![explanation of voyager golden records explanation of voyager golden records](https://l450v.alamy.com/450v/kcce65/vector-illustration-of-the-voyager-golden-record-with-explanation-kcce65.jpg)
In The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record (2019), a book published by Bloomsbury’s Sigma science imprint, author Jonathan Scott captures both the monumental scope of the Voyager mission, relentless as space itself, and the very human dimensions of the Gold Record discs: “When we are all dust, when the Sun dies, these two golden analogue discs, with their handy accompanying stylus and instructions, will still be speeding off further into the cosmos. Much like the Voyager spacecraft themselves, the journey itself was in large part the point-except that instead of capturing scientific data along the way, the Golden Record instead revealed a great deal about its makers and their historico-cultural context. Likewise, the Golden Record was designed to be playable for up to a billion years, despite the long odds that anyone or anything would ever discover and “listen” to it. And in 2018, Voyager 2 crossed the same threshold.Ī tiny speck of a spacecraft cast into the endless sea of outer space, each Voyager craft was designed to drift forever with no set point of arrival. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first Earth craft to burst the heliospheric bubble and cross over into interstellar space. Recorded at 16 ⅔ RPM to maximize play time, each gold-plaited, copper disc was engraved with the same program of 31 musical tracks-ranging from an excerpt of Mozart’s Magic Flute to a field recording made by Alan Lomax of Solomon Island panpipe players-spoken greetings in 55 languages, a sonic collage of recorded natural sounds and human-made sounds (“The Sounds of Earth”), 115 analogue-encoded images including a pulsar map to help in finding one’s way to Earth, a recording of the creative director’s brainwaves, and a Morse-code rendering of the Latin phrase per aspera ad astra (“through struggle to the stars”). Listen to the music recorded on the Voyager album with this Spotify playlist from user Ulysses' Classical. And just in case an alien lifeform stumbled upon either of the spacecraft, the Golden Record would provide them with information about Earth and its inhabitants, alongside media meant to encourage curiosity and contact. Conceived as a sort of advance promo disc advertising planet Earth and its inhabitants, it was affixed to Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, spacecraft designed to fly to the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond, providing data and documentation of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. An intergalactic message in a bottle, the Voyager Golden Record was launched into space late in the summer of 1977.