The Humble Hubble Telescope: Our Eyes in the Sky

The disk was encased in a protective aluminium jacket, packed with a cartridge and needle. The record’s exterior is marked with symbols explaining the spacecraft’s origin and indicating how the record is to be played.

The contents of the record were curated for NASA by a committee chaired by here quoted astronomer Carl Sagan. He noted that “launching this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.” Given it will be around forty thousand years before Voyager makes any close approach to a planetary system, there was no way anyone involved in this project would witness the potential outcomes of alien interception.

In general, the disks were not developed with the idea that anyone would find them and contact Earth, but instead as something of a time capsule or message-in-a-bottle. A testimony that might one day wash up on the shores of an extraterrestrial colony and show evidence that we, at least at one time, existed as a civilisation.

“Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished” – Carl Sagan

You too can listen to the Golden Records as Sagan intended, at:

White House Statement from the

38. ARTWORK: Xuming Du

Statement from the White House

Map of the Voyagers’ projected flight path