“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.
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