Europeana GroupStrong support for Europeana from Neelie KroesNovember 10, 2010 9:27 AM Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, says Europeana can be a world leader, if it is able to share the full wealth of written and multi-media material held in cultural institutions across Europe. The comments came during a recent speech at the Forum d'Avignon, an international meeting for culture, economy and media. "What a digital wonder this is: a single access point for cultural treasures that would otherwise be difficult to access, hidden or even forgotten," said Kroes about Europeana. She also stressed the importance of Europeana being able to display more 20th century materials, including orphan works and out-of- distribution works. Neelie Kroes European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda A digital world of opportunities Forum d'Avignon - Les rencontres internationales de la culture, de l'économie et des médias Avignon, 5th November 2010. physicstoday
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| Visions of Mars, on Mars This image shows the DVD provided by The Planetary Society to the Phoenix mission, which contains 250,000 names of people who signed up to send their names to Mars. It also contains "Visions of Mars," messages to future Martian explorers, science fiction stories and art inspired by the Red Planet. The DVD is mounted on the deck of the lander, which sits about one meter above the Martian surface, visible in the background. Credit: NASA / JPL / U. Arizona |
THE PHOENIX HAS LANDED
Phoenix touched down safely on the surface of Mars at 23:38 UTC (16:38 PDT). Follow the mission at The Planetary Society's blog.
Phoenix Carries First Martian Library and 250,000 Names. Find out more.
Did you send your name to Mars on Phoenix? You can still find and print your participation certificate.
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After landing, the spacecraft's scientific instruments will come alive, and begin their search for water ice in the harsh Martian environment. Nestled among busy instruments, a small and very special DVD will wait patiently for its turn. This unique DVD is made of silica glass, and designed to last hundreds if not thousands of years into the future, when its true mission will commence. It carries nothing less than a message from our world to one centuries away, when humans will roam the Red Planet.
In a unique project called Visions of Mars, the Phoenix DVD carries personal messages from visionaries of our own time to future visitors or settlers on Mars. There is Carl Sagan near his home in Ithaca, New York, addressing the future Martians with a cascading water fall in the background. There is Arthur Clarke seated in the comfort of his home in tropical Sri Lanka. There is Planetary Society Executive Director Louis Friedman, speaking from Society headquarters in Pasadena, and there is Phoenix mission PI, Peter Smith, providing mission information and a greeting to the future.
Others speak to the future not directly, but through their visionary works, which shaped our imaginings of the Red Planet. A wealth of influential pieces are included in Visions of Mars, which was assembled and edited by Planetary Society advisor Jon Lomberg. Percival Lowell, in beautiful poetic prose, expounds his theory of the "Mars canals," and the intelligent beings that built them. H.G. Wells, in War of the Worlds, imagines what such desperate creatures might do to our own beloved Earth. The recording of Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of this classic tale -- which set off a wave of panic across the United States -- is also digitally encoded on the Phoenix DVD. Louis Friedman contributed an afterword, describing the origins and history of Visions of Mars, and how it came to be.
Among those included in this remarkable message to the future are Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, a musical production of Bob Derkach's "Winds of Mars," and many others. A collection of rare Mars artwork, reflecting our changing images of our neighboring planet can also be found on the Phoenix DVD. All this, and much, much more, from the visionaries of the past century, whose dreams of Mars shaped our own.
Thousands of people from around the world, joined our age's visionaries of space exploration by adding their names to this remarkable message to the future! The Planetary Society collected names, which are now on Mars on the Phoenix DVD. When the Martians of the future find and decode our message to them, their names will be there too, a permanent record of their part in the story of space exploration.
émission
du vendredi 30 janvier 2009
Quelle
durée de vie pour l’archivage numérique ?Selon le cabinet d’études Infotrends, le nombre total
d’images numériques enregistrées dans le monde
depuis que cette technologie existe atteignait l’an dernier les
180 milliards. Et il devrait bondir à 347 milliards d’ici
2012. Soit presque un doublement en quatre ans. Et il ne s’agit
là que des images. Il faut y rajouter le texte, le son et la
vidéo. Car aujourd’hui, tout est devenu numérique.
Même la télévision. Et bientôt la radio.
Cette conversion généralisée à la forme
issue de l’informatique a posé un problème important
aux organismes chargés de conserver la mémoire officielle
de l’activité humaine.
En quelques années, le métier des grandes bibliothèques
et autres banques d’images, de musique ou de films a radicalement
changé. Il ne s’agit plus de conserver du papier, des
pellicules, des disques en vinyle ou des bandes magnétiques
mais bien des « données ». C'est-à-dire des
suites de 0 et de 1. Comment stocker de telles informations immatérielles
? Bien sûr, l’industrie a créé des supports
bien matériels pour y graver la mémoire numérique.
Le plus populaire a été inventé il y a tout juste
30 ans, en 1979. Il s’agit du fameux disque compact audio, le
célèbre CD. Une petite galette de 12 cm de diamètre
pour 1,2 mm d’épaisseur qui a donné naissance au
DVD en 1995 et au Blu-Ray en 2006-2007. Soit une capacité de
stockage multipliée par près de 40 en moins de 30 ans.
Ce support ainsi que d’autres comme les disques durs ou les mémoires
flash servent aujourd’hui à archiver des quantités
astronomiques de données numériques produites dans le
monde entier. Mais pour combien de temps ?
Une question presque saugrenue tant les supports d’information
numériques semblent éternels… Et pourtant, fin
2007, un scientifique du CNRS, Franck Laloë, a tiré le
signal d’alarme dans le magazine Pour la Science puis
dans le journal Le Monde . La durée de vie des supports
numériques serait bien plus courte qu’on ne l’imaginait.
Pas plus de dix ans, selon lui. Comment les professionnels de l’archivage,
mais également le grand public, vont-ils pouvoir, dans ces conditions,
transmettre notre mémoire numérique aux générations
futures ?
Invités:
Arnaud Beaufort. Directeur général adjoint de la BNF et directeur des services et des réseaux
Franck Laloë. Chercheur au CNRS, Président du GIS-DON (Le pôle de recherche sur la conservation des données sur disques optiques numériques)
Daniel Teruggi. Directeur du Groupe de Recherches Musicales, le GRM, depuis 1997 et Directeur de la Recherche et de l’Expérimentation à l’INA depuis 2001, ccordinateur du projet européen Prestoprime sur la conservation des données numériques à très long terme.
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| The Phoenix DVD On April 3, 2007 at the Multipurpose Test Facility at the Lockheed Martin Waterton Plant in Denver, Colorado, the Phoenix DVD was installed on the deck of the Phoenix lander. Credit: NASA / JPL / Lockheed Martin |
May 23, 2007
As part of our Messages from Earth project, The Planetary Society collected names to travel to Mars on board the Phoenix lander. I'm happy to announce the silica glass mini-DVD with a quarter million names on it (including all Planetary Society members) has been installed on the Phoenix spacecraft and is ready to go to Mars!
In addition to the names, the disc also contains Visions of Mars, a collection of literature and art about the Red Planet. The names and Visions of Mars were written to the silica mini-DVD by the company Plasmon OMS using a special technique. The resulting archival disk should last at least hundreds of years on the Martian surface, ready to be picked up by future explorers.
After the disc was written, a special label was applied to the disc to identify it for future explorers. Then, the whole assembly was "baked out" (to kill microbes and also to reduce future outgassing of the materials), and Lockheed Martin in Colorado installed it onto the spacecraft.
After installation, the spacecraft underwent further testing and assembly, was shipped to Cape Canaveral, and is now being prepared for its August launch to Mars. Phoenix will arrive and land in the northern near-polar regions on Mars in late May or early June 2008 (exact date depends on actual launch date).
We'll keep you posted on the mission as it progresses towards launch, and of course, update you on its launch and landing.
Next stop: Mars!
