VATICAN (AsiaNews & CNS): On 27 March 2020, while the world stood still and bewildered by the COVID-19 pandemic, Pope Francis presided over the Statio Orbis before the Eucharist in St Peter’s Square, inviting the world to look to the source of hope.
Exactly three years later, in a context where war has led to new anguish and fear, the Holy See announced a symbolic gesture to give continuity to that message.
The images and words spoken that day by the pope – with his call to recognise each other as children of the one Father on a boat battered by the storm – will go into space on June 10 in a mission promoted by the Holy See in collaboration with the Italian Space Agency (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana).
The project was unveiled at the Vatican March 27, the anniversary of Pope Francis’ prayer service he led in an empty St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Monsignor Lucio Adrián Ruiz, secretary of the Dicastery for Communication, said at the Vatican news conference that they have found many ways to spread the pope’s words and images from that historic evening three years ago: first as a global livestream, then a book Why Are You Afraid? Have You No Faith? which gathers together Pope Francis’ most significant speeches and comments during the pandemic. Now the book has been turned into a “nanobook” that will be housed in a low earth orbit satellite as a symbolic gesture of extending the pope’s loving embrace even farther.
CubeSat, a miniaturised satellite made by students at the Polytechnic University of Turin, will carry a nanobook, a microscopic silicon plate with engraved “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?”
Made by Italy’s National Research Council, the nanobook is less than two millimetres, but thanks to micro and nanofabrication technologies, it contains texts and images engraved in a binary code readable over time.
The CubeSat is scheduled for June 10, which will be launched on the SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The satelite is named Spei Satelles, which in Latin means “guardian of hope”. The microsatellite measures just 34x10x10 cm and weighs less than three kilograms, with an external surface covered with solar panels.
It also contains two UHF band communication systems through which Pope Francis’s messages of hope will also broadcast on a band that any amateur radio operator on Earth can pick up. As is the case in many space launches, anyone can register with a special boarding pass. But in this case – in addition to indicating one’s name – people will be asked to pledge to do work of mercy on Earth so that there may be hope and fraternity for all in the world.
People will also be able to register their names in a dedicated memory chip that will fly aboard Spei Satelles. For organisers, participants’ name “will be written in the heavens because you chose to sow hope on earth”.
