A third day in a row of space stuff and a return to the Voyager probes mentioned on Friday. The comparison of Galileo and Voyager was too interesting not to explicitly highlight. I promise we’ve got non-space things for the rest of the week!

Whereas Galileo was deliberately crashed into Jupiter at high speed to leave little or no trace to contaminate Europa, the Voyager probes were on trajectories to leave the solar system and continue through deep space for potentially hundreds of thousands of years.

Considering the remote possibility they might be discovered in the future by some intelligent extra-terrestrial, Voyager project leader John Casani delegated Carl Sagan with the task of creating an ‘information pack’ to tell the finders a little about Voyager’s port of origin.

A vinyl-style gold phonograph was designed, with pictorial instructions on it’s surface for how to play it. It contains not just audio, but 115 encoded pictures too.

Show students the chosen pictures and discuss the chosen audio. Discuss why EMI refused to allow The Beatles to be included - what did they have to lose? But most importantly ask them what they would want to include on a disc that represented not just all of humanity, but all of life on Earth.

-Bill