Hello all,
I could use some help in identifying an object apparently from the space program. As a child I received from my grandmother a glass slide that I have to this day. She told me that it had been to the moon in '69 and that one was left there and several others brought back to earth. It’s a glass slide measuring about 1.5"x1.5". There is a black circle with the words “From Planet Earth” on the upper inside edge and “July 1969” on the lower. In the center are micro-fiche scale letters from a number of world leaders. In high school I had access to a microscope and was able to read the English ones but I no longer have access to that type of equipment.
My family was close to administrators at NASA back then and that is how it came into my possession. Anyone have any idea what the story behind something like this could be? Did we really take such artifacts to the moon? I was unable to find anything online about this. Any help would be welcome. TRE
Here’s a picture of the disc left on the moon (linked to from the Wikipedia Apollo 11 page, which also links to this pdf which has translations of the inscriptions).
I don’t see any mention in the above (or on this history page) of other copies which rode on Apollo, but they might have been present e.g. as commemorative or personal items.
Brilliant! That is exactly it. It makes me now wonder more about how my family got one of them. Unfortunately, the opportunity to ask questions is lost. Thanks, Ompha!
Actually now that I read this more closely, the PDF notes:
*The same process used in making integrated circuits produced the message chip. First, the messages were photographed and the photo reduced 200 times.
The resulting image was tranferred to glass which was used as a mask though which ultra-violot light was beamed on to a photo-sensitive film on the silicon disc. After a photodevelopment step, the disc was washed with hydrofluoric acid which accomplished the final etching.
*
This makes me think that maybe I actually have the glass die that produced the original message chip.
The other thing is that my disc is an exact negative of the one on the photograph. Interesting…
What you have is called a “mask.”
It may very well be the mask that was used to create the etched wafer. If so, it’s probably one-of-a-kind. Definitely a cool artifact.
