In 1977, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), launched space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. On each of these spacecraft was a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk. Later known as the Golden Records, these disks had music and photographs engraved on them for any intelligent beings the spacecraft met on their long journeys.
Voyager 1 is continuing to operate well. In fact,
it has travelled so far that it has left the bounds of our solar system (over 23 billion km away).
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The Golden Records have messages packed in a bottle, which include spoken greetings in 55 languages, sounds, and images from nature. It also had a written welcome message from Jimmy Carter, during whose presidency the spacecraft was launched.
The records were built to last a billion years in space, but these little pieces of humanity could exist for trillions of years, says James Edward Huchingson, Professor emeritus and lecturer of Religion and Science at Florida International University.
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All living species, the mountains, seas, and forests would have long gone even before the Sun runs out of fuel in about 5 billion years. But the two Voyager spacecraft will still be floating in space, along with the Golden Records as testimony and legacy of Earth.
Voyager 1 is now giving off off strange readings that scientists are struggling to understand.
Perhaps that has something to do with why the Jimmy Carter era machine is sending back signals that can best be described as strange.
“The interstellar explorer is operating normally, receiving and executing commands from Earth, along with gathering and returning science data,” NASA explained on its website “But readouts from the probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) don’t reflect what’s actually happening onboard.”