Nasa to send ‘essence of humanity’ to Moon

SAPPHIRE discs etched with “the essence of humanity” will be sent to the Moon under Nasa’s Artemis programme to act as a repository of human knowledge.

The project, titled Sanctuary On The Moon, includes examples of mathematics, culture, palaeontology, art and science as well as the human genomes of a man and a woman. The discs mimic the golden phonographs sent with the Voyager spacecraft, the first ships to leave the Solar System, which contained greetings in 55 different languages, messages from world leaders and even a human heartbeat.

The new discs include schematics for Nasa’s Saturn V rocket and lunar landing modules which took astronauts to the Moon in the Apollo mission, as well as paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh, and The Declaration of Human Rights. There are also celestial and terrestrial maps, as well as data on anatomy, astrophysics and particle physics, phases of the Moon and developments such as the combustion engine and flying machines.

“We are delighted to take Sanctuary to the Moon,” said Joel Kearns, Nasa’s deputy associate administrator for exploration in the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.

“We believe that this internationally curated repository of knowledge on the Moon will serve as an inspiration today and for many generations to come.”

The discs are the idea of Benoit Faiveley, a French engineer who has worked with a team of international scientists, researchers, designers and artists to choose what images to place on each disc. Mr Faiveley himself appears on one of the discs dressed in an astronaut suit.

The discs, which will be placed in a durable aluminium capsule, will be delivered to the Moon’s surface using an automatic space probe under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract with Nasa.

Mr Faiveley said: “The only thing left over from ancient cultures are tangible objects, hieroglyphs, stones, scripts, paintings that lasted over centuries and millenniums. So we took a similar path. It will be a variegated portrait of our species engraved in micropixels. There are important examples from astrophysics, particle physics, astronomy and planetary science.

“We hope Sanctuary will constitute a ‘cosmic hello’ to our descendants or perhaps even visitors from elsewhere.”