What did the Nova-C probe take to the moon?

In February 2024, the spacecraft developed by Intuitive Machines landed on the moon. In this way, the company made history, as it was the first private company to achieve such a feat, in addition to being the first American mission in more than 50 years to land on the moon.

However, Intuitive Machines not only dazzled the world with its pioneering spirit, but also by carrying a rather strange object on the probe called Nova-C. Want to know what? Keep reading this article!

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Nova-C probe: extraterrestrial knowledge storage

By discovering great advances of global importance, probes play an essential role in the future of planet Earth. In the 1970s, for example, the Voyager 1 and 2 probes carried the famous golden discs into space, which contain information about humanity if there is life existing in space, such as aliens and extraterrestrial beings that do not know our world.

However, in the case of Nova-C, the purpose had to do with other concerns, namely storing data from extraterrestrials, in case it was one day destroyed or the entire storage capacity was damaged in some way.

In this way, Nova-C took with it tiny “golden plates”, called NanoFiche, which, amazingly, were able, through some sort of incision, to hold a full copy of Wikipedia in English. There are 30 million pages, 70,000 books, in addition to 10,000 audio recordings. To collect this data, Intuitive Machines enlisted the help of Project Gutemberg and the SETI Institute's Earthling Project.

Therefore, when the Nova-C probe reached the lunar soil, the company's celebration could not be different. After all, what may seem like just small devices to man, also holds a great achievement for mankind.

The Arch Mission Foundation, the organizing body for the space library, spoke about the mission, whose project was titled The Lunar Library. “The idea is to make data recovery as easy as possible. […] “For the first time in history, we can guarantee that achievements, history, literature, languages, sciences, arts, music, films, philosophies and religions will continue, regardless of what happens on Earth,” he declared.

It is worth noting that the same organization had already tried to send this backup copy in 2019, with the Israeli Beresheet mission, but unfortunately the project was not successful. At that time, the probe crashed while trying to land on the moon's soil.

The Nova-C probe also took other interesting objects of interest to humanity to the Moon, in addition to the lunar library. The company stated that things such as cameras, reflectors, scientific instruments from NASA and items provided by some companies are also on the probe.

However, Intuitive Machines' expectations do not stop there, as the company has concluded a contract with NASA for a new mission with other selected organizations. NASA intends to carry out missions to the moon by sending astronauts from 2026 onwards, in order to continue studying this region, and it will depend on the American company that took the Nova-C probe there.