NASA Uploads Voyager"s Golden Record MP3s to Soundcloud - http://clapway.com/2015/07/29/nasa-uploads-voyagers-golden-record-mp3s-to-soundcloud-335/

Somewhere, deep in interstellar space, are two NASA spacecrafts that are both carrying a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk. Embedded on these golden records are sounds and images, carefully selected, to portray the diverse life and culture on Earth. On Monday, NASA uploaded the sounds to Soundcloud so people can go listen to the collection of sounds floating through space for their self.

NASA’s — The Golden Record

Before NASA launched the golden record on Voyager 1 and 2, they launched Pioneer 10 and 11 with small metal plaques, which had information about their time and place of origin. NASA took this same idea and applied it to the golden record, but also decided to take it one step further. Rather than just giving any would-be spacefarers information about the spacecraft they may have found, they decided to send information relevant to us as a species.

A committee chaired by Carl Sagan, a popular American astronomer, carefully selected 115 images and various natural sounds that represent us and the world we live in. “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet,” said Sagan when describing the project.

Messages from Earth

NASA didn’t just vote to put natural sounds on the record. There are also musical pieces from various cultures around the world; there are greetings from real people spoken in 55 different languages, and there are even printed messages from President Carter and U.N Secretary General Waldheim.

Sound clips of the recordings have been available on the NASA Voyager website for a while now, but now you can enjoy them, together, in a full playlist via Soundcloud. Prior to NASA releasing the MP3s, you could only listen to each clip individually.

Going the Distance

Voyager 1 and 2 are continuing their journey into interstellar space in order to better understand the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence. The goal is to study the Sun’s magnetic field, the outward flow of the solar system, and continuing the search for the heliopause boundary. And if we expand Earth’s influence with a few good tunes then so be it.

Check out NASA’s playlist here.

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Without a proper playlist, what space adventure is complete?:

NASA Uploads Voyager"s Golden Record MP3s to Soundcloud

Bill Nye"s Crowd-Funded Solar Sail Satellite Is Now in Orbit - http://clapway.com/2015/05/21/bill-nyes-crowd-funded-solar-sail-satellite-is-now-in-orbit-123/

The Planetary Society, chaired by Bill Nye, recently put out and promoted a Kickstarter campaign that would produce the LightSail. The LightSail “solar sail” is a piece of fabric that sails on photon power. This propulsion system is now moving a satellite around Earth orbit, having been successfully launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that was also carrying the X-37B space plane and a total of 10 CubeSats.

The solar sail launch was pushed back by problems with the Air Force’s secretive X-B37 spaceplane.

The solar sail, originally an idea of astronomer Carl Sagan, has been championed by Bill Nye and the Planetary Society. They raised their original $200,000 goal, needed to build the sail, in less than a day using a Kickstarter campaign, and planned to launch a SolarSail-powered craft by May 6th. However, the launch date was pushed back to yesterday, the 20th, because the Air Force was troubleshooting the X-37B.

The launch went as expected, and all of the Atlas rocket’s payload was unloaded at the right altitudes. This is more or less as far as we know, though, since there was a part of the launch that is unaccounted for. On account of the X-37B, there was a window of time during which no information was reported. The Air Force has been very secretive about the X-37B, to the point that we don’t even know which of the two existing spaceplanes was sent up. The test is said to have involved on-board experiments, about which next to nothing is known. It also had two other experiments that we do know about: one testing a new ion thruster used by military communication satellites, the other testing the effects of space exposure on 100 different materials.

The LightSail solar sail itself is made from three CubeSats and four deployable solar sails made from Mylar. The craft is currently too low to effectively solar sail, since it’s going to get caught up in atmospheric drag. The point of the experiment, though, was to test the sail deployment sequence and critical systems, in preparation for the extended mission scheduled to take place in 2016. Since everything about this launch is looking good, we can expect to hear much more about the LightSail’s progress in the coming year.

Bill Nye"s Crowd-Funded Solar Sail Satellite Is Now in Orbit