Humanity's first messenger to the stars carries the sound of whales and Chuck Berry.

Voyager 1 Becomes Humanity's First Interstellar Emissary

A spacecraft launched in 1977 crosses the boundary of the solar system

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, became the first human-made object to enter interstellar space in 2012, carrying a golden record with sounds and images from Earth.

On August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 — launched from Cape Canaveral 35 years earlier — crossed the heliopause: the boundary where the sun's solar wind gives way to interstellar space. At that moment, a human-made object left the solar system for the first time in history.

The spacecraft was traveling at approximately 38,000 miles per hour, carrying a gold-plated audio-visual disc — a kind of message in a bottle for any civilization that might find it. The record contains sounds of Earth: whales singing, rain falling, a baby crying, greetings in 55 languages, and 90 minutes of music from Bach to Chuck Berry.

By the time scientists confirmed the crossing (it took time to interpret the data), Voyager 1 was 11 billion miles from the sun. Its radio signals, traveling at the speed of light, took 17 hours to reach Earth. The spacecraft's plutonium power source will exhaust around 2025, silencing it — but it will continue traveling through interstellar space for billions of years.

The record aboard contains instructions for playing it back. In 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will make its closest approach to another star: a red dwarf in the constellation Camelopardalis. Whether anyone will be there to…

💡 Carl Sagan, who championed the golden record, fought to include a photograph of a nude man and woman on it. NASA initially refused. He won after negotiations.