Golden Record
A gold-plated copper disc aboard both spacecraft carries an audio-visual portrait of Earth — together with instructions for playing it and identifying its origin.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A time capsule
The 30-centimetre record was made for both spacecraft. A committee chaired by Carl Sagan selected natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages, music from several traditions and images describing Earth and life.
How to read the cover
The diagrams use the neutral-hydrogen transition as a universal unit of time, explain how to reproduce an analogue image and locate the Sun relative to pulsars. A layer of uranium-238 serves as a very long-term time marker.
What is deliberately not hosted here
We do not host copyrighted music or photographs from the record. NASA notes that many images belong to third parties, so we provide descriptions and a link to the official catalogue.