Video: How DNA and data could be stored on the moon

Once the bore hole has served its science purpose, a series of yellow time capsules will be dropped into the hole before it is sealed (Illustration: Lunar Mission One)

It’s like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An artefact buried in the lunar surface conceals a big secret. Only this time, the secret is you…

A plan to establish a lunar archive containing human DNA and a digital record of life on Earth is being unveiled this week. Called Lunar Mission One, the archive is the brainchild of British space consultant David Iron, who has worked on Skynet, the UK spy satellite network, and Galileo, the European Union’s global positioning system.

His idea is to charge people £50 or so to place a sample of their DNA, in the form of a strand of hair, in an archive to be buried on the moon, alongside a digital history of as much of their lives as they want to record, in the form of text, pictures, music and video. Iron presented the plan at a space flight conference at the Royal Society in London on 19 November.


The catch? He needs at least 10 million earthlings to do this if he’s to generate the £500 million the moon shot will need.

Lunar kick-start

This week, Iron and his colleagues will launch a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.com to raise the initial £900,000 of seed funding needed to set up the company that will begin commissioning designs for the spacecraft, which it is hoped will blast off in 2024.

Working with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Harwell, UK – which regularly works on NASA and European Space Agency missions – Iron aims to piggyback the archiving venture on a genuine space science mission. First, Lunar Mission One plans to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon’s south pole. It will then drill at least 20 metres into the lunar crust, extracting core samples to be analysed on the craft in an attempt to better understand the moon and its ancient relationship to Earth.

“Getting below that top layer of the moon that Apollo looked at should give us extraordinary new data,” Iron says.

“No lunar or planetary mission of any kind has ever drilled to a significant depth below the surface. The deepest Apollo drill core was only 3 metres long,” says Ian Crawford at Birkbeck College, London, Lunar Mission One’s chief planetary scientist. “The drill will enable the geothermal gradient, and thus lunar heatflow, to be measured for the first time.”

After about six months of such science, capsules containing the DNA and digital data will be injected into the borehole (see illustration, above right), which will then be sealed. Some of the archive will be a record of Earth’s history, civilisations, culture and inhabitants. The rest of the archive, the private record, will come from millions of individual customers, Iron hopes.

Beyond religion

Another space flight venture plans to send religious artefacts to the moon, as New Scientist reported in May. The Church of England has even told Iron that the plan to store DNA on the moon does not conflict with Christian doctrine. “It is beyond religion,” Iron notes.

“I’m intrigued. This lunar time capsule might be a lot of fun,” says Roger Launius, a director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. “The idea of being able to point up at the moon and say ‘there’s a bit of me up there’ will have a lot of appeal.”

Monica Grady, a scientist working on the Rosetta comet lander mission at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, thinks the mission will be an inspiration to schoolchildren who will be asked to contribute ideas for the public archive. “The idea of an ‘ark’ of digital data will spark much discussion,” she says.

One lofty hope is that the archive can serve as a sort of “backup drive” for human civilisation. But extracting DNA from hair may be challenging, says Alan Cooper at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide. For long-term storage, he says, DNA from cheek cells or blood would be more stable.