Voyager 1 may be nearly 50, but it’s still bringing us surprises from the very edge of our solar system

Voyager 1 – and its sibling, Voyager 2 – were always meant to be a testament to humanity’s ingenuity. When they left Earth in the summer of 1977, they did so carrying a record that was supposed to be a message to anyone who found it.

It was intended to “communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials”, Nasa says. The record itself includes instructions on how to play it, and anyone who did would find 115 images including information intended to show what our planet is like and how its inhabitants lived, ate and travelled.

It was a message of hope about humanity, said Carl Sagan, who led the committee that decided on its contents. “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space,” he said. “But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”