SpaceIL , the Israeli - based private space traveling nonprofit bet on by billionaire Morris Kahn , came up short in their attempt to land the first commercial payload ever deliver on the Moon . Their Beresheet landercrashedlast Thursday , April 11 , after a technical glitch prompted its engine to power off and then back on , causing it to arrive in too fast and strike the lunar surface .
While not in the end successful , the ocean trip may have still managed to mark a milestone in the story of lunar exploration . The Arch Mission Foundation , which bring with SpaceIL to put a massive amount of information — let in the entirety of Wikipedia — on board , announcedthis week that the digital subroutine library may have survive the impact . That would make it the first substantial deposit of noesis to fill theMoon .
The data , which wasdubbedthe Lunar Library , obtain an telling wealth of material — the eq of rough 30 million page in all . In addition to Wikipedia , there are Quran selected by Project Gutenberg , 60,000 ikon , nomenclature keys , and a curated selection of medicine . All of this man was packed into 25 nickel magnetic disc that are each 40 microns thick . The entire library is roughly the sizing and figure of a DVD .
Arch Mission Foundation believes that the disk could have survived the impact establish on what ’s known about its trajectory and the crash and is working to confirm its existence . Even if it did n’t , there ’s still something to be say for the idea that " archaeological ruin " of human knowledge now exist there .
The Lunar Library would n’t be the only human keepsake left behind . Alan Shepard , the fifth world ever towalkon the Moon in 1971 , leave golf game balls afterplayinga lunar round . In 1969 , thecrewofApollo 11left a 1.5 - inch atomic number 14 magnetic disk containing goodwill messages from prominent figures in 75 countries drop a line microscopically .
SpaceIL intends to pursue a second lunar lander , with a launching appointment to be announced . While other countries have bring down a fomite on the Moon — the United States , China , and Russia — this would have notice the first time for a private entity .
[ h / tFast Company ]
