On the 17th of December 2014, Lunar Mission One made history becoming the first crowd funded space exploration mission, raising over $1 million USD over a four week period. Backed by 7,000 people from more than 70 countries, Lunar Mission One is the world’s most inclusive space project to date – a new lunar mission for everyone. In 2024, Lunar Mission One aims to make history again by sending an international unmanned robotic spacecraft to land at the South Pole of the Moon – an area never before explored. The Moon still holds an overwhelming amount of information about our own planet and the Solar System that we simply have not yet been able to access. Now, we aim to do something that has never been done before. Lunar Mission One Is Unique Within ten years, we plan to land at the Lunar South Pole and use pioneering technology to drill down to a depth of at least 20 metres and potentially as deep as 100 metres– many times deeper than ever done before. One hundred metres is approximately the length of one American football field. This exploration will enable us to access and analyze lunar rock that is 4.5 billion years old, adding significantly to our detailed scientific understanding of the Moon, the Earth, the Solar System and the Milky Way Galaxy. The project will also develop the 21st Century equivalent of a time capsule containing a ‘public archive’ – a digital record of Life on Earth, including human history and civilisation, and a scientific description of the biosphere with a database of species. There will also be a private archive, meaning people will be able to buy their own digital ‘memory boxes’ and send their digital memories to the Moon. This lunar time capsule will be buried in the borehole, which is no wider than a smartphone screen. The extraordinary preservation conditions of the borehole mean that what is stored could last a geological timescale. Why is this Mission so important? The Moon, unlike Earth, is largely uncontaminated and therefore holds much more ancient geological information. Scientists will be able to use this geological data to discover the bombardment history of the Moon and the Earth. Through the Mission, we will develop a much better understanding of the origins of the Moon, the Earth and the Solar System. The spacecraft’s instruments will also measure the local environmental conditions on and above the lunar surface, enabling an assessment of the Lunar South Pole’s suitability for a future permanently manned lunar base, which could significantly reduce the cost of future missions. Developing drilling technology that operates in this extreme and remote environment has positive implications from both a commercial and environmental perspective, with major improvements being driven in the safety and efficiency of remote drilling on Earth.

Mission Goals Lunar Mission One has three core ambitions:

• To use pioneering robotic technology to significantly further our understanding of the origins of the Moon, the Earth and the Solar System.

• To create a global education project to inspire a generation around the world to embrace science, engineering and humanities.

• To create a comprehensive record of the history of humankind and the biosphere of the Earth. The Digital Archives The Public Archive The public archive will contain a comprehensive record of both the history and civilisation of humankind and the biosphere of the Earth that will be compiled by a number of different institutions across the globe. It will cover the history of humankind and our civilisation to date, together with a species database that describes the Earth's known biodiversity and how it all fits together – from animals and plants to bacteria, from geology to atmosphere. We are talking about the opportunity for data gathering on a mass scale. We will create a truly global database by collecting information from across the Earth. There are several existing databases - such as Wikimedia and the Internet Archive - that can be merged by professionals, from the humanities to the life sciences. The public archive will be the first-ever comprehensive record of its kind and will be an educational tool that will be free for everyone to access.

Schools and educational institutions can use and add to the public archive to promote understanding and engagement with science, technology, humanities and engineering. Children and young people can create and share content, advancing knowledge around the world. The Private Archive The Private Archive is the basis for funding the project and its space mission. For as little as $5, the Mission will be funded through global mass participation, meaning anyone from around the world can be involved. It’s that simple. People will be able to choose what personal content they want to put in the private digital archive – from a simple message to pictures, photographs, music and videos. There will also be provision for people to send their DNA code to the Moon, via a physical strand of hair or a digital record of their DNA. By paying to include information about oneself, family, friends, or community, supporters can leave their marks for future anthropologists. Data Preservation and Scientific Understanding Lunar Mission One is all about preservation and scientific understanding. The compilation and management of the data records is one of the most challenging aspects of the Mission. The archive’s technology must be researched and developed, from the way data records should be defined to the hardware on which it is to be stored, from the sourcing of data to the network security of its compilation. By engaging with the world’s leading experts in knowledge database creation and preservation, we expect to create the most comprehensive record of life on Earth now and for future generations. Projects such as Wikidata, the collaboratively edited knowledge database operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, can provide a common source of certain basic data types while ensuring the integrity of the data.

Creating this digital archive is hugely ambitious, tremendously inspired, and made possible by mass participation on a global scale. It’s truly a lunar mission for everyone.

More information on the Mission can be found at www.LunarMissionOne.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.