Every time we bring in a new special exhibition, our team at Frost Science adds something to it—a bonus exhibit to make the content relatable to our Miami audience. We try to link the exhibition to our community and collections, much like connecting stars into constellations can tell a larger celestial story.
In Journey to Space, this local story is indeed interstellar in scale. In our “From Earth, with Love” exhibit, we explore the history and future of humans attempting to communicate with alien life.
Since the 1970s, NASA has made a tradition of adding messages to spacecrafts destined for the unknown just in case they encounter other advanced life. These messages range from symbols to poems and audio recordings. Perhaps the most iconic and complex of these messages were the Golden Records affixed to the Voyager I and II spacecraft.
In 1977, both Voyager units were launched from Cape Canaveral on missions to explore Jupiter and Saturn, then later the outer planets. Once they completed their objectives, these spacecrafts continued to soar. Voyager I is now over 15 billion miles from Florida, fully outside the pull of our Sun. Voyager II is not far behind, at 12.6 billion miles away. Both are still in contact with NASA researchers, pinging away in deep space.
Each Voyager has an identical Golden Record attached to its side. These gold-plated copper disks, fashioned into photographic records containing audio recordings and photographs from Earth, were also packaged with styluses and instructions in a symbolic language on how to play them. If these records are ever discovered, it will be by a species capable of interstellar travel, a technological achievement well beyond anything we can accomplish today.
In our “From Earth, with Love” exhibit, you can listen to the Golden Record and explore a 40th anniversary commemorative record set that was generously loaned to the museum by Frost Science Director of Corporate Partnerships Edie Pearson. She bought the record set as a birthday present for her son, Jesse Swinger, who was born the same week as the Voyager I launch. Now, you can see it displayed in Journey to Space.
There is another fun and unanticipated local twist to this exhibit. The Europa Clipper spacecraft is scheduled to be launched from Cape Canaveral later this year, setting off for Jupiter’s moon Europa. This moon has frozen oceans hypothesized to contain the building blocks of life. Attached to Europa is a “message in a bottle” of sorts, that includes the names of millions of Earthlings who wanted to reach out to life beyond Earth. The twist: included in that list of names was the museum’s graphics producer, Erica Geisland, who we asked to replicate the Clipper’s engraved vault plate for the exhibit. She was extra excited to help us tell this story, since her name will be among the millions launching into the unknown.
In the distant future, some alien life form may be decoding Erica’s name or listening to the music encoded on the original version of Edie’s record. As guests to the museum, you can do these things today! Stop by Journey to Space, now on view through Sunday, October 6, 2024, to view the “From Earth, with Love” exhibit and experience so much more in this interactive, engaging exhibition.