The public will be able to choose from a list of 150 songs put forward by the commission, including music from the country's 56 ethnic groups, pop songs from the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as opera soundtracks.

Unlike the single transmission of the popular patriotic hymn "The East is Red" in 1970 from the country's first man-made terrestrial satellite, the music from space next year will be "very different," Xinhua said without elaborating.

The hymn "The East is Red" was selected by satellite experts and space officials to pay tribute to Mao Zedong, then leader of the newly founded People's Republic of China, who enjoyed cult worship during that period.

The final selection will be made public in October, said the commission.

The satellite, budgeted about 1.4 billion yuan ($170 million), is part of the country's three-phase lunar project. It is designed to obtain three-dimensional images of the moon's surface, analyze the content of useful elements and materials, and probe the depth of the lunar soil and the space environment between Earth and the Moon.

The satellite will weigh 2,350 kilograms (5,170 pounds), with 130 kilograms (286 pounds) of extra equipment, and it will orbit the Moon for one year.

In addition to next year's project, China has already announced it hopes to have a spacecraft land on the Moon by 2012, and by 2017, it aims to land an unmanned lunar probe on the moon, have it collect samples and return them to Earth.

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