The Voyager Golden Record is a gold-plated copper phonograph record carried by both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. It combines images, sounds, music, greetings in 55 languages and written messages in a time-capsule-like portrait of Earth. Its cover carries symbolic instructions for playing the disc and locating the spacecraft’s place of origin. No extraterrestrial recipient is known to have found or understood it.
What is the Voyager Golden Record?
Each Voyager spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch (30 cm) phonograph record. The disc is made of gold-plated copper and sits inside an aluminum protective cover. NASA describes it as a message intended to tell a story of Earth to any extraterrestrial civilization that might encounter a spacecraft.
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The project was selected by a committee chaired by Cornell planetary scientist Carl Sagan. Sagan and his associates assembled the visual and audio selection. NASA also presents the record as a human representation of Earth’s diversity—not simply a message whose success depends on an alien audience.
What is on the record?
NASA’s finalized contents page lists 115 analog images, natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages, music, and printed messages from U.S. President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.
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Images and sounds from Earth
The images are encoded in analog form. The sound collection includes natural events and animals, including surf, wind, thunder, birds and whales. The record also carries spoken greetings in dozens of languages.
Music from different traditions
NASA describes the music selection as 90 minutes long and eclectic, spanning Eastern and Western classical music and traditions from around the world. Its published list includes works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, as well as Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven’s “Melancholy Blues,” a Javanese gamelan piece, a Peruvian wedding song and a Navajo Night Chant. These are examples from the list, not the complete selection.
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Greetings and written messages
The finalized record has greetings in 55 languages. The written messages are from Carter and Waldheim; they are distinct from the spoken greetings and other sounds.
How were the greetings chosen?
Carl Sagan was asked to assemble the greeting section, and Linda Salzman Sagan was assigned to collect it. In an account reproduced on NASA’s website from Murmurs of Earth, she describes a rushed recording effort involving speakers from Cornell and nearby communities. The organizers aimed to represent many populations and cultures, choosing greetings in multiple languages rather than a small number of languages paired with keys intended to make exact decipherment easier.
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The process had practical limits: some languages could not be recorded in time. The account specifically names Swahili as an omission. NASA’s August 1, 1977 announcement described the planned record as carrying greetings in approximately 60 languages, while NASA’s finalized contents and greetings pages give 55. The available NASA accounts confirm last-minute omissions but do not explain the full difference between the early estimate and final count.
How could someone play the record?
The Golden Record is a physical phonograph disc, not a digital recording. NASA says it is designed for playback at 16⅔ revolutions per minute. Symbolic diagrams on the cover provide instructions for playing it and for interpreting the images; they also show how to locate Earth and indicate the spacecraft’s time in space.
The diagrams are intended as instructions, but that does not mean their meaning would be obvious to every viewer. Understanding them—and the content of the record—would depend on a finder’s ability to recognize and interpret the symbols and operate the disc.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why did NASA send it into space?
The record was conceived as a durable message about Earth for a possible future encounter, not as a broadcast expected to reach a known recipient. NASA frames it as a time capsule that carries sounds and images of the planet beyond Earth.
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“The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”
— Carl Sagan, quoted by NASA
The Golden Record expanded on the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques, which used small metal plaques to identify their probes’ origin. Voyager’s record uses a different medium and carries a broader collection of sound and image. NASA does not provide a quantitative comparison of their information capacity.
How was the Golden Record made?
NASA says gold plating took place on August 23, 1977. The 12-inch disc is protected by an aluminum cover electroplated with an ultra-pure sample of uranium-238. NASA gives the isotope’s half-life as 4.468 billion years. The cover also bears a hand-etched inscription: “To the makers of music – all worlds, all times”.
Where can you find the complete contents?
NASA’s Golden Record contents page lists the images, sounds and music. NASA also identifies Murmurs of Earth, written by members of the project team, as a detailed account of the record’s creation and a source for the full contents. NASA reports that the book is out of print and suggests looking for a used or library copy.
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