The Altamira Comet is our effort to make a real comet from the selfies of people all around the world.

Each selfie will be sculpted in gold at microscopic scale — the same size as a speck of cosmic dust — and frozen together with millions of others in a ball of ice. Once released into orbit around the Sun, the ice will gradually turn to gas, releasing everyone’s golden selfies to form the comet’s tail. Together, our golden selfies will continue orbiting the Sun for generations to come.

Every person who participates adds their own golden selfie, so the more people that participate, the bigger the comet becomes! The Altamira Comet can only exist through participation at enormous scale.

Our goal is for at least one billion people across countries, cultures, and communities to participate.

We All Go.

This GitHub follows the development of the comet. Once launched, the public campaign for participation in the comet will be found at altamiracomet.org.

Making the Altamira Comet requires work across software, nanofabrication, comet science, spacecraft engineering, instructional design, and global accessibility. These are some of the main things we're working on now.

How does someone take their selfie and become part of the comet?

We are building the digital experience for taking your selfie, seeing it transformed into a golden selfie, and adding it to the comet with millions of others worldwide.

The work involves the golden selfie filter and service, privacy and storage, shareable digital artifacts, the Altamira Comet website, and ways for participants to see the comet grow and eventually follow its journey around the Sun.

How do we turn a billion people's unique digital selfies into a billion microscopic golden sculptures?

For our first proof of concept, we made a small vial of water containing five million golden selfies using computer vision and electron-beam lithography, documented in Altamira Comet proof-of-concept (Acta Astronautica, Volume 210, September 2023).

Work continues on improving the image processing so it can represent the diversity of people around the world consistently and make everyone's golden selfie equally recognizable and appealing, while developing the fabrication process needed to produce a billion unique sculptures.

How do we make a small artificial object behave like a real comet?

We are exploring how to form the comet from water and golden selfies, whether to freeze it before launch or in space, how to release it safely, and how sublimation will release the selfies and shape the comet's tail.

The work includes modeling and experiments around formation, freezing, storage, particle distribution, deployment, sublimation, tail formation, visibility, and the comet's evolution after release.

How do we carry the comet into heliocentric orbit, release it safely, and follow what happens next?

Work includes spacecraft mission design, CubeSat system architecture, design of the comet container and deployment mechanism, orbit trajectory validation, rideshare integration, and space qualification and testing.

This work continues through launch and cruise, spacecraft deployment, release of the comet, and observing and tracking it as it travels around the Sun.

How can youth & students around the world play a leading role in global participation?

We are developing lessons and activities for youth & students that use the Altamira Comet to connect art, science, engineering, technology, and culture — from prehistoric hands and the history of the selfie to nanofabrication and comets in culture.

The work includes educational materials, a classroom web experience, integration with the participation platform, and partnerships that can help students around the world take part and invite their families and communities to join them.

How can anyone on Earth become part of the comet?

The challenge is not simply to reach a billion people. It is to make it genuinely possible for anyone, anywhere in the world, to add their selfie to the comet.

We are developing ways for people to participate through the web and social media, schools and classrooms, events, and physical access points where needed. The experience should work across languages, countries, cultures, devices, and different levels of internet access, as a simple act: take your selfie, see it transformed into your golden selfie, and add it to the comet with everyone else.

The Altamira Comet is being made by scientists, artists, engineers, designers, students, universities, companies, studios, laboratories, organizations, and individuals around the world.

There is no single way to contribute and no fixed structure for how the work gets done. People gather around different questions and parts of the project, bringing whatever they can. Some contributions span years. Others might be an experiment, a design, a piece of code, a useful introduction, or an answer to one difficult question.

Different people lead different parts of the work, often simply because they have the expertise, interest, or initiative to move something forward. New groups can form as new questions emerge, and the shape of the collaboration can change as the comet develops.

Much of the work is shared here so that others can understand it, build on it, or find a place where they might contribute. We try to make visible the many people who help along the way.

We're figuring this out as we go.

Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors left impressions of their hands on cave walls around the world, including the Cave of Altamira in Spain. Each hand is the mark of a unique, individual person, but together the hands are an act of communication made by a community, for a community.

The Altamira Comet began with the idea that our selfies are a contemporary version of this same gesture: a simple way for each person on Earth to leave their own mark and at the same time become part of a shared work that we all make together. From the Stone Age to the Space Age!