Mason researcher part of team updating Voyager’s Golden Record
Anamaria Berea, Associate Professor, Computational and Data Sciences, has been working with a team of researchers from CalTech and the Interstellar Foundation to update Voyager’s Golden Record for the future NASA interstellar mission.
Historically, several space missions have been using "time capsules” to send content on spacecraft, as repositories of representative human knowledge that will last in time and space. Additionally, some of these messages are specifically designed as a “hello" towards another civilization, as was the case of Pioneer plaques and Voyager records, in case an extraterrestrial species will encounter these spacecrafts. But these repositories of human knowledge and identity of the human species have been originally designed in the 70s, and the human culture, history, and technology have changed since then.
With more and more space missions scheduled to launch in the next decade, the need for an update on the messages sent into space is timely, and the focus of the team’s work. Their paper “Message in a Bottle—An Update to the Golden Record” is only the first paper in a series that will lay out the types and content of messages to be sent into deep and interstellar space, from videos, images, audio, text and computer code, to digital and analogue encoding of information.
