A mission to send a commercial lander to the moon, set for launch in a couple of days, will bring the fruition of projects that have been in the works for years — including projects that aim to put DNA into cold storage on the final frontier.
Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s robotic Peregrine lander is scheduled to begin a circuitous 40-day trip to the moon with liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:18 a.m. ET Monday (11:18 p.m. PT Sunday). NASA TV will stream video coverage of the countdown.
It’ll mark the first launch for United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket, and the first use of the BE-4 engines built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture for Vulcan’s first-stage booster — coming nearly 10 years after the partnership between ULA and Blue Origin was announced.
A successful touchdown next month would go into the history books as the first soft landing of a commercially built spacecraft on the lunar surface — in fact, the first soft lunar landing of any U.S.-built spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972. Among the payloads placed aboard the lander is the Iris mini-rover, which would become the first U.S.-built vehicle to wheel around the moon since the Apollo era.
Several NASA-supported payloads will take measurements at the landing site, around a region known as the Gruithuisen Domes, during a science mission that’s projected to last a couple of weeks. Other payloads include micro-robots from Mexico, an art project called MoonArk, mementos and bits of cryptocurrency.
And then there’s the DNA. Samples of DNA — either contributed by donors or synthesized to contain coded information — will be riding on the Peregrine lander as well as the Vulcan rocket’s Centaur V upper stage.
DNA on the moon
The DNA samples destined for the moon are part of Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library II, a data storage disk that’s roughly the size of a DVD. Most of the library consists of smaller disks of nickel that have more than 60 million pages of pictures, text and data etched into them, creating stacks of “nanofiche” records.
The disk is packed aboard the Peregrine lander, and if all goes as planned, it will be safe and secure on the lunar surface for millennia. Such archival disks have flown on earlier space missions, including the Israeli-built Beresheet lander that crashed onto the moon in 2019. (That’s why this archive is called “Lunar Library II.”)
Using a microscope, someone coming across the archive could follow the instructions to reconstruct all the information stored on the nickel disks.
“We teach all the basic stuff you need to know with pictures, including what you need to know to build a computer,” said Nova Spivack, co-founder and chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation. “Then, once you have a computer, if you don’t already, you could interpret other layers, which are digital, not analog.”
Among the information stored on the disks are the contents of Wikipedia and collections from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive, plus a linguistic key to 5,000 languages as well as music and film archives.
The DNA archives demonstrate how data can be packed even more densely. Samples of DNA are encapsulated in thin layers of paper that are sandwiched between the nickel disks and sealed with a type of epoxy resin that Spivack calls “artificial amber.”
Some of the samples have been collected by a venture called LifeShip from folks who paid $99 each to preserve their personal genetic code on the moon. “The inspirational vision is, we’re creating population banks to then go expand and populate new worlds,” LifeShip founder Ben Haldeman told GeekWire.
Other samples consist of synthesized DNA, using the molecule’s four-base alphabet (A-C-G-T) to encode data that could represent text or even LOL cat pictures and music videos. That project is spearheaded by the University of Washington’s Molecular Information Systems Lab in partnership with Microsoft Research and Twist Bioscience.
The lab’s co-director, Luis Ceze, said the Arch Mission experiment is designed to show off what could be the ultimate data storage technology in an off-planet setting.
“The whole point of doing DNA data storage is to make the data very, very dense — about a million times denser than what we can do with electronic forms today.” Ceze said. “It’s very durable. In fact, there are some samples that are on the order of 800,000 to a million years old that were read. And since it’s very dense and durable, it’s also very light.”
In a series of experiments, Ceze and his colleagues successfully tested techniques to search through a DNA database and automate the process of encoding and decoding data. In 2020, Microsoft and Twist joined forces with Illumina and Western Digital to form the DNA Data Storage Alliance — an industry group that now counts Ceze’s lab and more than three dozen other organizations among its members.
The DNA database stored on the Arch Mission Foundation’s disk includes 10,000 crowdsourced images that were collected for the University of Washington’s “Memories in DNA” project. Some of those images are on display in a mosaic-style portrait of pioneering geneticist Rosalind Franklin that UW unveiled in 2020.
Ceze said it’s “incredibly mind-expanding” to contemplate the prospect of sending data stored in molecular form out into space.
“I think whoever finds it, if they know how it works, they’ll read it easily,” he said. “But if not, they have a little bit of a puzzle to retrieve the information there.”
Spivack suspects those future explorers will be able to figure it out. “In the far, far future, any form of life around here is probably going to be DNA-based,” he said. “So, if they find this payload, they might be able to understand that DNA piece of it. And maybe that’ll be even easier for them to understand than digital data.”
DNA in deep space
Even if future space explorers lose track of Lunar Library II, there’s still a chance they’ll come across a different treasure trove of DNA sent into deep space aboard the Vulcan rocket’s Centaur V upper stage.
Houston-based Celestis has packed a set of capsules containing DNA samples from paying customers aboard the rocket stage, which is destined to go into deep space beyond the Earth-moon system after it deploys Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander. The payload also includes capsules containing the cremated remains of loved ones.
“We go out more than a hundred million miles into a heliocentric orbit,” Celestis CEO Charles Chafer told GeekWire. Theoretically, the Centaur V stage and its payload could keep orbiting the sun for centuries to come.
Similar sets of capsules are packed aboard the Peregrine lander. (One of the moon-bound capsules contains a DNA sample from science-fiction pioneer Arthur C. Clarke.)
Celestis has been doing “space burials” for more than a quarter-century, but the DNA service is a more recent addition to the company’s offerings. Collection kits are sent out to customers, who swipe a sample of spit with a cheek swab and then mail the kit back to a lab. Technicians extract the DNA from the sample and preserve it in a bit of powder.
“We end up flying the DNA just like we fly a sample of ashes, in an individual capsule,” Chafer said. “The only difference is that for our DNA samples, we take the extra step of manufacturing the capsules out of titanium instead of aluminum, which is our standard for ashes. It gives a little bit more length of viability by having the DNA in a pretty heavily shielded container.”
Why do people pay thousands of dollars to have Celestis send their DNA or cremated remains into space? “It’s an interesting combination of motivations,” Chafer said. “I think one of ’em is, it’s just fun. It’s a cool way to be involved in a real space mission, and it’s such a different feeling when you’re standing watching a rocket take off when part of you or a loved one is on board that rocket.”
There’s a deeper motivation as well. “A lot of people see it as a symbolic way to bring light to the fact that humanity is trying to spread throughout the solar system,” Chafer said. “And these folks are in the forefront of that, if only symbolically.”
Celestis is adding some star power to this flight, in the form of celebrity samples of DNA and ashes. The manifest includes some dearly departed Star Trek luminaries: franchise creator Gene Roddenberry, James “Scotty” Doohan, DeForest “Bones” Kelley and Nichelle “Uhura” Nichols. There are also hair samples (including bits of DNA) from three U.S. presidents: George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.
United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno and his wife, Rebecca Bruno, contributed DNA samples as well. Chafer said it was Tory Bruno’s idea. “We got to talking, and he said, ‘I want to do this,'” Chafer recalled. “And then he said, ‘I’d like to take my wife along with me.’ I said, ‘Absolutely! How quickly can I add you to the manifest?'”
Years before his death in 2008, Arthur C. Clarke said “some super civilization” may find his DNA sample in the distant future, “and I may exist in another time.” Could that civilization clone Clarke — or, for that matter, George Washington?
“Off-planet DNA storage is a real thing,” Chafer said. “We provide it for the same reasons that people store their DNA here. If you’re concerned about surviving any number of Earth-failing scenarios, you’ve got your DNA.”
That may sound far-fetched, but Chafer said such flights of fancy are part of the appeal. “This is the fun part — here we are, speculating about the limits of alien technology to visit our spacecraft and clone people,” he said. “Do people genuinely believe that will happen? Maybe a few. Do several people say, ‘What if … and, you know, that would be cool’? Yeah. They do.”
