Great anticipation again this year for theInternational Moon Day (Imd), proposed by the Moon Village Association (Mva) as an annual educational, cultural and scientific event. A project created to raise public awareness and generate support for the exploration and sustainable use of the Moon and presented today in Turin at the Giorgio Amendola Foundation. To achieve this goal, IMD Group encourages and promotes events around the world during the week of July 20th. These include community roundtables, conferences, webinars, concerts, exhibitions and educational video screenings. In fact, in December 2021, the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly had concluded that International Moon Day should be observed annually on July 20.
International Moon Day was celebrated for the first time in 2022. More than 40 global events from 23 different countries and one main event with a theme of lunar coordination, exploration and sustainability were successfully observed. In 2023, International Moon Day was celebrated with 46 global events in 42 countries, with the theme “The beginning of the new lunar journey for humanity”. This year the theme chosen is “Illuminating the shadows”, as a key to understanding the exploration of the lunar South Pole.
“We invite the international community of governments, space agencies, industry, academia, NGOs and the public to participate in this important celebration – say the organizers -. This is an opportunity to form a growing community of stakeholders who cooperate to make a permanent return to the Moon peaceful, sustainable and impactful to improve life on Earth.” The IMD will consist of a series of global events located around the world, giving participants the opportunity to create their own unique experiences for local communities or other organizations. “In celebrating an event that represented a qualitative leap in the field of space exploration, we give everyone every opportunity, doing it in an inclusive way,” says Alessandro Bartolini, team leader at Cern.
“But the future has an ancient heart – recalls Prospero Cerabona, president of the Giorgio Amendola Foundation –. Young people have the right to make mistakes, to protest. Study is a fundamental value, without forgetting the values of solidarity and listening”. And on the topic of development and artificial intelligence, Giovanni Giordano, founder of NewRoboticArm, a startup founded in 2020, with the mission of developing applications of robotic arms for the space sector, recalls that the problem is not the machines: “The enemy of himself is man.”
Young talents
Among the proposals presented is that of a class of the ITS mechatronics aerospace, a project for Ca’ Foscari in Venice, wanted by the Ministry of Education, on innovation for artificial intelligence. An initiative to make artificial intelligence more “human”, with particular reference to emotional and psychological support for long-term deep space travel.
