for 2023.

The spacecraft that will bring the messages to space is called the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer or OSIRIS-REx.

The space mission will consist of OSIRIS-REx studying and mapping the asteroid Bennu. OSIRIS-REx will rendezvous with the asteroid in 2019 and collect surface material and head back to Earth in 2023.

This satellite mission will spend two and half years on the 1,760 foot wide asteroid and return with a minimum of 60 grams of surface material.

As OSIRIS-REx returns to Earth in 2023, the satellite would have made a journey deep into space of more than 3.9 billion miles. The space craft will land in the Utah desert after which the mission team will view the data along with messages from the time capsule.

The other time capsule will travel into deep space forever.

Messages can be tweeted using the hashtag, #AsteroidMission, or the tag, OSIRIS-Rex. On Instagram use the hashtag, #AsteroidMission.

Interested participants can submit these entries to the Asteroid Time Capsule campaign via www.instagram.com/osiris_rex or www.twitter.com/OSIRISREx.

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