THE LUNAR LIBRARY II (ASTROBOTIC, 2024)
More Lunar.
More Library.
The Lunar Library 2 is an ultra-durable archive of humanity, created by the Arch Mission Foundation.
The second Lunar Library archivex over 60M pages, including foundational components like the Wikipedia, collections from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project and PanLex datasets, which provide a linguistic key to 5000 languages with 1.5 billion cross-language translations. Additionally, the new Lunar Library included archives of music and film.
The library also featured the “Aldrin Archive” in partnership with the Aldrin Family Foundation, which included images from the Apollo 11 mission as well as space-themed STEAM projects from K-12 Students.
Additional content partners for the Lunar Library II include the SETI Institute’s The Earthling Project, CATALOG, Memory of Mankind, LifeShip, the Great Pause Project, the Molecular Information Systems Lab at the University of Washington, and more.
Astrobotic attempted to carry the Lunar Library II to the Moon on its Peregrine Lunar Lander intending it to store it on the lunar surface. Astrobotic’s inaugural lunar mission also included a manifest of payloads from NASA, companies, universities, nonprofits, and individuals.
The Peregrine Lander experienced an anomaly and after orbiting the Moon, it returned to Earth and burned up upon re-entry over the South Pacific.
The Lunar Library is being deployed to deliver extremely long-duration archives containing curated collections of public and private libraries and other time-capsules to the Moon. The Library will continue to be regularly updated with additional installments to various destinations around the surface of the Moon, across a series of lunar landings by a variety of commercial entities, nonprofit organizations, and governments.
The Lunar Library 2 is printed on nickel NanoFiche, an ultra durable analog storage medium developed by Arch Mission technology advisor, Bruce Ha.
In addition to the nickel NanoFiche technology, the Lunar Library II also utilizes other storage technologies, including data stored in molecular form using new DNA storage technology.
The Lunar Library II followed the Arch Mission’s initial Lunar Library launch in 2019, and the first Solar Library, launched aboard SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy flight earlier in 2018. In 2021, the Arch Mission Foundation’s first terrestrial Earth Archive, the Lava Library, was placed in the lava tubes of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano by the Valoria I mission crew of HI-SEAS during a Mars simulation mission.
A special thank you to Arch Mission co-founder Nick Slavin, Totenpass, and to our advisors, including Stephen Wolfram, David Copperfield, Frank White, Ben Lamm, Jill Tarter, Martin Kunze, and many more, for their important contributions to Lunar Library II.