The POT has many ambitious projects in the coming years. All under the firm goal of positioning and consolidating once again as the most relevant and advanced space agency in modern history.
To achieve this, an essential part of your goals to meet lies in everything related to the Project Artemiswhere they will not only resume their tradition of manned missions dedicated to space exploration, but also this initiative will take man back to the Moon.
The road is long and complex, while the competition between other space agencies in the world and some private companies is getting tougher.
But each advance presented in the face of this challenge seems to be promising and headed for success. It is almost a fact then that the human being will return to the Moon, but he will not go alone, in fact he will arrive accompanied by thousands of pieces of art in a peculiar format.
This is Lunar Codex: the project that will take thousands of pieces of art to the Moon
The project Lunar Codex describes itself on its official website as “a message in a bottle for the future, so that travelers who find our time capsules can discover something of the richness of our world today.”
There on that page they also detail how they plan to keep an archive of contemporary international art, made up of pieces of poetry, magazines, music, film and books from more than 30,000 artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers from 157 different countries.
To achieve this, they will resort to a peculiar format, which is not exactly digital. It is about the NanoFiche: a series of plates made of a nickel-based material that engraves reduced versions of text and photos on a disc-like surface:
According to the Lunar Codex, a single disk of each NanoFiche (which is about 3 centimeters wide) can contain hundreds of small square images, each one 2,000 by 2,000 pixels.
So its capacity is around 150,000 pages of text or photos for each disc. For what would currently be the highest density storage medium in the world.
The most curious thing is that advanced digital technology would not be needed to read its content, since a microscope or a very powerful magnifying glass would suffice to see all the pieces of art.
So from 2023 to 2026, in a parallel mission with the Artemis launches, NASA will send scientific instruments to the Moon, just like all these pieces of art.
At its final destination, the Lunar Codex art will serve as a permanent installation on the Moon, located within a MoonPod aboard the lunar lander for Astrobotic Peregrine Mission 1.