Bob Ramsdell in Outer Space




In October of 1997, the San Francisco Chronicle had an ad stating that 10,000 handwritten signatures would be digitized by the Jet Propulsion Laboratories and put on a CD. It would be attached to the Huygens package that would be dropped to the surface of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, on July 4, 2004. I sent my postcard in and gave out postcards to friends to have their children or grandchildren to send in also. I didn’t know if I would be alive in 2004 but I thought it would fun and instructional for the kids.

I later found out that so many people wanted to get on it that they decided to digitize a DVD and 600,000 people from around the world were on it. Most would be American, British, Russian and others but there were even two postcards from Tibet.

So when you see a picture of Saturn, you will know that Bob Ramsdell is in outer space!!

Here is a link from the Jet Propulsion Lab with an article on the digitizing process used to place the 600.000 + names: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/kids/amazing-dvd.cfm