Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are about to pierce the heleosphere, which protects our solar system from cosmic radiation, and enter interstellar space. The probes have already collected a wealth of data about our solar system, and they’re now collecting data about the edge of our solar system and soon, they’ll collect data about what lies beyond our solar system.
In addition to collecting information about our solar system and what lies beyond, each probe also contains a special record that contains information about our planet and humanity. Via NASA:
Each probe is famously equipped with a Golden Record, literally, a gold-coated copper phonograph record. It contains 118 photographs of Earth; 90 minutes of the world’s greatest music; an audio essay entitled Sounds of Earth (featuring everything from burbling mud pots to barking dogs to a roaring Saturn 5 liftoff); greetings in 55 human languages and one whale language; the brain waves of a young woman in love; and salutations from the Secretary General of the United Nations. A team led by Carl Sagan assembled the record as a message to possible extraterrestrial civilizations that might encounter the spacecraft.
“A billion years from now, when everything on Earth we’ve ever made has crumbled into dust, when the continents have changed beyond recognition and our species is unimaginably altered or extinct, the Voyager record will speak for us,” wrote Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in an introduction to a CD version of the record.
