Voyagers carry Jimmy Carter's message of hope across the cosmos
While a nation honors President Jimmy Carter with a state funeral and days of ceremonies in Washington, D.C., and his home state of Georgia, somewhere billions of miles away in the cosmos Carter's greetings on Earth's behalf are traveling 38,000 mph in hopes of one day reaching an unknown civilization.
Carter, who died Dec. 29 at age 100 in his hometown of Plains, Ga., wrote a short message in 1977 for inclusion, as an image, on two golden records affixed to the Voyager spacecrafts. His words are among dozens of images, greetings and music recordings meant to tell the story of Earth in a kind of time capsule.
The introduction to his 192-word message says that humans "are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization." The image of the full text of Carter's statement appears below.
What is contained on the Golden Record?
Carter's note is among 115 images and dozens of recordings, including greetings in 55 languages and selections of music from around the world. Selections representing the United States include "Dark was the night" by Blind Willie Johnson, Navajo Native Americans performing a Night Chant, "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, and "Melancholy Blues" by Louis Armstrong.
Each golden record measures 12 inches in diameter and is made of gold-plated copper. The aluminum cover is electroplated with an ultra-pure source of uranium-238 that a recipient, theoretically, could use to calculate when the spacecraft was launched. The cover also features instructions on how to use the included stylus to play the record and other details.
The images were curated by a committee chaired by astronomer, professor and author Carl Sagan.
"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space," Sagan said at the time. Sagan died in 1996.
The record − contained safely within its protective aluminum case − is bolted to the side of Voyager's bus housing that contains its electronics and instruments.
Where are the Voyager probes?
Both probes are now in interstellar space and the farthest from Earth human-made objects have ever traveled. Voyager 1 left the heliosphere and reached interstellar space in August 2012 and is 15.5 billion miles away, and Voyager 2 − traveling slower and in a different direction − did the same in November 2018 and is now roughly 13 billion miles from Earth.
In 2023, an onboard chip error in Voyager 1's flight data subsystem started scrambling data sent back from the probe, a problem NASA engineers solved five months later by reallocating memory storage to a different part of the subsystem.
Other than presenting mission engineers with complex technical issues as the probes enter their 48th year in space, Voyagers 1 and 2 continue sending back data from interstellar space.
Contributing: Riley Beggin