Lunar Codex

August 5, 2023

A collection of various art made by humans might become immortal with the Lunar Codex programme.
The programme is spearheaded by Samuel Peralta, a semi-retired physicist and art collector from Canada.
The collection of varied digitised art will be sent to the moon as a lasting record of human creativity.
Lunar Codex is stored on memory cards or laser etched on NanoFiche, a 21st-century update on film-based microfiche.
- These will ensure that the art forms reach the lunar surface safely.
The collection of art is gathered from 30,000 artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians from 157 countries.
The art forms include images, magazines, books, podcasts, movies and music, which are divided into four capsules.
- The first such capsule is known as the Orion collection, already flown around the moon when it was launched on the Orion spacecraft as part of NASA’s Artemis 1 mission last year.
- Other three are – The Nova Collection, The Peregrine Collection, The Polaris Collection.
- In future, a series of lunar landers will take the Lunar Codex capsules to various destinations in craters at the moon’s South Pole and a lunar plain called Sinus Viscositatis.
The artworks, however, will not be the first to be stranded on the moon.
- In 1969, when Apollo 12 mission was launched for the moon, the lunar module of the spacecraft carried a small ceramic tile bearing line drawing from Andy Warhol, the painter Robert Rauschenberg and the sculptors Forrest Myers and John Chamberlain.