30-million-page archive of human culture sent to the moon
- 5 years ago
MOON — With climate change, nuclear warfare, and flat earthers looming on the horizon, Earth's not exactly the safest place to store the records of human civilization. So it's being sent to the moon instead.
CNET reports that when the Beresheet lunar lander was launched on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket Thursday, it was carrying a disc encoded with a 30-million-page archive of human history and civilization, dubbed the Lunar Library.
Created by the Arch Mission Foundation, the Lunar Library is a DVD-sized archive composed of 25 nickel film discs that are each only 40 microns thick.
According to the foundation, the first four layers contain over 60,000 analog images of documents, photos, books, and illustrations that can be seen with a low-powered microscope. Letters on these layers are the size of a bacillus bacterium.
The 21 digital layers beneath are encoded with 200 GB of information, as well as images, audio, video and software.
"This includes a complete copy of the English-language Wikipedia and the PanLex datasets, which is a linguistic key to 5,000 languages.
The AMF had previously placed a test archive on Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster that was launched to Mars orbit aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket.
According to CNET, there's also a solid-state copy of Wikipedia on a cubesat from SpaceChain that's currently in low-Earth orbit.
CNET reports that when the Beresheet lunar lander was launched on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket Thursday, it was carrying a disc encoded with a 30-million-page archive of human history and civilization, dubbed the Lunar Library.
Created by the Arch Mission Foundation, the Lunar Library is a DVD-sized archive composed of 25 nickel film discs that are each only 40 microns thick.
According to the foundation, the first four layers contain over 60,000 analog images of documents, photos, books, and illustrations that can be seen with a low-powered microscope. Letters on these layers are the size of a bacillus bacterium.
The 21 digital layers beneath are encoded with 200 GB of information, as well as images, audio, video and software.
"This includes a complete copy of the English-language Wikipedia and the PanLex datasets, which is a linguistic key to 5,000 languages.
The AMF had previously placed a test archive on Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster that was launched to Mars orbit aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket.
According to CNET, there's also a solid-state copy of Wikipedia on a cubesat from SpaceChain that's currently in low-Earth orbit.