Arch Mission Foundation Partners with Astrobotic to Launch Historic Lunar Library
PITTSBURGH (PRWEB) May 15, 2018 -- The Arch Mission Foundation and Astrobotic today announced a partnership to land the Lunar Library™ on Astrobotic’s first mission to the Moon in 2020. The Lunar Library will last for up to billions of years on the Moon, continuing the Arch Foundation’s mission to preserve and disseminate humanity’s most important knowledge across time and space.
The foundational components of the Lunar Library will include the Wikipedia, and the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project, a digital library of human languages. Additional content and data for the Lunar Library, will be announced in the coming year.
“We’re thrilled the Arch Mission Foundation has selected Astrobotic,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic. “It’s humbling to think our mission to the Moon will deliver something that could be read millions of years from now. Arch’s Lunar Library will be a monument not only to human knowledge and culture, but also the first commercial mission to the Moon.”
Astrobotic will carry the Lunar Library to the Moon on its Peregrine Lunar Lander and store it on the lunar surface. Astrobotic’s inaugural lunar mission is set for launch in 2020 and will include a manifest of payloads from governments, companies, universities, non-profits, and individuals.
“The Arch Mission Foundation has conducted extensive technical diligence in order to select Astrobotic for this lunar mission. We’re impressed with Astrobotic’s readiness for repeatable lunar missions. Our deep connections in the space industry and space agencies have consistently given us positive endorsements of Astrobotic’s capabilities,” said Arch Mission co-founder Nick Slavin.
The Lunar Library consists of a set of tens of millions of pages of text and images stored as analog microfiche on thin sheets of nickel. Each page is etched by laser at 300,000 dpi using patented nanolithography technology provided exclusively to the Arch Mission Foundation by Stamper Technology. The content of the Library can easily be read via a 1000x magnification optical microscope, without needing a computer. Nickel is impervious to radiation as well as the changing temperatures on the Moon, and can last for millions to billions of years in space.
In addition to the nickel microfiche technology, the Lunar Library will also utilize other storage technologies, including the 5D “superman memory” used in the Solar Library mission earlier this year, and data stored in molecular form using new DNA storage technology. More will be announced about these technologies in the coming year.
“Through massive replication around the solar system we will be able to guarantee that the Arch Libraries™ will never be lost - even millions to billions of years in the future,” said Nova Spivack, co-founder and Chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation. “We can definitely preserve our unique cultural heritage and biological record in a way that will survive for millions to billions of years, and that has not been possible before. We see the Lunar Library as the ultimate in cold storage for human civilization.”
The Lunar Library follows the Arch Mission’s initial foray into space with the Solar Library, launched aboard SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy flight earlier this year. It marks the 12th lunar payload sale for Astrobotic, which continues to lead the world in lunar sales.
About Astrobotic Inc.
Astrobotic Technology Inc. is a lunar logistics company that delivers payloads to the Moon for companies, governments, universities, non-profits, and individuals. The company’s Peregrine spacecraft accommodates multiple customer payloads on a single flight, offering flexibility at an industry-defining low price of $1.2 million per kilogram. Astrobotic is an official partner with NASA through the Lunar CATALYST program, has 24 prior and ongoing NASA contracts, a commercial partnership with Airbus DS, a corporate sponsorship with DHL, 12 deals for its first mission to the Moon, and 110 customer payloads in the pipeline for upcoming missions. Astrobotic was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA.
For more information Astrobotic: http://www.astrobotic.com
About Arch Mission Foundation
The Arch Mission Foundation designs, builds, delivers and maintains curated long-term archives that are housed in specially designed devices called Arch LibrariesTM (pronounced “Arks”). Arch Libraries are being developed with a variety of form factors to survive for long durations in space, as well as on the surfaces of planets, moons and asteroids.
The Arch Libraries are already the longest-lasting records of human civilization ever created, and possibly that ever will be created. They may last billions of years longer than the Pyramids. They may even last longer than our planet. In a million years the Arch Libraries may be the only remaining trace of our species and our civilization.
In 2015, Nova Spivack and Nick Slavin co-founded the Arch Mission Foundation, and in 2016 the Arch Mission Foundation was formally incorporated. That year they were joined by Michael Paul and Matthew Hoerl, and in 2017 and 2018 the organization began to grow and attract a growing community of leading minds, and dozens of partner organizations.
For more information on The Arch Mission Foundation: http://www.archmission.org
Doug Freeman, Jones-Dilworth, Inc., +1 512-826-7674, [email protected]
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