who recorded for the golden records aboard voyagers 1 and 2

#Who recorded for the golden records aboard voyagers 1 and 2 series

The signals are received by Nasa’s deep space network – giant satellite dishes scattered around the world, designed to pick up data from distant spacecraft. (For their latest position, visit the Voyager home page.) Maybe it’s easier to imagine it like this: it takes a radio signal, travelling at the speed of light, 38 hours to travel from the Earth to Voyager 1 and back. Voyager 2, on a different trajectory, is 17 billion kilometres (10.5 billion miles) away. Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2013 and is (at the time of writing) 20 billion kilometres (12 billion miles) away. Whenever Voyager 1 sends back a signal, it is from the furthest distance any human-made object has travelled from Earth. Remarkably, both Voyager spacecraft are still working. Voyager: A long, long trip into the unknown.How we built the International Space Station.The missions have changed our perspective on the Earth and, with golden gramophone records attached to their sides, are now taking human culture to the stars. They have sent back detailed views of these strange worlds, revealing moons encased in ice, covered in volcanoes and bathed in gasoline smog. Over the past 40 years, the two Voyager spacecraft have explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. This is the unlikely control centre for one of the most ambitious and audacious missions in human history. You can tell that from the homemade cardboard sign beneath the computer monitors that reads: “Voyager Mission Critical Hardware PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH!” This is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) mission control for Nasa’s Voyager spacecraft. In a beige-coloured cubicle, on the ground floor of a nondescript suburban office block in Pasadena, California, history is being made. What you won’t find is any reference to, well, you-know-what. You’ll find everything from the story about the world’s greatest space mission to the truth about whether our cats really love us, the epic hunt to bring illegal fishermen to justice and the small team which brings long-buried World War Two tanks back to life. We’ll be revisiting our most popular features from the last three years in our Lockdown Longreads.

#Who recorded for the golden records aboard voyagers 1 and 2 series

So now we’re dedicating a series to help you escape. BBC Future has brought you in-depth and rigorous stories to help you navigate the current pandemic, but we know that’s not all you want to read.