Chandrayaan 2 is on the course of landing on the moon-but a tiny biological sample from India may have already made it to the moon ahead of its landing.
On February 21, 2019 an Israeli private lunar lander called Beresheet began its journey to the moon aboard a SpaceX rocket in its quest to be the first privately-funded spacecraft to land on the moon. Unfortunately, Beresheet had crash-landed and was irredeemably broken except, for a curious, quirky payload called the Lunar Library.
About Lunar Library
It is a 30 million page archive of human history and civilisation, covering all subjects, cultures, nations, languages, genres, and time periods. In the event of human extinction, it’s meant to be a ‘backup ‘ of earth-life.
The library is housed within a 100 gram nanotechnology device that resembles a 120mm DVD.
The device was conceived courtesy the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF)-a U.S.-based nonprofit whose mission is to create repositories of human civilisation and spread them through space.
The Lunar Library contained a small sample from the Bodhi tree in India, along with material on learning Hindi, Urdu and information on music.
The management of Mahabodhi stupa (Bihar) privately gave a leaf from the Bodhi tree and some soil from under the Bodhi seat. These were mixed with relics from saints and yogis, as well as earth from sacred caves and tiny bits of relics from India, China, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Nepal and Tibet.
Notably, the Lunar library also contained thousands of tardigrades — small, multicellular animals, first found by scientists in Antarctica, and known to be extremely resilient in hostile environments. They can survive without food and water for decades.
It is believed that the Lunar Library survived the crash of Beresheet and is intact on the moon according to our team of scientific advisers based on imagery data provided by NASA.
