#The staurn golden records series#

When NASA first conceived of a “Grand Tour” of the solar system in the 1960’s, the proposed craft that would conduct the tour was designed to be a part of the Mariner 11 program. Voyager 1 was originally part of the Mariner 11 program In practice, this means that Voyager 1 is the most distant object in the solar system whose exact location is known at all times. From a distance of 140 AU away (as on September 22, 2017), Voyager 1 is still in regular contact with the Deep Space Network, and receiving control inputs and return data. Launched on September 5, 1977, sixteen days after Voyager 2 which lifted off on August 20, Voyager 1 is now the furthest manufactured object from Earth, even further than the dwarf planets Eris and V774104, which are 96 AU and about 103 AU away, respectively. The image below shows Voyager 1 being propelled into space by a Titan IIIE lift vehicle. This should be a check on the epoch of launch, which is also described by the pulsar map on the record cover.Voyager 1 is the furthest space craft from Earth Thus, by examining this two-centimeter diameter area on the record plate and measuring the amount of daughter elements to the remaining uranium-238, an extraterrestrial recipient of the Voyager spacecraft could calculate the time elapsed since a spot of uranium was placed aboard the spacecraft. Half of the uranium-238 will decay in 4.51 billion years.

The steady decay of the uranium source into its daughter isotopes makes it a kind of radioactive clock. The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.Įlectroplated onto the record's cover is an ultra-pure source of uranium-238 with a radioactivity of about 0.00026 microcuries. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given. The drawing in the lower left-hand corner of the cover is the pulsar map previously sent as part of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. The Voyager spacecraft showcasing where the Golden Record is mounted. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction. Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 512 vertical lines in a complete picture. The drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered 'interlace' to give the correct picture rendition. Picture lines 1, 2 and 3 are noted in binary numbers, and the duration of one of the 'picture lines,' about 8 milliseconds, is noted.

#The staurn golden records series#

The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to ordinary television (in which the picture is a series of horizontal lines). The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how pictures are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The Golden Record cover shown with its extraterrestrial instructions.