Paris. One of NASA’s Artemis missions will in a few years send a “summary” of humanity’s cultural heritage to the Moon, recorded on sapphire discs, to “transmit an intelligible message to future generations” or even to possible extraterrestrial civilizations. .
The ‘Moon Sanctuary’ project, launched this week in collaboration with UNESCO and NASA, is inspired by the golden record that the Voyager space probes carried on board in 1977, with images and sounds of life on Earth.
“We want to talk to humans of the future, maybe even with an extraterrestrial civilization, to tell them who we are, what we know and what we do,” Benoît Faiveley, a French engineer responsible for the project led by a dozen scientists and artists, told AFP. .
An automated space probe from NASA, the American aerospace agency, will place a 1.4 kg capsule on the lunar surface “a priori in 2027,” he added.
The capsule will contain 24 sapphire discs measuring 10 centimeters in diameter, engraved with micropixels — between 3,400 and 7 million per disc — some of which are currently manufactured by the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).
The data, stored in an analogue way, will try to draw a “variegated portrait of our species”, through a selection of knowledge in science, mathematics, paleontology, art, etc.
They will also house a coding of the human genome, which offers “our biological recipe”, through texts, images and mosaic diagrams.
“The idea is that the information goes through time, with long-term storage, putting yourself in the shoes of an archaeologist of the future,” explained Jean-Philippe Uzan, an astrophysicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and one of the promoters of the project.
The Moon, unlike the Earth, is a “enduring site” because it has a surface that resists floods and earthquakes and is far from any “human deterioration,” the scientist added.
The contents of ‘Moon Sanctuary’ are also intended to be used on Earth within the framework of exhibitions, conferences and documentaries.
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– 2024-04-07 17:54:23
