The ARC is a standardized, passive, radiation-hardened payload designed to carry a comprehensive copy of the terrestrial genome library as a secondary payload on routine orbital launches. It fits a standard 1U CubeSat form factor — 10 × 10 × 10 cm, approximately 1.33 kg — and is compatible with all current commercial CubeSat deployers.
The ARC is fully passive. No battery, no power bus, no active electronics on orbit. It is an information archive, not a biological payload. It contains no living cells, no viable spores, no growth media, no liquid water, and no replication-capable material.
The encoding strategy must itself embody the redundancy that motivates the project. The archive must not reproduce, at the encoding level, the single-point-of-failure architecture it is designed to mitigate at the planetary level.
Six independent encoding pathways distribute the same core information across different physical media, different recovery assumptions, and different failure modes.
Structural shell: Aerospace-grade titanium (Ti-6Al-4V), the standard spacecraft structural alloy.
Radiation shielding: High-Density Polyethylene interior lining. HDPE outperforms aluminum for Galactic Cosmic Ray shielding due to its high hydrogen content.
Thermal control: Passive multi-layer insulation and selective emissivity coatings. DNA-in-silica demonstrates error-free recovery after the thermal equivalent of approximately 2,000 years at ambient temperature.
The ARC is designed for deployment across multiple independent mission profiles to maximize spatial separation and environmental diversity. Low Earth Orbit, lunar surface, solar orbit, Lagrange points, and interstellar trajectories — each carries the most recent GenBank release. The archive grows with every mission.