Hello Kitty Is in Space and Wants Your Messages

Hello Kitty in Space: Japan's iconic mouthless cat is riding aboard the small satellite Hodoyoshi 3 and will beam messages from space as part of a 40th anniversary celebration by Sanrio Co., Ltd.

Credit: Sanrio Co., Ltd.

Hello Kitty, Japan's lovable feline toy, is now a cat-stronaut.

Not only is the intrepid kitty orbiting the Earth in a small satellite, but she's ready to beam messages from space for fans.

Images from Sanrio Co., Ltd., the company responsible for the cute pop culture cat, show Hello Kitty in space clutching a toy while stunning views of Earth fill a small window in the background.

The Earth views are real, with Sanrio launching Hello Kitty as a passenger on the small nanosatellite Hodoyoshi 3 in June.

A digital display sits above the window to show messages from Earth.

"Hello Kitty is standing by to deliver your messages from space!" reads a message on Sanrio's space Hello Kitty website.


Sanrio posted a YouTube video of Hello Kitty in space to launch the message campaign. The mission is part of Sanrio's 40th anniversary celebration for the toy this year.

Sanrio representatives announced Hello Kitty's space mission on Tuesday (Aug. 12) and began taking submissions for "thank you" messages to a person's family or friends to be presented by Hello Kitty in space.

The messages can be 180 characters long and in Japanese or English, but only 10 messages will make it to space.

A selection committee will review the submissions and make a final decision on which messages have the right stuff.

For the project, Sanrio company sent a 1.6-inch (4 centimeters) Hello Kitty aboard the Hodoyoshi 3, one of two satellites (Hodoyoshi 4 was the other) built by the University of Tokyo's Nanosatellite Center.

The figure is riding in a compartment about 28 inches tall (70 cm), and about 20 inches wide and deep, according to a Sanrio statement.

Hodoyoshi 3 launched from Russia on June 19 alongside 36 other satellites. The spacecraft's primary mission is to test space technology and snap high-resolution photos of Earth from space.

Hello Kitty in Space
Sanrio's Hello Kitty in Space mission isn't the first time the mouthless Japanese cat has ventured toward space.


In 2013, seventh grader Lauren Rojas of Antioch, California launched a Hello Kitty doll into Earth's stratosphere as part of a science project at Cornerstone Christian School.

Credit: Melody Green via YouTube

According to a Reuters report, the Hodoyoshi 3 satellite is about the size of a trash can and is part of a larger $40 million project by Japan's education and science ministry to promote interest in science and engineering.

Applications for Hello Kitty's space missions are being accepted through Aug. 25, and submissions can be sent in by people outside of Japan, according to Sanrio representatives.

The messages will be transmitted from space between Aug. 26 and Sept. 8, and featured on the Hello Kitty 40th anniversary website, according to Sanrio representatives.

How would Earth communicate with a starship or a distant civilization?

USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D, a starship of the Star Trek: The Next Generation era. 

Credit: Memory-Alpha.Org /Paramount Pictures /CBS Studios

Its not a new question but its still a puzzle; How would humans communicate with extraterrestrials.

It may not be as easy as the science fiction writers and film makers would have us believe.

David Messerschmitt

David Messerschmitt, of the University of California at Berkeley, is addressing this potential problem. A new paper by him on Arxiv examines the issue and it provides an intriguing insight into how to communicate outside of our Earth.

Messerschmitt explains that humans already communicate with probes that are astronomical distances from Earth (Voyager 1, now in interstellar space) at radio frequencies, and there is some usage now of laser/optical communications (namely between the Earth and the moon).

Across greater distances, however, you lose information, the interstellar medium (ISM) gets in the way, and stars shift due to relative motion.

We are adept at communicating with our own satellites and probes but don't know how other civilizations communicate and how they design their systems. So, how could you send a message that would definitely be picked up and understood?

This sequence of images, showing a region where fewer stars are forming near the constellation of Perseus, illustrates how the structure and distribution of the interstellar medium can be distilled from the images obtained with Planck. 

Credit: ESA / HFI and LFI Consortia

Messerschmitt further explains that starships and civilizations would, almost certainly, have different communications protocols and therefore, requirements.

Starship communication would be two-way and based on a similar design, so success comes by having high "uplink and downlink transmit times".

The more information, the better it would be for scientific observations and keeping down errors.

Civilization-to-civilization chats, however, would present headaches. As with all diplomatic negotiations, crafting suitable messages would take time.

Then we'd have to send the message out repeatedly to make sure it is heard (which actually means that reliability is not as big of a problem.)

Then the interstellar medium  (ISM) would have to be contended with (something that pulsar astronomers and astrophysicists are already working on, he said).

In either case, when talking to starships or other civilizations, one can assume there'd be a lot of energy involved, he added.

"Starships are likely to be much closer than the nearest civilizations, but the cost of either a large transmit antenna or transmit energy is likely to be considerably greater for the starship than for a terrestrial-based transmitter," he said, suggesting that a solution would be to minimize the energy delivered to the receiver.

Other civilizations may have found more efficient ways to overcome this problem, he added.

You can read more details of the research on Arxiv, where Messerschmitt talks about Gaussian noise, channel coding and other parameters to keep in mind during communication.

More information: "Design for minimum energy in starship and interstellar communication." David G. Messerschmitt. arXiv:1402.1215 [astro-ph.IM] arxiv.org/abs/1402.1215

NASA Juno Flyby: Amateur ham radio operators send Morse messages to spacecraft

See how amateur ham radio operators beamed messages to NASA’s Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft during its Earth flyby of Oct. 9, 2013. Did their morse code messages of hello reach Juno?

Credit: Nasa /JPL Caltech

Lone Signal Project Begins Beaming Your Messages Into Deep Space

CREDIT: Lone Signal Media

In 18 years, messages beamed out into space from Earth by a new alien-messaging project Monday (June 17) will reach a distant star system known as Gliese 526.

Officials with the Lone Signal project — a newly launched website designed to send user-written notices to any extraterrestrials who may receive them — hope that their messages might open the first dialogue between Earth and other intelligent life forms.

One of the company's first message beamed to the Gliese 526 system, located 17.6 light-years from Earth was sent by famous futurist Ray Kurzweil and reads: "Greetings to Gliese 526 from Singularity University."

"As you receive this, our computers have made us smarter, the better to understand you and the wisdom of the universe…"

"This signal, in 19 hours, will go farther than the Voyager spacecraft has in 40 years," Jason Silva, the host of "Brain Games" on the National Geographic Channel said.

He spoke to a crowd of fashion models, businessmen and a handful of scientists in downtown Manhattan honouring Lone Signal's launch on Monday.

The Jamesburg Earth Station will be responsible for transmitting the messages contributed to the Lone Signal project.

NASA MAVEN Mission: Public invited to send names and messages to Mars

NASA is inviting members of the public to submit their names and a personal message online for a DVD to be carried aboard a spacecraft that will study the Martian upper atmosphere.

The DVD will be in NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which is scheduled for launch in November.

The DVD is part of the mission's Going to Mars Campaign coordinated at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP).

The DVD will carry every name submitted. The public also is encouraged to submit a message in the form of a three-line poem, or haiku.

However, only three haikus will be selected. The deadline for all submissions is July 1. An online public vote to determine the top three messages to be placed on the DVD will begin July 15.

Stephanie Renfrow

"The Going to Mars campaign offers people worldwide a way to make a personal connection to space, space exploration, and science in general, and share in our excitement about the MAVEN mission," said Stephanie Renfrow, lead for the MAVEN Education and Public Outreach program at CU/LASP.

Participants who submit their names to the Going to Mars campaign will be able to print a certificate of appreciation to document their involvement with the MAVEN mission.

"This new campaign is a great opportunity to reach the next generation of explorers and excite them about science, technology, engineering and math," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator from CU/LASP.

Bruce Jakosky

"I look forward to sharing our science with the worldwide community as MAVEN begins to piece together what happened to the Red Planet's atmosphere."

MAVEN is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The spacecraft will investigate how the loss of Mars' atmosphere to space determined the history of water on the surface.

"This mission will continue NASA's rich history of inspiring and engaging the public in spaceflight in ongoing Mars exploration," said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Pioneer & Voyager; are we sending Mixed Messages?

NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, which launched in 1972 and 1973, carried this design, which was etched on a 15x23-cm gold-anodised aluminium plate. The plaque was intended to inform any extraterrestrials who might come upon it when and where the spacecraft launched (using 14 pulsars as a reference point). "There's also an image of a man and woman - perhaps the most cryptic for an extraterrestrial to understand," says Vakoch. "The response NASA got [to that image] was quite surprising to them. Some were concerned that NASA was sending pornography into space." (Illustration: NASA)

NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which launched in 1977.

Sounds and images intended to portray the diversity of life and cultures on Earth were encoded on a phonograph record made of gold-plated copper. A committee chaired by Carl Sagan assembled its contents: 115 images, a variety of natural sounds, music from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings in 55 languages.

Each record is encased in a protective aluminium jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and how to play the record.

"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilisations in interstellar space," said Sagan. "But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet." (Image: NASA)

"Like other messages that have been created for extraterrestrial audiences, the starting point of the Voyager recording was something we would expect extraterrestrials to have in common with us - and that's basic math and science," says Vakoch. (Illustration: Frank Drake)

This illustration of DNA (top left) shows how "the chemistry of Earth is tied into our genetic material", says Vakoch.

Human reproduction is also the focus of multiple Voyager images, from the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm to a developing foetus to a silhouette of a man and a pregnant woman. "There's an emphasis on reproduction in the Voyager recording, but also considerable caution in depicting nude human beings," says Vakoch. "The image [of the man and woman] nicely portrays our ambivalence about sexuality." (Illustrations: Jon Lomberg)

This image illustrates "licking, eating and drinking" (Image: National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center)

There are some Voyager images that relate to health and the human body, including this X-ray of a hand, says Vakoch - "but nothing that explicitly says, 'Our bodies are frail.'"

"The Voyager recordings intentionally minimise negative aspects of [human culture]," says Vakoch. "There was an intentional decision not to include a picture of a nuclear mushroom cloud [or] poverty and disease."

But long-lived alien civilisations are the ones most likely to be around to intercept our messages. "If they're older, perhaps they're also much more advanced than we are," says Vakoch. "What would we have to say that would be of interest to them?"

"I think the greatest thing we have to offer is to be honest about our current level of development, to highlight that we're not sure that we're even going to survive the next century . . . but that we have enough faith that we will continue to exist that we are making an effort to reach out to other civilisations." (Image: National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center)

This illustration of vertebrate evolution shows representatives of the major vertebrate groupings, including amphibians, birds and mammals.

The image of the man and woman at top right is quite similar to the drawing that was on the Pioneer plaque, with one difference - in the Pioneer image of the early 1970s, the man is raising a hand in greeting, but in this image from a few years later, the woman is waving hello. "Just in the span of a few short years, we saw a responsiveness in NASA to [include] a more adequate representation of women by showing a woman not as passively standing next to a man but as being a member of a couple that was actively sending greetings to other worlds," says Vakoch. (Illustration: Jon Lomberg)

NASA really made an effort with Voyager to include images and sounds from around the world. "What's unique about the Voyager recording is there's really an emphasis on describing the breadth of human experience," says Vakoch. "Really it's the best portrayal of human diversity of any messages that have been sent out in space."

Still, the diversity it displays is limited – there are no images representing homosexuality, for example. "I think any interstellar message is in part a reflection of its times," he says. "It may well be that if NASA sends out another image in the future, it may include a picture of two men or two women holding hands." (Images: United Nations)