49 Fun Facts About Voyager Golden Record

How many Golden Records were sent into space, and where?

They are identical phonograph records launched in 1977, intended as a time capsule for any intelligent finder.

Which astronomer chaired the committee that selected the contents of the record?

Carl Sagan of Cornell University chaired the selection committee; he had co-designed NASA's earlier interstellar plaque, and his team assembled the record's music, pictures and spoken greetings during 1977.

Whose idea was it to put a message about humanity aboard the Voyagers?

John Casani, Voyager's project manager at JPL, proposed in late 1976 that the probes carry a message for any finder, and asked a Cornell-led committee to produce it.

Why did Sagan's team choose a metal phonograph record over the obvious alternative?

The team judged a metal phonograph record would outlast magnetic tape, which degrades in space over long spans; a grooved disc could also carry encoded pictures as well as sound.

How many images are encoded on the record?

There are 116 images, beginning with a calibration circle and continuing through diagrams of DNA, the Solar System and human anatomy to photographs of Earth's landscapes, animals and people.

Spoken greetings on the record are in how many languages?

Greetings in 55 languages are included, ranging from ancient Akkadian, Hittite and Sumerian to modern tongues; most were recorded at Cornell University in 1977, with each speaker choosing their own words.

Which UN Secretary-General recorded a spoken message for the record?

Kurt Waldheim, UN Secretary-General from 1972 to 1981, recorded a short spoken message on behalf of the United Nations; it is delivered in English.

Which composer has the most pieces on the record?

Johann Sebastian Bach has three pieces on the record: the opening of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, the Gavotte en rondeau from the Partita No. 3 for violin, and a Well-Tempered Clavier prelude and fugue.

Which US president's printed message is included on the record?

President Jimmy Carter's printed message, written in June 1977, calls the record 'a present from a small, distant world' and hopes humanity may one day join 'a community of galactic civilizations'.

Whose brainwaves, recorded for an hour and compressed into a minute, are on the record?

The creative director thought about Earth's history, civilisation's problems and what it was like to fall in love; she married Sagan in 1981.

Which Chuck Berry song was included, despite Alan Lomax objecting that rock music was 'adolescent'?

Johnny B. Goode, Chuck Berry's 1958 hit, is the record's only rock 'n' roll track; when Alan Lomax called rock adolescent, the reply was that there are a lot of adolescents on the planet.

Which Beatles song was reportedly considered but left off because EMI would not license it?

Here Comes the Sun was reportedly the Beatles' choice, with the band willing but EMI refusing to license it; producer Timothy Ferris later called the story apocryphal, saying it was never seriously considered.

Which future star record producer served as sound engineer, on John Lennon's recommendation?

Jimmy Iovine, then a young New York studio engineer who had worked with John Lennon, engineered the record's audio after Lennon, unable to take part himself, suggested him.

Which blues guitarist's hymn 'Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground' is on the record?

Blind Willie Johnson recorded the wordless gospel-blues 'Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground' in 1927; its humming and slide guitar were chosen to express human loneliness.

Which jazz trumpeter is among the musicians on the record?

Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven's 1927 recording 'Melancholy Blues' is the record's jazz selection, part of a roughly 90-minute programme spanning Western classical music, a Chinese guqin piece and a Bulgarian folk song.

Which electronic composer's work is on the record?

Laurie Spiegel's computer realisation of Kepler's Harmonices Mundi, heard as 'Music of the Spheres', opens the record's sounds-of-Earth sequence; she created it on Bell Labs' GROOVE system.

Which of these classical composers is NOT named as being represented on the record?

Wagner has no piece on the record; its Western classical works include Mozart's Queen of the Night aria, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and two pieces by Beethoven.

The cetacean recordings on the record came from Roger Payne's 1970 album titled what?

Songs of the Humpback Whale, Roger Payne's 1970 album, made whale song famous and helped launch the save-the-whales movement; Payne supplied the humpback recordings used on the record.

Which Beethoven symphony has its first movement on the record?

The first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is on the record, in Otto Klemperer's Philharmonia Orchestra recording; Beethoven is also represented by the Cavatina from his String Quartet No. 13.

At what speed is the record designed to be played?

The record is cut for 16⅔ rpm, half the usual LP speed, which doubled the playing time per side; the cover diagram gives the rotation period in units of the hydrogen hyperfine transition.

What is the record made of?

Each disc is gold-plated copper, 12 inches across; it is housed in an aluminium cover electroplated with a sample of uranium-238 and packed with a stylus and cartridge.

Why is a sample of uranium-238 electroplated onto the cover?

Its half-life is 4.468 billion years; the ratio of remaining uranium reveals the record's age.

What inscription was hand-etched into the record's run-out groove, nearly getting it rejected?

Producer Timothy Ferris had 'To the makers of music – all worlds, all times' etched by hand in the run-out groove; because it was not in the specifications, NASA nearly replaced the disc with a blank before relenting.

The map on the record's cover locates the Sun relative to how many pulsars?

The cover's map shows the Sun's position relative to 14 pulsars, each line marked in binary with the pulsar's period; the same design had been engraved on NASA's earlier interstellar plaques.

How long does one side of the record take to play, according to the binary number on the cover?

The cover's side-view drawing of the disc and stylus carries a binary number giving the playing time of one side as about an hour; the top drawing shows the stylus tracking from the outside in.

How are colour pictures stored on the record?

Colour pictures are stored as three consecutive frames, one each for red, green and blue; a picture of the Sun's spectrum is included so finders can calibrate the colours.

How many vertical lines make up each picture on the record?

Each picture is built from 512 vertical scan lines encoded in the audio signal; a calibration circle in the first picture lets finders check their aspect ratio.

Where were the record's lacquer masters cut?

The lacquer masters were cut at the JVC Cutting Center in Boulder, Colorado; metal mothers made from them went to a record-processing plant in Gardena, California for the finished discs.

How many Voyager records were made in total?

Only two flew; the rest stayed on Earth.

Which star will Voyager 1 pass within about 1.6 light-years of in roughly 40,000 years?

Gliese 445, a red dwarf in Camelopardalis, is the star the probe will pass at about 1.6 light-years in some 40,000 years; the star itself is approaching the Sun.

Which spacecraft became the farthest human-made object from Earth in 1998?

Voyager 1 overtook Pioneer 10 in February 1998 to become the most distant human-made object, travelling outward at about 17 kilometres per second.

Which pianist's Well-Tempered Clavier recording is on the record?

Glenn Gould plays the Prelude and Fugue in C from Book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier on the record; the Canadian pianist made his name with a 1955 Goldberg Variations recording.

Which singer's raga 'Jaat Kahan Ho' is on the record?

Kesarbai Kerkar's recording of 'Jaat Kahan Ho', in raga Bhairavi, is the record's Indian classical selection; the Goa-born singer was a leading voice of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana.

Which 1978 book by the record team tells the story of its creation and reproduces most of the images?

Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, published by Random House in 1978, was written by the six-member team; a CD-ROM edition from Warner New Media followed in 1992.

Which label's 40th-anniversary vinyl box set of the record won a Grammy in 2018?

Ozma Records, founded by David Pescovitz, Tim Daly and Lawrence Azerrad, produced the 40th-anniversary vinyl box set, which won the 2018 Grammy for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package.

Where did NASA make the record's audio available to stream in 2015?

In 2015 NASA uploaded the record's greetings and sounds of Earth to its SoundCloud account as a playlist titled 'Golden Record: Sounds of Earth'.

Which of the two probes launched first, and when?

Voyager 2 launched first, on 20 August 1977, sixteen days before its twin; both rode Titan IIIE-Centaur rockets from Cape Canaveral.

Which mariachi piece is on the record?

El Cascabel, a Mexican son written by Lorenzo Barcelata, is the record's mariachi selection, one of the folk recordings chosen to represent Latin America alongside a Peruvian wedding song.

Which astronomer on the record team is known for an equation estimating communicating civilisations?

Frank Drake, author of the 1961 Drake equation, proposed the phonograph-record format and designed the pulsar map on the cover that tells finders where the Sun is.

Which famous photograph did Voyager 1 take of Earth on 14 February 1990 from over 6 billion km away?

Pale Blue Dot shows Earth as a speck less than a pixel wide inside a scattered sunbeam; the probe took it from about 6 billion kilometres away after the mission's scientists lobbied NASA for a final look homeward.

In what year did NASA announce that Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space?

NASA announced in September 2013 that the probe had crossed the heliopause into interstellar space the previous August; it had passed the termination shock in December 2004 and remains within the Sun's gravitational reach for millennia.

What metaphor did Sagan use for the launch of the record?

He noted it would only be played if advanced space-faring civilisations exist, but that launching it said something hopeful about life on Earth.

Which star will Voyager 2 approach in about 40,000 years, in the constellation Andromeda?

Ross 248, a faint red dwarf in Andromeda, is the star Voyager 2 will pass at about 1.7 light-years in some 40,000 years; neither probe is aimed at any star.

Which French company supplied the blank records for the Golden Record?

Pyral S.A. of Créteil, near Paris, supplied the blanks; the cutting and plating of the finished records were then done in the United States.

Who recorded a greeting on the record at the age of six?

Sagan's son Nick spoke the English greeting, 'Hello from the children of planet Earth', at age six; he went on to write episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager.

Which metal was plated onto the disc before its final outer layer?

A thin layer of nickel was plated onto the disc before its outer plating, helping the final layer bond to the base metal; the finished discs were then mounted in aluminium containers for delivery to JPL.

How long is one rotation of the record, as written in binary on its cover?

One rotation takes 3.6 seconds, written on the cover in binary as a multiple of 0.7 billionths of a second, the period of the hydrogen atom's hyperfine transition.

What is the half-life of the uranium-238 sample on the record's cover?

Uranium-238's half-life is about 4.5 billion years, 4.468 billion to be precise, roughly the age of the Earth; it decays through a long chain ending in stable lead-206.

Which Georgian choral song is on the record?

Tchakrulo, a polyphonic song from Kakheti in eastern Georgia, is the record's Georgian selection, sung by a male choir; Georgian polyphony was later recognised by UNESCO.