Showing posts with label Voyager Golden Records. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Voyager Golden Records. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

What were the only two items displayed on both Pioneer Plaques and Voyager Records?

anthropocentricImage by "T"eresa via Flickr
Twenty-seven years ago this week, Pioneer 10 became the first man-made object to "leave" the solar system when it passed orbit of Neptune on June 13, 1983. Technically, Pioneer 10 has yet to enter the Oort cloud, let alone escape the heliopause, so it's not beyond the influence of our sun. Nonetheless, Pioneer 10 is the first man-made object to carry a tangible human message outside the local planetary system -- the first Pioneer Plaque.

Designed by Carl "Contact & Cosmos" Sagan and Frank "The Drake Equation" Drake, the Pioneer Plaque contained a supposedly universally comprehensible description of the Pioneer probe's origins, including mathematic and astronomic directions to our solar system and a basic depiction of human beings. The depiction of humanity included simplified nude line drawings of an adult human male and female. While Stephen Hawking has of late suggested that we should not tell aliens where we live, the big controversy about extraterrestrial communications in 1972 was that we launched nudie pictures into space.

Thus, while an identical Pioneer Plaque was launched on Pioneer 11 in 1973, the Voyager Golden Records attached to Voyagers 1 and 2 omitted the nude drawings. In fact, Sagan was able to reuse only two items from the Pioneer Plaques when he designed the Voyager Golden Records in 1977.

What were the only two items displayed on both Pioneer Plaques and Voyager Records?