Discover published sets by community

The Voyager Golden Record cover is designed to protect the record and also contains a pictorial guide for playing the record. The cover features the pulsar map and other symbols intended to show the location of the Sun with respect to 14 pulsars.

The selection of content for the Voyager Golden Records was overseen by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. He and his team assembled a wide range of sounds, music, and images to depict the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

The Voyager Golden Record contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, including 116 images, a variety of natural sounds, musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings in 55 languages.

Pioneer 10 was launched on March 2, 1972, and Pioneer 11 on April 5, 1973. Both spacecrafts were intended to study the asteroid belt, the environment around Jupiter and Saturn, and the outer Solar System before moving on to explore interstellar space. They carry the Pioneer Plaque as a message to any extraterrestrial life.

The Pioneer Plaque is 9x6 inches, made of gold-anodized aluminum. The Voyager Golden Record is 12 inches in diameter, made of gold-plated copper, with the cover also made from aluminum.

The 'Sounds of Earth' audio is a part of the Voyager Golden Record. It includes sounds ranging from whale calls to the music of Mozart, aimed at conveying the diversity of terrestrial life and human cultures.

The Pioneer Plaque is a gold-anodized aluminum plate attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts. It features a pictorial message in case the spacecrafts are intercepted by extraterrestrial life, showing figures of a man and a woman, the solar system, and several symbols intended to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.

Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 on August 20, 1977. They were designed to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment to explore the outer planets. The Voyager Golden Records were included to communicate the story of our world to extraterrestrials.

The Golden Record cover includes instructions in symbolic language, explaining the record's purpose and how to play it. The instructions are designed with the assumption that any extraterrestrial beings would be able to interpret universal scientific principles.

The messages contained on the Pioneer plaques and the Voyager Golden Records are intended to last for at least 1 billion years, ensuring that they could potentially be found and understood by extraterrestrial beings far in the future.

Both Pioneer 10 and 11 and the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts are on trajectories that will take them out of the Solar System and into interstellar space. The spacecrafts are carrying messages intended for any potential extraterrestrial life that might intercept them in the future.