The Voyager Golden Record
What Was Put on It, and How It Was Chosen
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- Astronomy
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Each chapter explains how the record was assembled, from selecting greetings in fifty-five languages to including Bach's Cello Suite No. 1. The book covers the playback mechanism and manufacturing process that made this space message possible. It also describes how the Voyager missions will carry these records through interstellar space.
This detailed account of humanity's cosmic message will interest anyone curious about space exploration, cultural preservation, or how scientists communicate with potential alien civilizations.
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The Voyager 1 spacecraft holds the record as humanity’s most distant creation, having journeyed farther from Earth than any other man-made object. Alongside its sister ship, Voyager 2, it has entered interstellar space—the area between stars filled with galactic plasma. These missions followed in the footsteps of earlier probes, such as Pioneer 10 and 11, which carried basic plaques. Both Voyagers were sent into space by NASA carrying a message intended for alien life forms, meant to tell them about human civilization. The concept behind this cosmic time capsule was developed by Eric Burgess and Carl Sagan.
John R. Casani, the project manager, conceived the idea of placing information about humanity aboard the Voyager spacecraft. He assigned this task to Carl Sagan, who then collaborated with Linda Salzman and Frank Drake. Together, they determined that a metal record—visual data etched into grooves by a Boulder, Colorado company—would endure longer in space than magnetic tape. Casani provided Sagan with a $1,500 budget for six weeks of work, although Sagan and his colleagues added more funds from their own pockets. The final record had to match the weight of the Pioneer plaque.
This is a message from a small, distant world, a gift of our voices, our science, our pictures, our songs, our ideas and our emotions. We are trying to make it through our era so we might reach yours.
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The contents of the Voyager Golden Record were chosen by a committee led by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, and the selection process took nearly a year. Sagan and his team gathered 116 images—though one was reserved for calibration—and natural sounds like surf, wind, thunder, and animal calls, including bird songs and whale songs. They also included spoken greetings in 55 languages, such as one from U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim in English and another from Sagan’s six-year-old son Nick. There were human sounds too—footsteps and laughter, Sagan's own. The record carried the message “Per aspera ad astra” in Morse code, along with musical pieces from various cultures and time periods. A printed note from U.S. President Jimmy Carter was also included.
The Voyager Golden Record carries a curated set of images meant to give any alien intelligence a sense of life and science on Earth. The collection begins with scientific diagrams showing math, physics, the Solar System, DNA, and human anatomy. It also includes pictures of animals, insects, plants, and landscapes, as well as humans going about daily life in a wide range of cultures. These images show food, architecture, and portraits, all annotated with scales of time, size, or mass. All measurements are defined early on using physical constants that would be the same everywhere in the universe.
The Golden Record's musical choices reflect a broad sweep across time and culture, featuring classical masters like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky, alongside traditional and modern artists such as Guan Pinghu, Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry. Among the team responsible for assembling the collection were Carl Sagan, who led the project, Ann Druyan as creative director, Jon Lomberg as artist, and ethnomusicologists Robert E. Brown and Alan Lomax. Timothy Ferris served as producer, and Jimmy Iovine was the sound engineer. The inclusion of Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” sparked debate, with Lomax dismissing rock as “adolescent,” a view Sagan countered by saying, “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet.” Also featured were recordings of humpback whales from Roger Payne’s 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale.
The Golden Record includes an hour-long audio segment made from the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, compressed into just one minute. During the recording, Druyan thought about many things—Earth’s history, the rise and struggles of civilizations, and what it felt like to fall in love.
After NASA faced criticism for the nudity on the Pioneer plaque, which featured line drawings of a naked man and woman, the agency decided that Sagan and his team couldn’t include a photograph of nude figures on the Golden Record. Instead, they opted for just a silhouette of a couple. But the record does include “Diagram of vertebrate evolution” by Jon Lomberg, which shows anatomically correct naked male and female figures displaying external organs. On the Pioneer plaque, the man is waving, but in this image, it's the woman who raises her arm.
The Voyager Golden Record contains 116 images, with one reserved for calibration, each recorded in analog form and made up of 512 vertical lines. These images are part of the record’s overall design, which also includes audio content meant to be played at 16 and two-thirds revolutions per minute. The physical structure of the record combines visual and sound elements to carry a message across space and time.
Jimmy Iovine was still early in his career as a music producer when he worked as sound engineer for the project, recommended by John Lennon, who had been contacted to contribute but was unable to take part.
Sagan’s team hoped to put the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” on the Voyager Golden Record, but EMI, which held the rights, refused. The 1978 book Murmurs of Earth mentions this as one of the legal hurdles the team encountered. Sagan said the band liked the idea, but “they did not own the copyright, and the legal status of the piece seemed too murky to risk.” Ann Druyan recalled a telegram from EMI demanding $50,000 per record for two records, while the whole Voyager project cost $18,000. In 2017, Ferris said, however, that “Here Comes the Sun” was never seriously considered for inclusion.
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On the cover of the Golden Record, in the upper left-hand corner, is a simple drawing of a phonograph record and its stylus, positioned correctly to play the record starting from the outside edge and moving inward. Around the stylus, written in binary code, is the length of one full rotation of the record—3.6 seconds. This time is expressed using units based on the hydrogen atom's radiation frequency, a universal constant. Below that drawing appears a side view of the record and stylus, with another binary number indicating how long one side of the record should play—roughly an hour, more precisely between fifty-three and fifty-four minutes.
The upper right-hand portion of the Voyager Golden Record’s cover explains how to rebuild pictures from the recorded signals. The first drawing shows a typical signal at the start of a picture, tracing it as vertical scan lines, much like analog TV uses horizontal lines. Picture lines 1, 2, and 3 are labeled in binary, and one line lasts about 8 milliseconds. Below that, the lines are shown drawn vertically with an “interlace” pattern to form the correct image. Further down is a full picture raster showing 512 vertical lines. At the bottom is a replica of the first image on the record so listeners can check their decoding. A circle ensures the right horizontal-to-vertical ratio in reconstruction. Color images were made using three separate pictures for red, green, and blue components, with a color spectrum of the Sun included for calibration.
On the cover of the Golden Record, a map in the lower left-hand corner points to our Solar System by way of 14 pulsars, each marked with its exact period, a design that had first appeared on the plaques of Pioneers 10 and 11. In the opposite corner, a diagram illustrates the hydrogen atom in its two lowest energy states, linked by a line and labeled with the number 1, to signify that the time it takes for the atom to shift between these states is meant as a universal unit of time—this same scale applies both to the date shown on the cover and to the timing of the images stored within.
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Blank records from Pyral S.A. in Créteil, France, were sent to the JVC Cutting Center in Boulder, Colorado, where lacquer masters were cut. These masters traveled next to the James G. Lee record-processing center in Gardena, California, where they were used to cut and gold-plate eight Voyager records. Once plated, the records were placed into aluminum containers and shipped to JPL.
The Voyager Golden Record is a copper disk, twelve inches across, coated first with nickel and then gold. Its protective cover is made of aluminum, on which is electroplated a small sample of uranium-238. This particular isotope has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. If a future civilization were to find the record, they could determine its age by measuring how much uranium remains compared to other elements, using techniques like mass spectrometry.
The records included an inscription "To the makers of music – all worlds, all times" hand-etched into their surface. It was placed in the dead wax, or "run-out groove"—the space between the label and the playable area of the record. This detail wasn't part of the original plan, which caused the record to be rejected at first, meant to be swapped for a blank disc. But Sagan convinced the administrator to leave it as is, and so the inscription stayed.
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In 1977, Voyager 1 was sent into space, and by 1990 it had moved beyond Pluto’s orbit. It left our Solar System in November 2004, crossing the termination shock and entering interstellar space. The spacecraft is now traveling through the Kuiper belt. After about 40,000 years, it will approach the star Gliese 445, located in the constellation Camelopardalis, coming within 1.8 light-years of it. At the same time, Voyager 2 will come close to another star, Ross 248, in the constellation Andromeda, also at a distance of about 1.8 light-years.
In May 2005, reports emerged that Voyager 1 had reached the heliosheath, a zone beyond the termination shock. That boundary marks where the solar wind—electrically charged gas streaming from the Sun—is slowed by pressure from interstellar gas. At the termination shock, the solar wind suddenly slows from its usual pace of 300–700 km/s and grows denser and hotter.
In March 2012, Voyager 1 was over 17.9 billion kilometers from the Sun, moving at about 61,000 kilometers per hour, while Voyager 2 was over 14.7 billion kilometers away and traveling at roughly 56,000 kilometers per hour. Both spacecraft were still carrying the golden records they'd been given when they left Earth, silent witnesses to a journey that had taken them far beyond our solar system's edge. They continue their voyage through the void, each one a small piece of human story, drifting in the cold darkness of space.
On September 12, 2013, NASA reported that Voyager 1 had moved beyond the heliosheath and into interstellar space, even though the spacecraft is still under the Sun's gravitational pull.
As of 2023, four of the eleven instruments aboard Voyager 1 were still functioning and transmitting data. Scientists anticipated that at least one scientific instrument would keep operating through 2025, with engineering information potentially being sent for several additional years beyond that.
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Overview
The Voyager program sent two probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, into space in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, and later Uranus and Neptune. After completing their flybys, both probes continued traveling into interstellar space. On August 25, 2012, data from Voyager 1 showed it had entered interstellar space. Then, on November 5, 2019, Voyager 2 confirmed the same. Both are still operating today, with Voyager 1 being the farthest human-made object from Earth. As of 2024, Voyager 1 is moving at 61,000 kilometers per hour and is 24.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, while Voyager 2 travels at 55,000 kilometers per hour and is 20.4 billion kilometers away. They are the only human-made objects to have entered interstellar space, a record they will likely hold until at least the 2040s.
Mariner Jupiter-Saturn
The Voyager probes were born from a plan called the Grand Tour, an idea by aerospace engineer Gary Flandro in 1964, which sought to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto using a rare planetary alignment occurring every 175 years. That original mission was canceled in December 1971 when funding shifted to the Space Shuttle program. A smaller version emerged in 1972, featuring two identical spacecraft based on the Mariner series—initially called Mariner 11 and Mariner 12. The gravity-assist method, first tested by Mariner 10, would be used to gain speed by swinging through planetary gravitational fields. This mission came to be known as Mariner Jupiter-Saturn, or MJS, and was later renamed because the probes had evolved beyond their Mariner roots.
Voyager probes
In 1977, NASA chose the name Voyager for the mission, honoring a suggestion by William Pickering who had proposed Navigator. The two probes were launched in August and September of that year, with Voyager 2 following a trajectory designed to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, while Voyager 1 was set on a faster path focused on Jupiter and Saturn, including an encounter with Titan that sent it out of the ecliptic plane and ended its planetary mission. Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock in December 2004, entering the heliosheath, followed by Voyager 2 in December 2007, showing the Solar System's asymmetry. In 2012, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had crossed the heliopause on August 25, becoming the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space. Voyager 2 later made the same journey, crossing the heliopause in November 2018. Both probes continue monitoring conditions in deep space, expected to operate until 2020, with instruments shutting down by 2025 due to power depletion.
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Overview
Voyager 1, launched in September 1977 just 16 days after Voyager 2, explored Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan, studying Titan's thick atmosphere instead of a Pluto flyby. Communicating through NASA's Deep Space Network, it was 171.19 astronomical units from Earth in August 2026 and crossed the heliopause in 2012, becoming the first human-made object in interstellar space. Originally designed to study the heliosphere's edge, its mission extended beyond scope. In 2017, engineers fired its trajectory correction thrusters for the first time since 1980, adding years to its journey. As of 2026, only two instruments remain active: the Plasma Wave Subsystem and magnetometer. The spacecraft is expected to transmit data until at least 2036.
Mission background
In the 1960s, NASA considered a Grand Tour mission to explore the outer planets, and by the early 1970s, work began on what would become the Voyager 1 probe. Originally designated as Mariner 11, part of the Mariner program, the mission faced budget cuts that scaled it back to a flyby of Jupiter and Saturn. At that point, it was renamed the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn probes. Later, as the probe designs evolved beyond anything resembling earlier Mariner missions, the name was changed again—this time to Voyager.
Spacecraft components
Voyager 1 was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and its body is shaped like a ten-sided prism. The spacecraft is equipped with 16 hydrazine thrusters, three-axis stabilization gyroscopes, and instruments that help keep its radio antenna aimed at Earth. All of these components make up the Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem, or AACS, which also includes backup units for most systems and eight extra thrusters. In addition to those, Voyager 1 carries 11 scientific instruments designed to study celestial objects as it journeys through space.
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Overview
Launched by NASA on August 20, 1977, as part of the Voyager program, Voyager 2 followed its twin spacecraft by only sixteen days. Sent on a course that would take it past Jupiter and Saturn, then on to study the ice giants Uranus and Neptune—making it the only craft to visit either—the probe completed its primary mission with flybys in 1979 at Jupiter, 1981 at Saturn, 1986 at Uranus, and 1989 at Neptune. Now in an extended mission, Voyager 2 is traveling through interstellar space beyond the Sun’s heliosphere. It passed into the interstellar medium in 2018, moving at 15.341 kilometers per second relative to the Sun, and as of February 2026, it is more than 143 astronomical units from Earth. Communication with NASA continues via Australia’s DSS 43 antenna, since the probe’s southern path keeps it out of range of the Goldstone and Madrid complexes.
Background
In the early space age, it became clear that a rare planetary alignment in the late 1970s would allow a single probe to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune using gravity assists. NASA began planning a Grand Tour, which grew into a project with two pairs of probes—each group designed to visit Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto or Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. By 1972, the mission was scaled back to two Mariner-derived spacecraft, the Mariner Jupiter–Saturn probes, focusing only on flybys of Jupiter and Saturn to keep costs low while keeping the Grand Tour option open. As it developed, the name changed to Voyager. Voyager 1’s main goal was to explore Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan, while Voyager 2 was also to visit Jupiter and Saturn but with a trajectory that allowed a possible extension to Uranus and Neptune or a backup flyby of Titan. Titan was chosen after Pioneer 11’s 1979 images revealed its thick and complex atmosphere. The probe's path was designed for the best possible Titan encounter.
Spacecraft design
The spacecraft known as Voyager 2 was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Its body is shaped like a decagonal prism, and it uses 16 hydrazine thrusters to move through space. To keep its high-gain antenna aimed at Earth, the craft relies on three-axis stabilization, gyroscopes, and special instruments including a Sun sensor and a Canopus star tracker. These tools are all part of what's called the Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem. That system also includes backup units for most of the spacecraft’s components and eight extra thrusters. In addition to these navigation tools, Voyager 2 carries 11 scientific instruments meant to study objects in space as it journeys onward.
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