What you’re staring at is proof that Motherboard has been accepted to join a mission to the near-Earth asteroid known as 101955 Bennu. Okay, so our involvement in the mission involves little more than getting our name on the spaceship being sent to the asteroid, as well as the return capsule heading back to Earth with a sample of the celestial rock. Oh, and you can too!

The OSIRIS-REx mission is hugely ambitious: In 2016, NASA will launch the robotic spacecraft, which will take about two years to reach Bennu. In 2018, it will obtain a sample from the asteroid’s surface, and a return capsule will launch back towards Earth to arrive in 2023. The rest of the craft (including Motherboard’s name, a chill shades emoticon, and thousands of other names) will continue floating about the ether.

Bennu is extremely old and carbonaceous, which makes it a ripe source for info about the early formation of the universe. While we’ll have to wait a few years for any concrete data, the home run would be a sample of ancient rock that helps researchers gain insight into the building blocks of life.

There’s another goal in mind: Research has shown that there’s a small chance that Bennu could be on a collision course with Earth. The authors of that paper calculated a total impact probability of 10-3 by the end of the 22nd century, which is indeed very small. But with other near-Earth asteroids also on potential collision courses, the OSIRIS-REx team hopes to gain more insight into asteroid trajectories for monitoring purposes.

The Bennu name program is part of The Planetary Society’s Messages from Earth initiative, which aims to get regular folks involved with space by letting them include their names or messages on space missions. Combined with the crowdsourced naming of Pluto’s moons, it seems that astronomers are fans of getting crowds involved with their work.

@derektmead