On February 22, 2024, The NanoFiche Deck made of 16 layers of nickel including the cover sheet riding on the surface of Intuitive Machine’s Odysseus lunar lander touched down on the moon. The Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission made their historic lunar landing as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (“CLPS”) initiative. This is the first time the US has landed on the moon since the Apollo program over 50 years ago.
The lunar lander delivered payloads for the Artemis program and a selected number of private organizations along with a treasure trove of curated human knowledge, including some of the most important and influential writings in the history of mankind, nano-inscribed on thin nickel sheets using the NanoFiche patented technology invented by Rochester NY based Stamper Technology, Inc.
The lander is alive on the moon but was tipped over and is laying on its side. However, the side where the NanoFiche deck was mounted is facing “sunny side” up and viewable from Earth with a powerful enough telescope or instrument.
NanoFiche™ Specifications
The NanoFiche deck is a stack of nickel and gold discs 120mm in diameter and mounted on a Titanium bracket attached to the outside of Odysseus. It is made of a 200 micron thick logo cover sheet to protect the rest of the content of 15 additional 100 micron thick content nickel layers. The content layers are engraved with analog and digital information designed to last for billions of years on the moon.
Notable content on the IM-1 Odysseus Time Vault:
The Wikipedia. The entire English Wikipedia containing over 6 million articles on every branch of knowledge.
Project Gutenberg. Portions of Project Gutenberg’s library of over 70,000 free eBooks containing some of our most treasured literature.
The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project archive of over 7,000 human languages and The Panlex datasets.
Selections from the Internet Archive’s collections of books and important documents and data sets.
Historical publications – Full analog engraving of The Complete works of William Shakespeare, The King James Bible, The Qu’ran, Longchenpa, Bhagavad Gita, Tanakh, Latin Vulgate, Phi printed to 1 million digits, Pi printed to 7 million digits.
Lunar Codex – An archive of contemporary art, books, music, poetry, and film.
Inventor’s Private Collection – Photos and articles documenting NanoFiche’s inventor’s journey from Vietnam to Rochester where NanoFiche was invented and made
