Vote Now For Birthday Message NASA Will Send To Voyager Craft

Voting is now open to decide which message written by NASA fans will be sent to the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The two craft are billions of miles away, but for their 40th anniversary NASA is sending a message out to the Voyager 1 to carry on into the depths of space.

NASA began a competition earlier this month to allow fans to submit messages to be sent to the Voyager 1 craft. The submission period ended on the 15 and then teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA and the team that works on Voyager voted on their favorites to narrow it down. Now they’re asking people like you to vote and help decide on the final message that will be beamed out to Voyager 1 on its 40th birthday, Sept. 5. The message will arrive on Sept. 6, about 20 hours after it is sent.

Voyager 1 and its counterpart, Voyager 2, have been soaring through space for nearly 40 years since they launched, transmitting data back to Earth about the farthest depths of space any mission has ever gone. The Voyager 1 craft is currently in Interstellar Space more than 12 billion miles from Earth.

The #MessageToVoyager was easy for participants to submit to NASA all hopeful winners had to do was craft a message that was 60 characters or less including spaces, punctuation, letters and numbers and then tag it on social media with the designated hashtag. They could have posted on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram or Google+ as long as the post was public so NASA could find it.

Messages in different languages from all over the world poured in for NASA to consider before choosing the finalists. There are 10 finalists who made the cut for final message but their names are not attached to the messages they submitted. You can view the 10 final messages and vote for your favorite on NASA’s website. You can only vote once so choose wisely.

Most of them are space themed and carry a positive message like, “All of us are behind you, and ahead of you is everything,” and “From the stars we came, and to the stars we return.” Inspiring messages for the little craft to carry.

Each Voyager already carries a golden record that contains sounds from Earth and messages in different languages incase the craft ever comes upon any extraterrestrial, now one of the final messages will be added to the information the Voyager 1 carries.

Voting will be open until 8 p.m. EDT on Aug. 29. Once you vote on NASA’s page, you’ll be able to see how many other people voted for the same message as you and what percent of that vote your choice has so far. As of Thursday evening, the message with the most votes was “From the stars we came, and to the stars we return.” But there is still plenty of time for the tables to turn, so stay turned for which message comes out on top.