The company's UK website is unaffected.

Switching on head-torches we descended a dark passageway and followed the old rail tracks 300 metres into the mountainside, until we reached the archive's metal door.Inside the vault, stands a shipping container stacked with silver packets, each containing reels of film, on which the data is stored.

"It's a lot of memories, a lot of heritage," Mr Bjerkestrand says."It's anything from digitised art pieces, literature, music, motion picture, you name it."Since the archive's launch eight years ago, more than 100 deposits have been made by institutions, companies and individuals, from 30-plus countries.

Among the many digitised artefacts are 3D scans and models of the Taj Mahal; tranches of ancient manuscripts from the Vatican Library; satellite observations of Earth from space; and Norway's treasured painting, the Scream, by Edvard Munck.The AWA is a commercial operation and relies on technology provided by Norwegian data preservation company, Piql, which Mr Bjerkestrand also heads.

It was inspired by the Global Seed Vault, a seed bank that's located only a few hundred metres away, a repository where crops can be recovered after natural or manmade disasters.

"Today, there are a lot of risks to information and data," said Mr Bjerkstand. "There is terrorism, war, cyber hackers."Another Isro experiment involves growing three strains of microalgae which could be used as food, fuel or even in life support systems and this will help identify the most suitable ones for growing in microgravity, she says.

The Isro projects would also investigate how tardigrades - micro-animals on Earth that can survive extreme environments - would fare in space."The project will examine the revival of dormant tardigrades, count the number of eggs laid and hatched during a mission, and compare space-flown versus ground control populations," Ms Mitra says.

The other experiments aim to identify how muscle loss occurs in space and how it can be treated; and the physical and cognitive impact of using computer screens in microgravity."The research will study how gaze fixation and rapid eye movements are affected by being in space, and how this may affect an astronaut's stress and wellbeing. The results could influence future spacecraft computer design and interaction," she says.