Source-Nasa
Ever buried a time capsule and opened it after years? Well, the joy of opening one is unmatched. A time capsule is a cache of goods and information. Voyager’s Golden record is also a time capsule sent into space, it contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and is intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may find them.
The Voyager Golden Records are two phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The Voyager 1 probe is currently the farthest human-made object from Earth. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have reached interstellar space, the region between stars where the galactic plasma is present. Like their predecessors, Pioneer 10 and 11, which featured a simple plaque, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched by NASA with a message aboard—a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate to extraterrestrials a story of the world of humans on Earth.
The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. The selection of content for the record took almost a year. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, thunder and animals (including the songs of birds and whales).
To this they added audio content to represent humanity: spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages, including a spoken greeting in English by U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and a greeting by Sagan's six-year-old son, Nick; other human sounds, like footsteps and laughter (Sagan's); the inspirational message Per aspera ad astra in Morse code; and musical selections from different cultures and eras. The record also includes a printed message from U.S. president Jimmy Carter.
The collection of images includes many photographs and diagrams both in black and white and colour. The first images are of scientific interest, showing mathematical and physical quantities, the Solar System and its planets, DNA, and human anatomy and reproduction. Care was taken to include not only pictures of humanity, but also some of the animals, insects, plants and landscapes. Images of humanity depict a broad range of cultures.
These images show food, architecture, and humans in portraits as well as going about their day-to-day lives. Many pictures are annotated with one or more indications of scales of time, size, or mass. Some images contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are defined in the first few images using physical references that are likely to be consistent anywhere in the universe.
The musical selection is also varied, featuring works by composers such as J.S. Bach (interpreted by Glenn Gould), Mozart, Beethoven (played by the Budapest String Quartet), and Stravinsky. The disc also includes music by Guan Pinghu, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, Kesarbai Kerkar, Valya Balkanska, and electronic composer Laurie Spiegel, as well as Azerbaijani folk music (Mugham) by oboe player Kamil Jalilov.
The inclusion of Berry's "Johnny B. Goode'' was controversial, with some claiming that rock music was "adolescent", to which Sagan replied, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet." The selection of music for the record was completed by a team composed of Carl Sagan as project director, Linda Salzman Sagan, Frank Drake, Alan Lomax, Ann Druyan as creative director, artist Jon Lomberg, ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown, Timothy Ferris as producer, and Jimmy Iovine as a sound engineer. It also included the sounds of humpback whales from the 1970 album by Roger Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale.
Blank records were provided by the Pyral S.A. of Créteil, France. CBS Records contracted the JVC Cutting Center in Boulder, Colorado to cut the lacquer masters which were then sent to the James G. Lee record-processing centre in Gardena, California to cut and gold-plate eight Voyager records. After the records were plated they were mounted in aluminium containers and delivered to JPL.
The record is constructed of gold-plated copper and is 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter. The record's cover is aluminium and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. It is possible (e.g., via mass spectrometry) that a civilization that encounters the record will be able to use the ratio of remaining uranium to the other elements to determine the age of the record. The records also had the inscription "To the makers of music – all worlds, all times" hand-etched on its surface.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, and left the Solar System in November 2004. It is now in the Kuiper belt. In about 40,000 years, it and Voyager 2 will each come to within about 1.8 light-years of two separate stars: Voyager 1 will have approached star Gliese 445, located in the constellation Camelopardalis, and Voyager 2 will have approached star Ross 248, located in the constellation of Andromeda. Of the eleven instruments carried on Voyager 1, four are still operational and continue to send back data. It is expected that there will be insufficient energy to power any of the instruments beyond 2025.
On September 12, 2013, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had left the heliosheath and entered interstellar space, although it still remains within the Sun's gravitational sphere of influence.
Written by: Akshita Bist
Edited by: Nidhi Jha
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