it was an image with historical force. Pope Francis, alone in a rainy St. Peter’s Square, gave an extraordinary blessing urbi et orbi (to the city and the world) and presided over a global prayer in times of coronavirus. It was March 27, 2020, when the pandemic was punishing Italy and had trapped the Pontiff in the Vatican. Francis’ message was very clear: “No one is saved alone”.
Now his words have flown higher than ever. The message is inside a nano-book that contains a tiny version of the prayer of fraternity and hope, and which the Vatican has successfully launched into space with a satellite.
This is a project within the space mission Spei Satelles, or satellites of hope. The artifact, called Cube-Sat 3U, is a small cubic satellite that weighs less than 3 kilograms and was blessed by the Pontiff on March 29 in an audience. He arrived in space on the Falcon 9 rocket, which took off on Monday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Jorge Mario Bergoglio had to follow him from the apartment reserved for popes to the Gemelli polyclinic hospital in Rome, where he has been admitted since his last operation, on June 7. He is now better and will be discharged this morning, the medical team reported yesterday.
Now, the satellite already orbits in space at an altitude of about 525 kilometers from the earth’s surface. Inside is the nanobook, condensed into a silicon sheet of only 2x2x0.2 millimeters, on which the text of the book Why are you afraid? Still don’t have faith? , which collects the Pope’s reflections and images during the dark days of the pandemic, particularly the blessing he gave on March 27. The project was ambitious, as the researchers converted the 150-page book into codes that fit on the tiny device.
“As such, it is a communicative project, so to speak, a symbolic project, because it is not actually a book, but a small slab of silicon, 2 by 2 by 0.2 millimeters, which cannot be read by itself, much less in space orbit, but it is a sign, a sign of hope, a sign that, like all space, makes us dream, makes us all fly.” explained Monsignor Lucio Ruiz, secretary of the Department of Communication of the Holy See, who coordinated the project in collaboration with the Italian Space Agency and the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnology of the Italian National Research Council, with the participation of some students from the Polytechnic University of Turin.
The device, in addition to the instruments to operate and be guided from Earth, has a radio transmission system, “two small computers that have a frequency that can be picked up by radio amateurs, which transmit messages taken from the papal magisterium”, has explained Ruiz. To be able to intercept them and listen to the pieces of the Pontiff’s book, it will be enough to have a UHF band amateur radio that is able to pick up the satellite’s broadcast on 437.5 MHz.
“So, permanently, throughout the entire orbit, there will be these small messages that will be sent and that can be intercepted”, says Ruiz, about texts written in Italian, English and Spanish. They will not always be the same, because the technology they have developed is able to update them. “We have loaded a fairly large fund of messages from the magisterium of Pope Francis, but they can be changed sometimes”, concludes the representative of the Holy See.
It is not known how much the Holy See has paid to put the satellite into orbit, which will be able to remain in space for up to 12 years, despite the fact that the radio transmitter will broadcast between six months and a year due to the limit of the batteries. It will not only upload the Pope’s messages: the Vatican has promised to inscribe from a distance the names in memory of all those who sign up on the project’s website, in exchange for them committing to “an action of mercy “.
