One of the biggest challenges of space exploration is being able to record and store data for a long period of time in highly inhospitable environments. The RememberMe team addressed the “MemoryMaker” challenge in the category “PlanetsNearAndFar”.

Humanity has had a long history of identifying and designing ways to store data that goes back to the stone age. The RememberMe solution borrows from these ideas as it stands on the shoulder of giants and adapts existing memory storage ideas to the high temperatures, acidity and pressure of Venus. The RememberMe solution combines the ideas of a VCR - a mechanism by which a tape is rolled into a reel and, as data is written on the tape, it moves into a second reel - with the mechanism of the punch card, which records bits of data as holes punched into a piece of paper. Since both plastic and paper would melt in Venus, the RememberMe design makes use of a high temperature and corrosion resistant alloy for the tape, combined with a titanium based compression spring mechanism that creates dents in the steel tape as it moves between reels in order to record transmitted data (a 1 is recorded as a dent whereas a 0 is recorded a no-dent). The advantages of making dents as opposed to holes on the upper side tape is entailed in the ability to reverse this mechanism by applying pressure to the opposite or lower side of the tape. Finally, the dimensions of the RememberMe design have been calculated and evaluated against the challenge rules required to meet the stringent needs of interplanetary travel. The system proposed can easily be scaled by parallelizing the denting mechanism.

Specs for materials and validation against the challenge size and weight constraints (given 1Mb memory) can be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ua9iCSyZyntY3cHJ...