Greetings from the Pioneers
Launched in the early 1970s Pioneer 10 and 11 were appropriately named - becoming the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, first to fly by Jupiter and Saturn , and the first human artifacts to venture beyond the solar system. Now coasting through interstellar space , they carry with them greetings in the form of a gold anodized plaque with symbolic drawings as illustrated above . The male and female figures are drawn to the same scale as the Pioneer spacecraft shown behind them. Immediately to the left is a map of the position of the sun with respect to nearby pulsars and the center of the galaxy while below is a drawing of the solar system indicating the planet of origin . In the upper left is a schematic of two fundamental states of the hydrogen atom . These diagrams along with other details of the plaque were designed by Carl Sagan of Cornell University and are intended to be decipherable by spacefaring extraterrestrial civilizations .