Bridging Earth and space, and art and science, with global voices | MIT News

On board Intuitive Machines’ Athena spacecraft, which made a moon landing on March 6, were cutting-edge MIT payloads: a depth-mapping camera and a mini-rover called “AstroAnt.” Also on that craft were the words and voices of people from around the world speaking in dozens of languages. These were etched on a 2-inch silicon wafer computationally designed by Professor Craig Carter of the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering and mounted on the mission’s Lunar Outpost MAPP Rover.

Dubbed the Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space (HUMANS), the project is a collaboration of art and science, bringing together experts from across MIT — with technical expertise from the departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; nano-etching and testing from MIT.nano; audio processing from the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future and the Music and Theater Arts Section; and lunar mission support from the Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative.

While a 6-inch HUMANS wafer flew on the Axiom-2 mission to the International Space Station in 2023, the 2-inch wafer was a part of the IM-2 mission to the lunar south polar region, linked to the MIT Media Lab’s To the Moon to Stay program, which reimagines humankind’s return to the moon. IM-2 ended prematurely after the Athena spacecraft tipped onto its side shortly after landing in March, but the HUMANS wafer fulfilled its mission by successfully reaching the lunar surface.

“If you ask a person on the street: ‘What does MIT do?’ Well, that person might say they’re a bunch of STEM nerds who make devices and create apps. But that’s not the entire MIT. It’s more multifaceted than that,” Carter says. “This project embodies that. It says, ‘We’re not just one-trick ponies.’”

A message etched in silicon

The HUMANS project, initially conceived of by MIT students, was inspired by the Golden Record, a pair of gold-plated phonograph records launched in 1977 aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, with human voices, music, and images. Designed to explore the outer solar system, the Voyagers have since traveled into interstellar space, beyond the sun’s heliosphere. But while the earlier project was intended to introduce humanity to an extraterrestrial audience, the HUMANS message is directed at fellow human beings — reminding us that space belongs to all.

Maya Nasr PhD ’23, now a researcher at Harvard University, has led the project since 2020, when she was a graduate student in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She co-founded it with Lihui Zhang SM ’21, from the MIT Technology and Policy Program. The team invited people to share what space means to them, in writing or audio, to create a “symbol of unity that promotes global representation in space.”

When Nasr and Zhang sought an expert to translate their vision into a physical artifact, they turned to Carter, who had previously created the designs and algorithms for many art projects and, most recently, for One.MIT, a series of mosaics composed of the names of MIT faculty, students, and staff. Carter quickly agreed.

“I love figuring out how to turn equations into code, into artifacts,” Carter says. “Whether they’re art or not is a difficult question. They’re definitely artful. They’re definitely artisanal.”

Carter played a pivotal role in the computational design and fabrication of the silicon wafer now on the surface of the moon. He first translated the submitted phrases, in 64 languages, into numerical representations that could be turned into fonts. He also reverse-engineered a typesetting language to “kern” the text — adjusting the spacing between letters for visual clarity.

“Kerning is important for the aesthetics of written text. You’d want a Y to be not-too-close to a neighboring T, but farther from a W,” Carter said. “All of the phrases were sequences of words like D-O-G, and it’s not as simple as, put a D, put an O, put a G. It’s put a D, figure out where the O should be, put the O, figure out where the G should be, put the G.”

After refining the text placement, Carter designed an algorithm that geometrically transformed both the text and the audio messages’ digital waveforms — graphical representations of sound — into spirals on the wafer. The design pays homage to the Voyagers’ Golden Records, which featured spiral grooves, much like a vinyl record.

In the center of the disc is an image of a globe, or map projection — Carter found publicly available geospatial coordinates and mapped them into the design.

“I took those coordinates and then created something like an image from the coordinates. It had to be geometry, not pixels,” he says.

Once the spirals and globe imagery were in place, Carter handed the data for the design to MIT.nano, which has specialized instruments for high-precision etching and fabrication.

Human voices, lunar surface

“I hope people on Earth feel a deep sense of connection and belonging — that their voices, stories, and dreams are now part of this new chapter in lunar exploration,” Nasr says. “When we look at the moon, we can feel an even deeper connection, knowing that our words — in all their diversity — are now part of its surface, carrying the spirit of humanity forward.”

For Carter, the project conveys the human capacity for wonder and a shared sense of what’s possible. “In many cases, looking outward forces you to look inward at the same time to put the wonder in some kind of personal context,” Carter says. “So if this project somehow conveys that we are all wondering about this marvelous universe together in all of our languages, I would consider that a victory.”

The project’s link to the Golden Record — an artifact launched nearly 50 years ago and now traveling beyond the solar system — strikes another chord with Carter.

“It’s unimaginably far away, and so the notion that we can connect to something in time and space, to something that’s out there, I think it is just a wonderful connection.” 

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