A record of mankind's greatest achievements is sitting on the surface of the moon after a failed attempt by Israel to land a probe, experts say.
Israel was unsuccessful last week in its attempt to become the first country to land a private spacecraft on our natural satellite.
Its Beresheet spacecraft, however, was carrying a library containing all of Wikipedia as well as 30,000 books and guides to 5,000 languages.
Alongside the Bible and an Israeli time capsule, some of the quirkier items aboard were David Copperfield's magic secrets and a recipe for queso - a cheese based Tex-Mex appetiser - provided by a cafe in Texas.
The craft itself was destroyed in the attempt, but the creators of the Lunar Library - which was designed to be indestructible - say it might have survived.
They are calling on the public to help them track down the possible impact site of the library after the aborted landing.
The 'Lunar Library' was created by the Arch Mission Foundation, based in LA, for the purpose of preserving humanity's 'precious knowledge and biological heritage' well into the future.
The library contains 25 nickel film disks, which resemble tiny DVDs around half the thickness of a human hair.
Each disk is made up of multiple layers of information, the first four of which are comprised of up to 60,000 photographs of pages of books, photos, illustrations and documents.
'We have either installed the first library on the moon or we have installed the first archaeological ruins of early human attempts to build a library on the moon,' Arch Mission co-founder Nova Spivack told Mashable.
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'When you look at the Moon from now on, realize there is a lost library there containing Wikipedia, 30,000 books, 5,000 languages, and the history of the world.'
Arch Mission has created a Google document that details all of the technical specifications of the Lunar Library.
It also compiles all of the data of the crash, gathered by SpaceIL, the Israeli nonprofit behind Beresheet.
One aerospace engineer has already suggested that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter may be able to spot the craft's impact crater, although the library in contained is likely to be too small to spot.
Beresheet, which translates to Genesis, or 'In The Beginning,' was carrying a set of tiny disks - weighing just 3.5 ounces (100g), roughly half the weight of a tennis ball - containing 30 million pages of documents,
The first layer is visible to the naked eye and can be viewed with a 100 times magnification microscope. It contains 1,500 pages of text, images, logos and other data.
It also includes the contents of the Rosetta wearable disc, a guide to more than 1,000 human languages
The next three layers can be viewed at 1000 times magnification. In these layers are 20,000 images of texts and photos, including the basic explanations of more than one million concepts.
Among the other information included on the disc are technical instructions detailing the scientific and engineering knowledge that's required to access, decode and understand the digital information located further down in the Lunar Library.
There's also an entire copy of the English language Wikipedia, Israeli history and data from the Long Now Foundation, a linguistic guide to 5,000 languages.
The Lunar Library amounts to about 200GB of data when its digital contents are decompressed.
This would take between roughly 12 and 20 hours to download via an average home high speed cable broadband connection.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
