There is one thing that always catches me when I work on this almanac. The gesture of putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the sea, without ever knowing whether it will wash up somewhere. On August 20, 1977, NASA did roughly that, only the sea was much bigger. From Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a Titan/Centaur rocket, it launched Voyager 2. The official mission was Jupiter and Saturn, but the probe carried something else the whole way: a 12-inch, gold-plated copper phonograph record.
A small team led by Carl Sagan put the record together. Frank Drake, Jon Lomberg, Timothy Ferris, and Ann Druyan worked on it. They had less than six months, after NASA approved the idea. Etched into the disc were 115 images, from scientific diagrams and human anatomy to landscapes and everyday scenes. There were natural sounds: wind, surf, thunder, whale songs, birds. There was a music selection running from Bach and Beethoven to Peruvian panpipes and Louis Armstrong. And there were greetings in 55 languages, from Akkadian, spoken six millennia ago, to modern Chinese dialects. Printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim were on it too. A disc that should remain playable for a billion years in deep-space conditions.
Voyager 2 was the first of the twin probes. Voyager 1 only launched on September 5. Because of its trajectory, Voyager 2 alone got the chance to fly past Uranus and Neptune, and it is still the only spacecraft ever to do so. Both Voyagers carry the same record, sealed in an aluminum jacket, with brief instructions on how to play it and a pulsar map that shows where to find Earth.
