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NASA launched two golden records off to space in 1977 to instruct aliens about Earth if they ever come to alien probes — and Elon Musk is evidently a fan.
Elon Musk wasn’t sure whether he had real or duplicate, and he didn’t replied to ask for comment
But his post had me shocking: Who has the original golden records?
Tracing the Golden Records
The identical spacecraft were started over 40 years ago to inspect the outer solar system.
The golden records connected to the outer part of the spacecrafts, with visible commands on how to play 115 images, spoken greetings in 55 languages, and varieties of sounds from Earth, along with a 90-minute music playlist, as per a post on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The 12-inch gold-plated copper disks also contain a note from President Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Waldheim, according to NASA.
When I began watching the golden records, I observed uncertain numbers for how many originals were made. Some news articles mentioned 10 golden records, others claimed there were only eight.
But as per an archivist at JPL, there were 12 original records: two out of which moved to space and 10 were provided to institutions or people on Earth.
The institutions and people who received a copy, according to the JPL archivist: At present only eight out of 10 on Earth are accounted for. According to the him, the duplicates that moved to Langley Research Center and President Carter couldn’t be discovered a few years ago.
Where as Musk might doesn’t have an original golden record, he might a copy. They’re now sold online starting at $88.
But the real materials are for deal — and Jon Lomberg, the design director of the golden record, contain all of the original images and other archival material from the golden record.
“There’s a system that you can observe, I guess, a personal bond to that idea by being aware that this was the real slide that the people that created the record used and watched at and claimed over and agreed to scan and dispatch into space and it,” Lomberg said.
A personal copy of the master audio recording owned by the late Carl Sagan, the lead scientist of the project, went to auction at Sotheby’s in July 2023, but didn’t reached to its reserve and wasn’t sold.
And it should be considered that not even Sagan himself received a copy of the original record.
Voyager 1 and 2’s current mission
Since beginning, the spacecraft founded volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon, recognized the intricacies of Saturn’s rings, and clicked the first close-up pictures of Uranus and Neptune.
Since Nasa has stretched the mission and has hold the interaction with the probes as they go into interstellar space.
Their ongoing mission is to find out the outermost edge of the Sun’s domain.
Voyager 1 is about 15 billion miles away from Earth, and Voyager 2 is a little less that is 12.5 billion miles away, as per tracing data from JPL.
Since December, Voyager 1 has had problems with its flight data system, resisting Earth from receiving any data. JPL spokesperson Calla Cofield told BI that NASA doesn’t have any updates on Voyager 1.
“The team carried on data collection and are preparing some decisions that they’re expecting will get them on a path to either understanding the origin of the issue and/or solving it,” Cofield said.
Voyager 2 is working normally after short interaction problems previous year, according to a NASA update posted in August.
While the golden records on the Voyager spacecraft are likely to sum up over a billion years, Lomberg said the probes will might hit on another planet or star for sure.
Lomberg said that, in some case, the golden records sent to space are dated by now: they don’t contain any data on personal computers or rap music.
But he said the message is still timeless.
“The basic things that we introduce, the mountains and the rivers and the oceans and parents and children and the elegance of sport,” Lomberg said. “There’s some things that never go old.”
