A Titan IIIE rocket lifted Voyager 1 from Cape Canaveral at 8:56 AM local time. Its primary mission was a four-year tour of Jupiter and Saturn. The spacecraft was a 1,592-pound assemblage of science instruments, computers, and a 3.7-meter parabolic antenna. It also carried a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record.
The record contained 115 analog-encoded images, natural sounds, musical selections from around the world, and spoken greetings in 55 languages. Its contents were curated by a committee led by Carl Sagan. The instructions for playing it were etched onto its cover in symbolic language. The record was a deliberate message in a bottle, cast into a cosmic ocean with no guarantee of a shore.
Voyager 1 completed its planetary science objectives ahead of schedule. It provided the first detailed images of Jupiter's rings, volcanic activity on Io, and the complexities of Saturn's rings. On February 14, 1990, from a distance of 3.7 billion miles, it turned its camera and took the "Pale Blue Dot" photograph of Earth. Then its cameras were permanently powered down to conserve energy for its interstellar mission.
The probe's significance shifted from planetary explorer to interstellar emissary. It crossed the heliopause, the boundary where the Sun's influence wanes, in August 2012. Voyager 1 is now the most distant human-made object, traveling through the void between stars. Its three radioisotope thermoelectric generators will provide dwindling power until roughly 2025, silencing its instruments. The craft itself, with its golden record, will drift for eons. It is a monument to a species that tried to speak to the future.