An unmanned Chinese spacecraft that returned to Earth after orbiting the moon late last month carried with it a selection of Chinese music, including a song by Peng Liyuan, a famous singer and the wife of China’s president, Xi Jinping.
Ms. Peng’s song, “In the Field of Hope,” was one of 10 included on a microchip carried in the capsule during its mission, which was intended to test equipment and techniques for lunar orbit and re-entry for a future unmanned journey to the moon and back, the state news agency Xinhua reported.
Other works on the device, called the China Dream Music Microchip, included the composer Tan Dun’s symphony “Heaven Earth Mankind”; a recording of the pianist Lang Lang playing Li Huanzhi’s “Spring Festival Overture”; a song sung by China’s version of the Three Tenors: Dai Yuqiang, Wei Song and Mo Hualun; and performances by other Chinese artists on the violin, cello, pipa, guqin and guzheng.
“On the eight-day mission, Chinese musicians’ passion and dreams sang out to the vastness of space,” Xinhua said.
The mission also carried Chinese paintings and works of calligraphy, it said.
Audio accompaniment has been part of space exploration since its earliest days, from the radio pulses of the Sputnik 1 satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957 to the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s 2013 recording of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in the International Space Station.
China’s first satellite, Dong Fang Hong I, broadcast “The East is Red” by radio transmitter after its launch in 1970. The title of the song, a paean to Mao, is the same as the name of the satellite.
The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes launched by the United States in 1977 carried with them so-called golden records: gold-plated copper discs upon which was recorded sounds of nature, greetings in 55 languages, and music from around the world including Bach, Chuck Berry and a song by the Chinese guqin artist Guan Pinghu.