Notes
VOYAGER 1977-2017
September 5, 2017 was the 40th anniversary of the launching of Voyager 1, a spacecraft designed to explore the outer planets of our solar system and then continue its journey to deep space. Voyager 2 was launched a short time later and it too has a similar mission. Amazingly both travelers are still sending data back to Earth. Voyager 1 is currently 13 billion miles from Earth and traveling in interstellar space where no man-made object has ever gone. It is traveling at 38,000 mph and, some day in the distant future, may be intercepted by another life form from another galaxy. With that idea in mind, astronomer Carl Sagan and his compatriots developed a record, printed on gold-plated copper, that includes the sounds of our planet. It includes images, sounds of nature, greetings in many languages, and music. The list of that music may be found on the next page.
What you see above is a lithograph of the iconic record cover. The diagrams you see explain how to play the recording. The upper left is a drawing of the record and instructions written in binary arithmetic around it for the correct time of rotation—3.6 seconds. The four diagrams in the upper-right show how to decode the video portion of the recording; the top drawing is what the waveform of the video signal should look like. The bottom right pictures a hydrogen atom in its two lowest states—the transition time between them functions as a clock reference for the other diagrams. The lower right is a pulsar map showing the location of our solar system.
For more complete information about the mission follow this link to their website: