Dreams and sweat carried it off
but most of all, its legacy makes us all Earth travelers among the stars.

Charley Kohlhase

Mission Analysis and Engineering Manager (1974-1977)

The Voyager Golden Record


Ann Druyan & Carl Sagan

☉ Turnbull Conference Center on the campus of Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla. in 1984.

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played.

The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. The record also included recordings of music from around the world. As Carl Sagan has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

More about this mission

Greetings, Sounds, Music from Earth


1977 C.E
Launch Year
96 mins
Listen Time
115 files
Images
~ 12 inches
Diameter
16-2/3 rpm
Record Speed
55
Languages
512
Vertical Lines
Uranium-238
Electroplating

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