February 26, 2004
Offsite backup for world's languages
At 7:36am GMT (2:36am EST) on Friday, the
Rosetta Disk
is scheduled to be
launched on board an Ariane-5 rocket from the
European Spaceport in
Kourou, French Guyana. The mission's target is the comet
Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which will be reached in 2014 after a "billiard
ball" journey through the Solar System lasting more than ten
years. This will be the first mission to orbit and land on a comet. |
|
The Rosetta Disk is a modern version of the Rosetta Stone. The 2-inch nickel disk is micro-etched with 30,000 pages of information covering over 1,000 languages. For each language there is a simple dictionary, a guide to pronunciation and counting, and a traditional story with translation. Additionally, to help language decipherment in remote futures, a translation of a common text (the first three chapters of the book of Genesis) is provided in all languages. The disk can be read with the aid of an optical microscope.
Posted by Steven Bird at February 26, 2004 01:27 AM