Colophon

Credits & Legal

This is an independent, non-commercial educational project — a set of original data visualisations and explainers about NASA's Voyager mission and its Golden Record. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, or any of the people, estates, labels or services credited below. Every source we drew on is listed here, with thanks.

The Golden Record — creative committee

The contents of the Voyager Golden Record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Its core members were:

Carl Sagan

Executive Director · Chair

Conceived and led the project; set its tone and oversaw selection.

Frank Drake

Technical Director

Devised the cover's scientific diagrams — the pulsar map and binary instructions.

Ann Druyan

Creative Director

Directed the sounds and music; contributed her recorded brainwaves and heartbeat.

Timothy Ferris

Producer

Produced the audio montage and shaped the 90-minute music programme.

Jon Lomberg

Design Director

Directed the visual content and the method for encoding the images.

Linda Salzman Sagan

Greetings Organiser

Gathered the greetings in 55 languages and drew the human figures.

Other contributors & voices

John Casani

Voyager project manager who initiated the message and delegated it to Sagan.

Alan Lomax · Robert E. Brown

Ethnomusicologists who advised on the global music selection.

Jimmy Iovine

Sound engineer on the recording.

Amahl Shakhashiri · Wendy Gradison · Shirley Arden · Steven Soter

Project assistants and coordinators.

Nick Sagan

Spoke the English greeting — "Hello from the children of planet Earth" — aged six.

Kurt Waldheim

UN Secretary-General, recorded the opening spoken greeting.

Jimmy Carter

U.S. President, author of the printed Presidential message.

Roger Payne

Recorded the humpback whale songs (from Songs of the Humpback Whale, 1970).

The 55 greeters

Faculty and community members, largely from Cornell's language departments, who spoke the greetings.

The musicians

All 27 musical works remain the property of their respective performers, composers and rights holders (see disclaimer below).

The definitive account is “Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record” (Sagan, Drake, Druyan, Ferris, Lomberg & Salzman, 1978), our primary reference for this exhibit.

Data & imagery sources

Mission data & images

NASA / JPL-Caltech — public domain. Spacecraft dimensions, mission milestones and the Voyager photographs (Jupiter, Io, Saturn, Titan, Uranus, Neptune, Triton, the Pale Blue Dot, the Family Portrait, the Earth–Moon portrait, the Golden Record).

Planet positions

Computed from JPL Solar System Dynamics' "Keplerian Elements for Approximate Positions of the Major Planets" (E. M. Standish).

Current distance

Propagated from Voyager's published heliocentric velocity; anchored to NASA's projected one-light-day milestone (Nov 2026).

Image archives

NASA Photojournal · NASA Image and Video Library · NASA Scientific Visualization Studio.

Wikimedia Commons

Public-domain images: The Earth seen from Apollo 17 (NASA, PD) and Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (PD, photo Luc Viatour).

Golden Record cover

The interactive decode diagram is an original redrawing created for this project, after the public-domain NASA/Frank Drake design.

Audio

Greetings & Sounds of Earth

Streamed in-page from NASA's official accounts via the NASA SoundCloud player — the "Greetings to the Universe" and "Sounds of Earth" playlists. © NASA, public domain; served by SoundCloud.

Music selections

The 27 musical works are under copyright and are not reproduced here. NASA did not include them in its public audio release. We link to the official remastered release at goldenrecord.org (Ozma Records).

Synthesised tones

The 1 kHz calibration tone, pulsar rhythms, hydrogen reference, ambient score and UI sounds are generated in your browser with the Web Audio API — original, no recordings used.

Third-party services & type

SoundCloud

Embedded audio players. Use is subject to SoundCloud's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

goldenrecord.org

External link to the official remastered record (Ozma Records). Subject to their own terms.

three.js

3-D rendering library (MIT License) for the spacecraft explorer.

Typefaces

Space Grotesk (SIL Open Font License) and IBM Plex Mono (SIL OFL), served via Google Fonts.

Legal & disclaimers

No affiliation or endorsement. This project is independent and educational. It is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored or approved by NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology, SoundCloud, Ozma Records, or any individual, estate or rights holder named here. References are for identification and educational purposes only.
NASA material. NASA content is generally not protected by copyright and is used in accordance with NASA's media-usage guidelines. NASA does not endorse any non-U.S.-Government entity, and the NASA name, logos and insignia are not used to imply endorsement. See NASA media guidelines.
Music & third-party recordings. The musical works on the Golden Record remain the property of their respective composers, performers and copyright owners. They are not reproduced, hosted or streamed by this project; we provide information and links to official sources only.
Embedded & linked content. Audio is streamed from NASA's official SoundCloud account; external links open third-party sites. We do not control and are not responsible for third-party content, which is subject to its own terms and privacy policies.
Trademarks. All trademarks, service marks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.
Accuracy. Figures, dates and "live" readouts are computed from published data and approximations and may differ from official real-time telemetry. Provided for general information, without warranty of any kind.
Imagery. Public-domain images are credited above. Where a third-party image is shown for educational illustration, rights remain with the original owner.
Contact / takedown. This is a non-commercial work. If you are a rights holder with a concern about any credited material, it can be promptly removed on request.

With gratitude to everyone who built the real Voyager mission and its Golden Record — engineers, scientists, artists, musicians and the voices of Earth — and to the people who keep the spacecraft alive nearly fifty years on.