The Arch Mission Foundation to Send Billion Year Archive Aboard SpaceIL’s Spacecraft to the Moon in 2019

The Billion Year Archive™ is the first of ambitious series of “Archives of Civilization” to be launched around the Solar System.

PR Newswire

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Earlier this week. SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit organization working to land the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon, presented their Time Capsule that will fly to the Moon aboard the spacecraft BERESHEET, in partnership with IAI (Israel Aerospace Industries). One of the technologies that enables this time capsule is a Billion Year Archive™ made by the Arch Mission Foundation.

The Billion Year Archive represents the first major Lunar archive from the Arch Mission Foundation as part of their mission to continuously preserve and disseminate humanity’s most important knowledge across time and space.

The Arch Mission Archive is contained within the SpaceIL time capsule and has a projected 5 billion year durability on the Moon. The Archive, in the form of a special 25 layer nickel disc made using nanotechnology by the Arch Mission Foundation, was installed this week in SpaceIL’s spacecraft. It is intended to serve as a backup for human civilization in a safe location off of Earth. This is the first installment of the Arch Mission Foundation’s “Archives of Civilization” project which includes backups of libraries of important knowledge, history, information and technology, delivered to many locations around Earth and other locations in the Solar System.

The Billion Year Archive contains a vast collection of important human knowledge, including the Wikipedia and many other data sets. The Arch Mission will be sending updates to this library over time on subsequent missions with partners across the space industry.

Further detail about the content of the Billion Year Archive will be provided in the future.

“The Billion Year Archive is an important achievement for the Arch Mission Foundation, and for the preservation of human civilization,” said Nova Spivack, co-founder of the Arch Mission Foundation. “We’ve worked for over 2 years to curate the data and build this ultra-long durability time-capsule,” Spivack added. “This is the largest set of knowledge ever stored in a single object of this scale. It will also be the largest amount of human knowledge landed on another planetary object, as well as the longest-lasting library humans have ever built. This is a major accomplishment for Israel, as well as for humanity as a whole,” Spivack added.

The Billion Year Archive is located inside the SpaceIL lunar lander in a protected compartment that is designed to remain on the Moon for billions of years.

SpaceIL is a non-profit organization aiming to land the first privately funded spacecraft on the moon early next year. One of the main goals of the organization is to inspire the next generation of kids to choose careers in sciences and engineering.

“We are excited that SpaceIL, on behalf of Israel the ‘Startup Nation’, will put the largest archive of human knowledge on the Moon” said Yonatan Weintraub, co-founder of SpaceIL.

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 Libraries™ or “Archs” (pronounced “Arks”). Arch Libraries are being developed with a variety of form factors to survive for long durations in space, as well as on Earth, and the surfaces of other 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 the distant future 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 as a not-for-profit corporation, and in 2016 the Arch Mission Foundation was formally incorporated and subsequently qualified for 501c3 not-for-profit tax status in the USA. Other early members of the Foundation include Michael Paul, Matthew Hoerl, Bruce Ha, Robert Jacobson, and an extensive advisory board.

Financial support for The Billion Year Library project was provided by Magical and Genius 100 as well as a range of donors. A grant to write the Wikipedia section of the Arch Library was provided by PTScientists. Arch Libraries and The Billion Year Archive are trademarks of The Arch Mission Foundation.

For more information visit: http://www.archmission.org

About SpaceIL:

SpaceIL is a nonprofit organization established in 2011 aiming to land the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon. Founded by three young engineers, Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub, SpaceIL sought to answer the international challenge presented by Google’s $20 million Lunar X Prize: to build, launch and land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon. SpaceIL is continuing with its mission to the moon despite the contest’s expiration without a winner. http://www.spaceil.com

 

SOURCE The Arch Mission Foundation