Tuxera and Puli Space Technologies to touch down on moon in 2022
Maryam Farag
Industry Aerospace Energy aerospace Canada Economy Innovation Technology
Tuxera announced a sponsorship of Puli Space Technologies’ efforts to take a monumental time capsule plaque to the moon.
Puli Space Technologies’ project, Memory of Mankind (MoM) on the Moon, is one of 25 planned payloads aboard Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One. The Peregrine Lander is targeted for launch on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Rocket in June 2022 under NASA’s Artemis program, Commercial Lunar Payload Services.
The MoM on the Moon venture will bring a lasting archive of imagery, news editorials, books, personal texts from the people of Earth to the moon on an aluminum alloy plaque, including a brief statement from Tuxera.
The plaque is resistant to lunar conditions, and its microfilm-like content is laser-etched into the surface and can hold millions of characters of text, all readable with a 10x magnifier. According to Puli, it represents “a unique cultural and social imprint of the early 2020s that will be preserved for tens of thousands of years.”
“We’ve designed a very lightweight, low-cost micro-detector that is able to ‘sniff’ for hydrogen-bearing volatiles, including water ice,” said Tibor Pacher, Founder and CEO, Puli Space. “One of our major goals is to look for resources that can be used in-situ on the moon. If our detector can figure out how much water ice is on the Moon, then it could potentially be harvested in the future for drinking water or to synthesize rocket fuel on the moon.”
The texts that will travel on the Peregrine Lander are also placed here on Earth deep within the 7,000-year-old World Heritage Salt Mine in Hallstatt, Austria. The goal of MoM is to preserve as much information as possible from the culture of humanity for the future.
“We’re extremely excited to be helping Team Puli in their monumental work with moon exploration,” said Szabolcs Szakacsits, Founder and CTO, Tuxera. “We understand the harsh conditions such as extreme cold and radiation, which make data storage and processing more challenging in space. Tuxera already has file systems and flash management software at work in the International Space Station. We have also worked with a number of aerospace contractors in North America and Europe, so we’re fully ready to help Puli in their mission to the moon.”
