November 22, 2002
The Rosetta Project
Another milestone for open source software? The ZOPE powered Rosetta language archive (1445 languages and counting at ) goes into space Jan 8. The project is manufacturing analogue content that may just last the test of time.
Jim Mason, Project Director, of the Rosetta Projct writes:
the european space agency has asked long now to contribute a rosetta
language archive disk for their next mission to the comet p/wirtanen. this
is a 9 year research mission to go land on a comet way out in the boonies of
the solar system to take "soil" samples to study early solar system
formation. they want the rosetta disk as an icon of the societies that sent
the craft and also a sort of mythic frame for the elaboration of the
scientific genesis story that is the point of the mission. (remember, one
of the ten descriptive components of the rosetta disk is parallel
translations of genesis ch 1-3 in 1000 languages)
they are mounting the disk on the vehicle nov 18 at the esa launch facility
in french guiana and there is a big press hoo haa around this. it launches
on jan 8th. they've invited me to go for the press event, and i of course
did not argue too much. so this thursday i'm leaving on a 10 day trip to
french guiana. i leave on the 14th and return on the 23rd.
i admit to this being a little exciting for me. the invitation literally
fell out of the sky, unexpectedly. who would have guessed?