The Voyager Golden Record

Assembled from 73 blocks · 1 evidence · 65 related

1. Story
2. A gold-plated copper phonograph record, twelve inches across, mounted in an aluminium case on the side of each spacecraft. It carries greetings in dozens of languages, about ninety minutes of music from many cultures, a sequence of natural and human sounds, and — encoded as analogue waveforms rather than as audio — around a hundred and fifteen photographs. The cover is etched with instructions for playing it, a diagram of the hydrogen hyperfine transition to define the units, and a pulsar map giving the Sun's position relative to fourteen pulsars; a patch of electroplated uranium-238 lets a finder date the launch from the remaining decay. The committee that assembled it, chaired by Carl Sagan, had a few months to do it. Its realistic chance of ever being played is negligible, and the people who made it said so at the time: it is aimed at nobody in particular, and its actual audience has always been on Earth.
3. Knowledge
4. Voyager 1
5. Voyager 2
6. The Voyager Golden Record
7. Carl Sagan
8. Connections
9. Carl Sagan
10. Voyager 1
11. Voyager 2
12. Voyager 1 launches
13. The Voyager Golden Record
14. Pale Blue Dot
15. Voyager 1
16. Voyager 1 photographs the solar system from outside it
17. The Grand Tour alignment
18. Voyager 2
19. Multi-Hundred-Watt radioisotope thermoelectric generator
20. Titan
21. NASA Deep Space Network
22. Gravity assist
23. Jet Propulsion Laboratory
24. Launch Complex 41, Cape Canaveral
25. Jupiter
26. Saturn
27. Titan
28. Voyager high-gain antenna
29. Plasma Wave Subsystem (PWS)
30. Titan IIIE-Centaur
31. Edward C. Stone
32. The Voyager Golden Record
33. Carl Sagan
34. Pale Blue Dot
35. The full Grand Tour is cancelled and rebuilt as a two-spacecraft mission
36. Voyager 1 launches
37. Voyager 1 closest approach to Jupiter
38. Active volcanism found on Io
39. Voyager 1 passes Saturn and Titan, and leaves the plane of the planets
40. Voyager 1 photographs the solar system from outside it
41. Voyager 1 crosses the termination shock at about 94 AU
42. Voyager 1 crosses the heliopause at 121.6 AU
43. The 2012 crossing is confirmed from plasma oscillations
44. Voyager 1's cosmic ray subsystem is switched off
45. Voyager 1's low-energy charged particle instrument due for shutdown
46. Voyager 1 reaches one light-day from Earth
47. Voyager 1
48. The Grand Tour alignment
49. Multi-Hundred-Watt radioisotope thermoelectric generator
50. DSS-43, Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex
51. Gravity assist
52. Jet Propulsion Laboratory
53. Launch Complex 41, Cape Canaveral
54. Jupiter
55. Neptune
56. Saturn
57. Uranus
58. Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS)
59. Titan IIIE-Centaur
60. Edward C. Stone
61. The Voyager Golden Record
62. The full Grand Tour is cancelled and rebuilt as a two-spacecraft mission
63. Voyager 2 launches
64. Voyager 2 closest approach to Jupiter
65. Voyager 2 passes Saturn and continues towards Uranus
66. Voyager 2 reaches Uranus — the only close encounter ever made
67. Voyager 2 passes Neptune and Triton, ending the planetary programme
68. Voyager 2 crosses the termination shock at about 84 AU
69. Voyager 2 crosses the heliopause at 119 AU
70. Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrument is switched off
71. The "Big Bang" power manoeuvre on Voyager 2
72. Evidence
73. Each spacecraft carries a twelve-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record holding around 115 analogue-encoded images, greetings in dozens of languages, about ninety minutes of music and a sequence of natural and human sounds, with playing instructions, a hydrogen hyperfine-transition unit key, a fourteen-pulsar map of the Sun's position and an electroplated uranium-238 dating patch etched on the cover; the assembling committee was chaired by Carl Sagan. V55 verification basis: THE PAGE WAS NOT REACHED — voyager.jpl.nasa.gov returned EGRESS_BLOCKED and the search budget was exhausted. All figures are approximate and from general knowledge; the image count, language count, music duration and pulsar count all require confirmation.