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The Voyager Golden Record was a six-week project with a budget of $1,500. John Casani, the Voyager project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, handed it to Carl Sagan in 1977 with a single engineering constraint: the message had to weigh no more than the simple aluminium plaque already flown on Pioneer 10 and 11. Sagan, his then-collaborator Linda Salzman, and the Cornell radio astronomer Frank Drake decided that magnetic tape would not survive the cosmic-ray flux of interstellar space, so they reverted to the oldest viable storage medium they could find — a phonograph record. They overran the budget personally.
The disc itself is a copper master 12 inches in diameter, plated first with nickel and then with gold. The cover is aluminium. Electroplated onto the aluminium is an ultra-pure sample of uranium-238, an isotope with a half-life of 4.468 billion years. Any civilisation with mass spectrometry can measure the ratio of uranium remaining to its decay products and date the record to within a few percent. The cover diagram in the upper-left corner shows a stylus in starting position; the rotation period is given in binary, in units of the 0.70-nanosecond hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen, the same universal clock used on the Pioneer plaques. The hydrogen-line clock and a pulsar map showing Earth's location relative to fourteen pulsars with named periods carry over from the Pioneer plaque.
Sagan's content committee included Frank Drake, the artist Jon Lomberg, the ethnomusicologists Robert E. Brown and Alan Lomax, the writer Timothy Ferris as producer, Ann Druyan as creative director, and a then-25-year-old sound engineer named Jimmy Iovine, recommended by John Lennon, who had been asked to contribute and could not. Iovine would later co-found Interscope Records.
The image side carries 116 photographs plus a calibration circle, encoded in analogue form as 512 vertical lines, three lines per pixel for colour, designed to be reconstructed at 16⅔ revolutions per minute. The selections include a diagram of vertebrate evolution by Jon Lomberg with anatomically correct nude figures, a photograph of the Arecibo radio telescope with scale annotation, page six of Newton's Principia Mathematica Volume III, a photograph of Egypt and the Sinai from orbit annotated with the chemical composition of Earth's atmosphere, and a woman in a supermarket. After the public objected to the nudity on the Pioneer plaque, NASA forbade Sagan to include a photograph of a nude couple, so a silhouette was substituted.
The audio side opens with a 49-second greeting in English from U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and 55 spoken greetings in modern and ancient languages, including one by Sagan's six-year-old son Nick. There is a printed message from President Jimmy Carter on the disc itself: "We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours." There is the inspirational phrase Per aspera ad astra in Morse code. There are humpback whale songs taken from Roger Payne's 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale. There is an hour-long recording of Ann Druyan's electroencephalogram, taken while she thought about Earth's history, civilisation's problems, and what it was like to fall in love with Carl Sagan; the EEG is compressed into roughly one minute of audio.
The music runs about ninety minutes. Bach gets three pieces: the first movement of Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 played by Karl Richter and the Munich Bach Orchestra, the Gavotte en Rondeau from Partita No. 3 played by Arthur Grumiaux, and Glenn Gould playing the C-major prelude and fugue from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Beethoven gets two: Otto Klemperer conducting the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, and the Cavatina from String Quartet No. 13. Mozart's Queen of the Night aria is sung by Edda Moser. Stravinsky conducts his own Rite of Spring sacrificial dance. Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" is included; Alan Lomax called rock music "adolescent" and Sagan replied "there are a lot of adolescents on the planet." Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" closes one side. Guan Pinghu plays the seven-minute guqin piece "Liu Shui," Flowing Streams. Kesarbai Kerkar sings the Hindustani raag Bhairavi. The Bulgarian shepherdess Valya Balkanska sings "Izlel e Delyu Haydutin." The Beatles favoured inclusion of "Here Comes the Sun" but EMI demanded $50,000 in royalties per record for two records — the entire production cost was $18,000 — and refused.
The blank discs were supplied by Pyral S.A. of Créteil, France. CBS Records contracted the JVC Cutting Center in Boulder, Colorado to cut the lacquer masters. The James G. Lee Record Processing center in Gardena, California cut and gold-plated eight finished records. Sagan secretly etched "To the makers of music — all worlds, all times" into the dead wax; the record was initially rejected for the unauthorised inscription before he persuaded the NASA administrator to allow it.
Voyager 1 launched on 5 September 1977. It crossed Pluto's orbit in 1990, crossed the termination shock in November 2004, and crossed the heliopause into interstellar space on 12 September 2013. As of 2023 four of its eleven instruments were still returning data. Voyager 1 is currently moving at roughly 61,000 kilometres per hour and is the most distant human-made object from Earth. In approximately 40,000 years it will pass within 1.6 light-years of Gliese 445, a red dwarf currently in the constellation Camelopardalis. In January 2018, Ozma Records' 40th-anniversary vinyl reissue of the Golden Record won the Grammy Award for best boxed or limited-edition package.