This page has tags:

1. 1 2022-04-21T10:49:58-04:00 Patrick Timothy Dawson a0b08a5aaf9148250b99cba97af95de3340033d4 Public Patrick Timothy Dawson 9 vistag 2022-07-22T16:29:13-04:00 Patrick Timothy Dawson a0b08a5aaf9148250b99cba97af95de3340033d4
2. 1 2022-04-20T15:39:15-04:00 Patrick Timothy Dawson a0b08a5aaf9148250b99cba97af95de3340033d4 Voyager 1 & 2 Patrick Timothy Dawson 6 vistag 2022-07-28T22:09:23-04:00 09/05/1977 Patrick Timothy Dawson a0b08a5aaf9148250b99cba97af95de3340033d4

This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/Sagan_Viking.jpg 2022-03-07T16:31:50-05:00 Sagan’s Work on the Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager Space Probes 51 plain 2022-08-15T17:36:48-04:00 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 nine minutes of this documentary. You can watch as much of it as you choose.
  
  
  After the Viking mission, Sagan was tasked to help create the most elaborate message to intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos yet. That being the golden record that was placed on the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. The team he assembled included his wife, Linda Salzman Sagan, and Ann Druyan. Sagan and Druyan would fall in love while working on the project and Sagan would later divorce Salzman and marry Druyan in 1981. The record contains several messages that an alien civilization with an understanding of science may likely understand. One notable example that I would like to draw your attention to is the measurements of human brainwaves located in the bottom left corner. Those are Druyan’s brainwaves. She discusses the experience of having them recorded in a section of the Cosmos: Possible Worlds companion book, which I have quoted below.
  

  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 (Druyan, 2020, p. 163-164).

  Voyager 2 was the first of these space probes to launch on August 20th, 1977. Voyager 1 would follow on September 5th. A book was co-authored by everyone on the Golden Record team recounting their experiences working on the project. It was titled Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record and it was released the following year in 1978. Here are seven minutes of a documentary from 1982 discussing Voyager 2’s first photos of Saturn's rings. It also showcases the television studio that had been set up to interview scientists daily throughout the project. After you’re done with the documentary, you can use the blue button below to continue to the section on Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and Sagan’s Antinuclear war activism. You can also select a different section that you are interested in by returning to the Launch Point or using the drop-down menu at the top of your screen.