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Star Stuff: An Exploratory Case Study of the Cosmos Television Franchise

Birthday letter to Chuck Berry

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1. Birthday letter to Chuck Berry
4. The Voyager Golden Record, Cover of the Voyager Golden Record, The golden record's location on Voyager (middle-bottom-left). The Golden Record Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The Golden Record Cover In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record - about an hour. 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 top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. 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). 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 drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered "interlace" to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 512 vertical lines in a complete picture. 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. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction. 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. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given. 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. Electroplated onto the record's cover is an ultra-pure source of uranium-238 with a radioactivity of about 0.00026 microcuries. The steady decay of the uranium source into its daughter isotopes makes it a kind of radioactive clock. Half of the uranium-238 will decay in 4.51 billion years. 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. This should be a check on the epoch of launch, which is also described by the pulsar map on the record cover. The Voyager Golden Records are two phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may find them. The records are a sort of time capsule . Although neither Voyager spacecraft is heading toward any particular star, Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years ' distance of the star Gliese 445 , currently in the constellation Camelopardalis , in about 40,000 years . Carl Sagan noted that "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space, but the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet." The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University . The selection of content for the record took almost a year. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, thunder and animals (including the songs of birds and whales ). To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages, other human sounds, like footsteps and laughter (Sagan's), and printed messages from U.S. president Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim . The record also includes the inspirational message Per aspera ad astra in Morse code . The collection of images includes many photographs and diagrams both in black and white, and color. The first images are of scientific interest, showing mathematical and physical quantities, the Solar System and its planets, DNA , and human anatomy and reproduction . Care was taken to include not only pictures of humanity, but also some of animals, insects, plants and landscapes. Images of humanity depict a broad range of cultures. These images show food, architecture, and humans in portraits as well as going about their day-to-day lives. Many pictures are annotated with one or more indications of scales of time, size, or mass. Some images contain indications of chemical composition . All measures used on the pictures are defined in the first few images using physical references that are likely to be consistent anywhere in the universe . The musical selection is also varied, featuring works by composers such as J.S. Bach (interpreted by Glenn Gould ), Mozart , Beethoven (played by the Budapest String Quartet ), and Stravinsky . The disc also includes music by Guan Pinghu , Blind Willie Johnson , Chuck Berry , Kesarbai Kerkar , Valya Balkanska , and electronic composer Laurie Spiegel , as well as Azerbaijani folk music ( Mugham ) by oboe player Kamil Jalilov . The inclusion of Berry's " Johnny B. Goode " was controversial, with some claiming that rock music was "adolescent", to which Sagan replied, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet." The selection of music for the record was completed by a team composed of Carl Sagan as project director, Linda Salzman Sagan , Frank Drake , Alan Lomax , Ann Druyan as creative director, artist Jon Lomberg , Timothy Ferris as producer, and Jimmy Iovine as sound engineer. The Golden Record also carries an hour-long recording of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan . During the recording of the brainwaves, Druyan thought of many topics, including Earth's history, civilizations and the problems they face, and what it was like to fall in love. After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included. However, the record does contain "Diagram of vertebrate evolution", by Jon Lomberg , with drawings of an anatomically correct naked male and naked female, showing external organs. The pulsar map and hydrogen molecule diagram are shared in common with the Pioneer plaque . The 115 images are encoded in analogue form and composed of 512 vertical lines. The remainder of the record is audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute. Jimmy Iovine , who was still early in his career as a music producer, served as sound engineer for the project at the recommendation of John Lennon , who was contacted to contribute but was unable to take part. Sagan's team wanted to include the Beatles song " Here Comes the Sun " on the record, but the record company EMI , which held the copyrights, declined. In the 1978 book Murmurs of Earth , the failure to secure permission for the song is cited as one of the legal challenges faced by the team compiling the Voyager Golden Record. In the book, Sagan said that the Beatles favoured the idea, but "[they] did not own the copyright, and the legal status of the piece seemed too murky to risk." When asked about the obstacle presented by EMI with regard to "Here Comes the Sun", despite the artists' wishes, Ann Druyan said in 2015: "Yeah, that was one of those cases of having to see the tragedy of our planet. Here's a chance to send a piece of music into the distant future and distant time, and to give it this kind of immortality, and they're worried about money ... we got this telegram [from EMI] saying that it will be $50,000 per record for two records, and the entire Voyager record cost $18,000 to produce." However, this was refuted in 2017 by Timothy Ferris; in his recollection, "Here Comes the Sun" was never considered for inclusion. In July 2015, NASA uploaded the audio contents of the record to the audio streaming service SoundCloud . In the upper left-hand corner is a drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0.70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom . The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record—about an hour (more precisely, between 53 and 54 minutes). 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 top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to analog television (in which the picture is a series of horizontal lines). 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 drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered "interlace" to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster , showing that there are 512 (2 9 ) vertical lines in a complete picture. 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. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction. Color images were represented by three images in sequence, one each for red, green, and blue components of the image. A color image of the spectrum of the sun was included for calibration purposes. 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. It shows the location of the Solar System with respect to 14 pulsars , whose precise periods are given. 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. Blank records were provided by the Pyral S.A. of Créteil , France. CBS Records contracted the JVC Cutting Center in Boulder, Colorado , to cut the lacquer masters which were then sent to the James G. Lee record-processing center in Gardena, California , to cut and gold-plate eight Voyager records. After the records were plated they were mounted in aluminum containers and delivered to JPL. The record is constructed of gold-plated copper and is 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter. The record's cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238 . Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. It is possible (e.g. via mass-spectrometry ) that a civilization that encounters the record will be able to use the ratio of remaining uranium to the other elements to determine the age of the record. The records also had the inscription "To the makers of music – all worlds, all times" hand-etched on its surface. The inscription was located in the "takeout grooves", an area of the record between the label and playable surface. Since this was not in the original specifications, the record was initially rejected, to be replaced with a blank disc. Sagan later convinced the administrator to include the record as is. Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, and left the Solar System (in the sense of passing the termination shock ) in November 2004. It is now in the Kuiper belt . In about 40,000 years, it and Voyager 2 will each come to within about 1.8 light-years of two separate stars: Voyager 1 will have approached star Gliese 445 , located in the constellation Camelopardalis ; and Voyager 2 will have approached star Ross 248 , located in the constellation of Andromeda . In March 2012, Voyager 1 was over 17.9 billion km from the Sun and traveling at a speed of 3.6 AU per year (approximately 61,000 km/h (38,000 mph)), while Voyager 2 was over 14.7 billion km away and moving at about 3.3 AU per year (approximately 56,000 km/h (35,000 mph)). Voyager 1 has entered the heliosheath , the region beyond the termination shock. The termination shock is where the solar wind, a thin stream of electrically charged gas blowing continuously outward from the Sun, is slowed by pressure from gas between the stars. At the termination shock, the solar wind slows abruptly from its average speed of 300–700 km/s (670,000–1,570,000 mph) and becomes denser and hotter. Of the eleven instruments carried on Voyager 1 , five of them are still operational and continue to send back data today. It is expected that there will be insufficient energy to power any of the instruments beyond 2025. On September 12, 2013, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had left the heliosheath and entered interstellar space , although it still remains within the Sun's gravitational sphere of influence.
5. The Voyager Golden Record, Cover of the Voyager Golden Record, The golden record's location on Voyager (middle-bottom-left). The Golden Record Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The Golden Record Cover In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record - about an hour. 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 top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. 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). 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 drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered "interlace" to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 512 vertical lines in a complete picture. 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. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction. 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. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given. 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. Electroplated onto the record's cover is an ultra-pure source of uranium-238 with a radioactivity of about 0.00026 microcuries. The steady decay of the uranium source into its daughter isotopes makes it a kind of radioactive clock. Half of the uranium-238 will decay in 4.51 billion years. 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. This should be a check on the epoch of launch, which is also described by the pulsar map on the record cover. The Voyager Golden Records are two phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may find them. The records are a sort of time capsule . Although neither Voyager spacecraft is heading toward any particular star, Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years ' distance of the star Gliese 445 , currently in the constellation Camelopardalis , in about 40,000 years . Carl Sagan noted that "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space, but the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet." The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University . The selection of content for the record took almost a year. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, thunder and animals (including the songs of birds and whales ). To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages, other human sounds, like footsteps and laughter (Sagan's), and printed messages from U.S. president Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim . The record also includes the inspirational message Per aspera ad astra in Morse code . The collection of images includes many photographs and diagrams both in black and white, and color. The first images are of scientific interest, showing mathematical and physical quantities, the Solar System and its planets, DNA , and human anatomy and reproduction . Care was taken to include not only pictures of humanity, but also some of animals, insects, plants and landscapes. Images of humanity depict a broad range of cultures. These images show food, architecture, and humans in portraits as well as going about their day-to-day lives. Many pictures are annotated with one or more indications of scales of time, size, or mass. Some images contain indications of chemical composition . All measures used on the pictures are defined in the first few images using physical references that are likely to be consistent anywhere in the universe . The musical selection is also varied, featuring works by composers such as J.S. Bach (interpreted by Glenn Gould ), Mozart , Beethoven (played by the Budapest String Quartet ), and Stravinsky . The disc also includes music by Guan Pinghu , Blind Willie Johnson , Chuck Berry , Kesarbai Kerkar , Valya Balkanska , and electronic composer Laurie Spiegel , as well as Azerbaijani folk music ( Mugham ) by oboe player Kamil Jalilov . The inclusion of Berry's " Johnny B. Goode " was controversial, with some claiming that rock music was "adolescent", to which Sagan replied, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet." The selection of music for the record was completed by a team composed of Carl Sagan as project director, Linda Salzman Sagan , Frank Drake , Alan Lomax , Ann Druyan as creative director, artist Jon Lomberg , Timothy Ferris as producer, and Jimmy Iovine as sound engineer. The Golden Record also carries an hour-long recording of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan . During the recording of the brainwaves, Druyan thought of many topics, including Earth's history, civilizations and the problems they face, and what it was like to fall in love. After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included. However, the record does contain "Diagram of vertebrate evolution", by Jon Lomberg , with drawings of an anatomically correct naked male and naked female, showing external organs. The pulsar map and hydrogen molecule diagram are shared in common with the Pioneer plaque . The 115 images are encoded in analogue form and composed of 512 vertical lines. The remainder of the record is audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute. Jimmy Iovine , who was still early in his career as a music producer, served as sound engineer for the project at the recommendation of John Lennon , who was contacted to contribute but was unable to take part. Sagan's team wanted to include the Beatles song " Here Comes the Sun " on the record, but the record company EMI , which held the copyrights, declined. In the 1978 book Murmurs of Earth , the failure to secure permission for the song is cited as one of the legal challenges faced by the team compiling the Voyager Golden Record. In the book, Sagan said that the Beatles favoured the idea, but "[they] did not own the copyright, and the legal status of the piece seemed too murky to risk." When asked about the obstacle presented by EMI with regard to "Here Comes the Sun", despite the artists' wishes, Ann Druyan said in 2015: "Yeah, that was one of those cases of having to see the tragedy of our planet. Here's a chance to send a piece of music into the distant future and distant time, and to give it this kind of immortality, and they're worried about money ... we got this telegram [from EMI] saying that it will be $50,000 per record for two records, and the entire Voyager record cost $18,000 to produce." However, this was refuted in 2017 by Timothy Ferris; in his recollection, "Here Comes the Sun" was never considered for inclusion. In July 2015, NASA uploaded the audio contents of the record to the audio streaming service SoundCloud . In the upper left-hand corner is a drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0.70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom . The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. Below this drawing is a side view of the record and stylus, with a binary number giving the time to play one side of the record—about an hour (more precisely, between 53 and 54 minutes). 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 top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to analog television (in which the picture is a series of horizontal lines). 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 drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered "interlace" to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster , showing that there are 512 (2 9 ) vertical lines in a complete picture. 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. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction. Color images were represented by three images in sequence, one each for red, green, and blue components of the image. A color image of the spectrum of the sun was included for calibration purposes. 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. It shows the location of the Solar System with respect to 14 pulsars , whose precise periods are given. 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. Blank records were provided by the Pyral S.A. of Créteil , France. CBS Records contracted the JVC Cutting Center in Boulder, Colorado , to cut the lacquer masters which were then sent to the James G. Lee record-processing center in Gardena, California , to cut and gold-plate eight Voyager records. After the records were plated they were mounted in aluminum containers and delivered to JPL. The record is constructed of gold-plated copper and is 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter. The record's cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238 . Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. It is possible (e.g. via mass-spectrometry ) that a civilization that encounters the record will be able to use the ratio of remaining uranium to the other elements to determine the age of the record. The records also had the inscription "To the makers of music – all worlds, all times" hand-etched on its surface. The inscription was located in the "takeout grooves", an area of the record between the label and playable surface. Since this was not in the original specifications, the record was initially rejected, to be replaced with a blank disc. Sagan later convinced the administrator to include the record as is. Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, and left the Solar System (in the sense of passing the termination shock ) in November 2004. It is now in the Kuiper belt . In about 40,000 years, it and Voyager 2 will each come to within about 1.8 light-years of two separate stars: Voyager 1 will have approached star Gliese 445 , located in the constellation Camelopardalis ; and Voyager 2 will have approached star Ross 248 , located in the constellation of Andromeda . In March 2012, Voyager 1 was over 17.9 billion km from the Sun and traveling at a speed of 3.6 AU per year (approximately 61,000 km/h (38,000 mph)), while Voyager 2 was over 14.7 billion km away and moving at about 3.3 AU per year (approximately 56,000 km/h (35,000 mph)). Voyager 1 has entered the heliosheath , the region beyond the termination shock. The termination shock is where the solar wind, a thin stream of electrically charged gas blowing continuously outward from the Sun, is slowed by pressure from gas between the stars. At the termination shock, the solar wind slows abruptly from its average speed of 300–700 km/s (670,000–1,570,000 mph) and becomes denser and hotter. Of the eleven instruments carried on Voyager 1 , five of them are still operational and continue to send back data today. It is expected that there will be insufficient energy to power any of the instruments beyond 2025. On September 12, 2013, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had left the heliosheath and entered interstellar space , although it still remains within the Sun's gravitational sphere of influence.
6. VOYAGER II-URANUS FLY BY National Archives and Records Administration VOYAGER II-URANUS FLY BY U.S. Information Agency. (1982 - 10/01/1999) VOYAGER II-URANUS FLY BY - HIBBS/STONE/SMITH/GAUTIER/BRAHIC. ARC Identifier 59760 / Local Identifier 306-WNET-188. TELEVISION DISCUSSION: AL HIBBS, DR. EDWARD STONE, DR. BRAD SMITH, DR. DANIEL GAUTIER, AND DR. ANDRE BRAHIC, SCIENTISTS, JET PROPULSION LABORATORY, DISCUSS THE DISCOVERY OF NEW MOONS, ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION OF URANUS, THE NINE KNOWN RINGS OF URANUS, THE DISCOVERY OF A 17-HOUR DAY, PLANET TEMPERATURE, AND THE FACTS UNCOVERED ABOUT URANUS' MAGNETIC FIELD. SHOWS RECENT VOYAGER PHOTOGRAPHS. Made possible by a donation from Shawn Masters.

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Sagan’s Work on the Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager Space Probes 35 plain 2022-07-18T17:00:33-04:00 07/24/1969 - 09/28/1980
You are now in the section of this project devoted to Carl Sagan's work on Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager space probes. This work on several of these space probes directly informed the creation of the original Cosmos series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The first probes we will be discussing here are Pioneer 10 and 11. The spacecraft launched on March 2nd, 1972, and April 5th, 1973, respectively. Their primary mission was to take close-up pictures of Jupiter and send them back to Earth. A journey that would ultimately conclude with them being the first human-made spacecraft to exit our solar system and enter deep space. Thus, Sagan was tasked with creating a golden plaque to be placed on the probes that would communicate their origins in the remote event that intelligent life elsewhere might pick them up. Here's a two-minute interview with Sagan from 1972 discussing the likelihood of life on Jupiter and the creation of the golden plaque.

Though the idea for the plaque was conceived of by Sagan, it was illustrated by his wife at the time Linda Saltzman Sagan, she would also work with Sagan on the Voyager space probes, which will be discussed later in this section. Between the Pioneer and Voyager missions, Sagan also worked on the Viking space probes that were sent to land on Mars and take the first ever photos of the Martian surface. The documentary titled A New View of Mars documents the current human understanding of Mars leading up to that mission. It discusses the legacy of human thinking about Mars, the earlier Mariner 9 mission to circumnavigate it, the possibility of life on the planet, and the plans for the Viking missions that were underway at that time. I have isolated 9 minutes of this documentary. You can watch as much of it as you choose.

in 1977, I recorded my own brain waves for a message to any beings in the Milky Way galaxy who might happen upon one of two derelict spacecraft at any time in the next five billion years. It came about when Carl Sagan asked me to be the creative director for an interstellar message of unprecedented complexity to be affixed to the side of NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. The Voyagers would undertake the first reconnaissance mission of the outer solar system before wandering through the galaxy for the next several billion years. One part of what came to be called the “golden record” consisted of music representing many human cultures, including Delta blues, Peruvian panpipes, Javanese gamelan, a Navajo night chant, Senegalese percussion, Japanese shakuhachi, a Georgian men’s chorus, and much more. Another section of the record was devoted to different kinds of sounds: a newborn’s first cry and her mother ’s soothing murmurs, the roar of an F-111 flyby, a cricket song, a kiss, and greetings in 59 different human languages and one whale language. We had no idea who would ever hear this recording or what it would mean to them, but we knew it was a sacred undertaking. Nothing we had built would ever travel so far and last so long. In 1977, with the Cold War raging, we looked upon our task as building an ark of human culture. Carl and I fell in love that same spring while we were making the golden record. We had known each other for three years as platonic friends and coworkers, each committed to another person. In that other life I had asked Carl if it would be possible for our imagined extraterrestrials to decipher the signals from a recording of a meditation that registered my EEG, EKG, and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Carl replied, “Billions of years is a long time, Annie. Go do it.” The recording session at a New York hospital fell only two days after we had blurted out our feelings to each other in a long-distance phone call and decided to marry. My thought itinerary for the meditation included a broad narrative of the multibillion-year history of our planet. Toward the end of the hour, I permitted myself a personal exploration of the love that I had discovered only hours before. My fresh joy at finding my heart’s true home will endure on those records longer than Earth itself.
- Sagan and Druyan's meeting (Book quote)
- What was learned for Voyager 2
- Own Television Studio where they interviewed scientists
- Voyager 1 & 2 is discussed in Episodes 6 and 7 of Cosmos A Personal Voyage