A message of faith and hope first delivered by Pope Francis in the middle of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown will be sent into space, the Vatican have announced.
The speech of the pontiff praying alone in an empty St Peter's Square have been turned into a nanobook measuring less than two millimetres wide.
The nanobook will be launched into orbit on 10 June 2023.
It will travel around the earth on a purpose-built satellite at an altitude of about 525 kilometres, dispatched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The 'Spei Satelles' (Satellites of Hope) project, whose cost and funding has not been revealed, is being coordinated by the Italian Space Agency (ISA) in conjunction with various Italian institutions.
ISA President Giorgio Saccoccia said the Vatican had asked for "a solution that would allow the Holy Father's words of hope to cross the earth's borders and reach from space the greatest possible number of women and men on our troubled planet".
On 27 March 2020, the Pope urged followers who felt "afraid and lost" during the pandemic to have faith.
The project is not the pontiff's first encounter with space, in 2017 he held a video call with astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), where he asked them about "man's place in the universe".
Six years earlier, his predecessor Benedict XVI also rang astronauts on board the ISS.
