The Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 27

Fig. 1.12 The gold-plated aluminum plaque on Pioneer spacecraft, showing the figures of a man
and a woman to scale next to a line silhouette of the spacecraft
before it was to be shipped to Kennedy Space Center. One of the correspondents,
Eric Burgess, visualized Pioneer 10 as mankind's first emissary beyond our Solar
System. This spacecraft should carry a special message from mankind, a message
that would tell any finder of the spacecraft a million or even a billion years
that planet Earth had evolved an intelligent species that could think beyond its
own time and beyond its own Solar System. Burgess and another correspondent
Richard Hoagland approached Director of the Laboratory of Planetary Studies at
Cornell University, Dr. Carl Sagan. A short while earlier, Sagan had been involved
in a conference in the Crimea devoted to the problems of communicating with
extraterrestrial intelligence. Together with Dr. Frank Drake, Director of the National
Astronomy and Ionosphere Center at Cornell University, Sagan designed a type of
message that might be used to communicate with an alien intelligence.
Sagan was enthusiastic about the idea of a message on the Pioneer spacecraft.
He and Drake designed a plaque, and Linda Salzman Sagan prepared the artwork.
They presented the design to NASA; it was accepted to put on the spacecraft. The
plaque design was etched into a gold- anodized aluminum plate 15.25 by 22.8 cm
(6 by 9 in.) and 0.127 cm (0.05 in.) thick (See Fig. 1.12 ).