UNESCO has partnered with an American innovation platform Barrelhand to raise awareness of the importance of preserving linguistic diversity, by sending a coin-sized nickel disk to the moon.
The tiny disc is engraved with the UNESCO Constitution’s preamble “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men and women that the defenses of peace must be constructed”, translated into 286 languages. Utilizing nanofiche technology, the disc has been engineered to withstand extreme conditions for millions of years.
This symbolic gesture underscores the importance of preserving linguistic diversity. 2025 is the third year of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL 2022-2032). Languages from all regions of the world were etched onto the disc, many of them indigenous and/or endangered.
“Languages carry the knowledge, identity, and worldviews of peoples. Through our work on multilingualism and the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, this project affirms our collective commitment to safeguarding humanity’s shared heritage,” Tawfik Jelassi, assistant D-G for Communication and Information, UNESCO.
The Memory Disc Project is a new innovation in modern space exploration, integrating cultural preservation into international missions. The current mission is the second in a series of five similar missions in the period 2024-2027.
Following its debut aboard the Intuitive Machines IM-1 lander during the first U.S. commercial lunar landing in February 2024, and the successful integration of Memory Disc V2 into a private Japanese mission currently en route to Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold), a large lunar plain in the Moon’s northern hemisphere for a planned landing on June 5 UTC/ EDT – Memory Disc V3 is set for three additional spacecraft integrations across two international lunar missions by 2027.
Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1) by U.S.-based Astrobotic Technology, is scheduled to land in the Nobile Region near the lunar south pole in late 2025 as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. A later mission will carry Memory Disc V3, which will be integrated onto the ispace-Europe rover and deployed onto the lunar surface from the APEX 1.0 lunar lander as part of ispace technologies U.S. (ispace-U.S.) Mission 3. The lander is currently scheduled to launch to Schrödinger Basin, a prominent impact basin on the far side of the Moon near the southern lunar highlands, in 2027.
At just 19mm in diameter and 1.4 grams in weight, the Memory Disc employs NanoFiche nano-engraving technology to etch curated content at 133,000 dots per inch (DPI), an extraordinary resolution enabling features as small as 200 nanometers, approximately 420 times finer than a human hair. The disc is made of raw nickel and is designed to last billions of years without power, resistant to cosmic radiation, extreme temperatures, and the vacuum of space. Like a modern Rosetta Stone, it remains legible through optical magnification alone.