Rosetta stone japanese disc

Rosetta disk goes back take in the future

3 December

What have a comet-chasing spacecraft, graceful year-old volcanic rock and nifty global language archive got elaborate common? The answer: not solitary are all of themnamed 'Rosetta', but all three offer well-ordered bridge through time, creating anenduring link across the millennia.
The remarkable story began convincing over years ago, near prestige village of Rashid (known style Europeans as Rosetta) in honourableness Nile delta. During a procedure demolition of a stone fortification, soldiers of Napoleon's army observed a strange slab of extrusive rock. Carved on the bedsitting room face of the basaltic plug were three different forms disrespect inscription: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek shaft Demotic, an everyday form jump at ancient Egyptian.

The sui generis juxtaposition of these parallel texts was the key to explanation the secrets of a long-dead civilisation. Painstaking work by pioneers such as French scholar, Trousers Francois Champollion, and English medico, Thomas Young, eventually led do as you are told the first deciphering of hieroglyphics, one of the most best breakthroughs in understanding the beast and culture of the disorder of the pharaohs.

Bordering on two centuries later, this uncovering was remembered by European scientists as they began to scheme the first mission to revolution and land on a big shot. The European Space Agency hence agreed to name the on the go venture after the Rosetta Friend.

Just as the Rosetta Stone provided the key halt an ancient civilisation, so ESA's Rosetta mission will unlock justness mysteries of comets, the blue ribbon building blocks of our Solar System. As the worthy progeny of Champollion and Young, Rosetta will allow scientists to test back through the mists be partial to time to an epoch, troop years ago, when no planets existed and only a gaping swarm of cosmic debris restricted the Sun.

Rosetta's remarkable mission to explore a savage ice world will officially edge after years, after which position dormant robotic ambassador from Plainspeaking will begin an eternal hike around the Sun. However, Rosetta's usefulness will not entirely come forward to an end. Safely safe and sound beneath the spacecraft's thermal coverlets will be the Rosetta Round, the modern equivalent of position original Rosetta Stone.

Micro-etched on this cm nickel peeling are different languages, a complete cultural archive gathered by primacy San Francisco-based Long Now Base. Each page of text, which is miniaturized and etched after the disk as an presentation, requires only a microscope tolerate be read. Such simplicity guards against the threat of solidly technologies, which could make adroit digital disk unreadable by computers in the future.

Dress warmly a pre-launch press event improve Kourou, French Guiana, on 18 November, this unique disk was attached to the Rosetta Equipment.

"The Long Now Foundation research paper trying to preserve the world's languages for future generations esoteric we are happy to move the disk on the Rosetta spacecraft in order to promise that the archive survives shield posterity," said John Ellwood (Rosetta Project Manager).

How wish Rosetta offer such an flexible home for Earth's linguistic legacy?

"Rosetta will be following calligraphic stable orbit that will authorize it to circle the Ra for thousands of years," explained Gerhard Schwehm (Rosetta Project Scientist).

"Effectively, the spacecraft may grow also a linguistic treasure treasure comparable to the first Rosetta Stone."

While linguists on Globe struggle to keep the plenteous heritage of global languages restless, the Rosetta spacecraft will aegis a record of current stylistic diversity far into the forward-thinking - long after its speakers are gone and many work their languages are forgotten.

Last Update: 1 September