How Voyager space probe billions of miles away has time capsule for aliens including Chuck Berry, and Mozart

IT has spent 46 years in our outer solar system travelling billions of miles – but it could be 300,000 more years before the spaceship Voyager 2 glimpses another star.

Before then, experts hope aliens will find the probe and the time capsule on board containing details about life on Earth.

Any ET cracking open the cache will be treated to music by Beethoven and Mozart, as well as Chuck Berry and Louis Armstrong’s Melancholy Blues.

And they will receive a message from Jimmy Carter, the US President when it blasted into space with its twin, Voyager 1.

The future of Voyager 2 looked uncertain just days ago after Nasa accidentally cut contact with it.

But agency chiefs breathed a sigh of relief when it reconnected 12 days later by sending a “heartbeat signal” to Earth.

Astrophysicist Dr Jacco van Loon said of the 12in gold-plated phonograph record on Voyager 2, packed with audio, pictures and the sounds of nature: “This will all be fine if the extra-terrestrials have ears, although it is expected they will have similar sensory organs as us.

“It makes sense to have eyes and ears because they will live on a planet with an atmosphere to which sound travels.”

But he added: “They will be different, just like when you travel to another continent and you will find different wildlife.

“And in the past, life has also looked different as a result of evolution.

“But will these ETs be friendly or hostile?

“It is an important question to consider and one that people did not completely agree on when it was decided to include all the information on the time capsule.”

The two robotic interstellar probes rocketed into space in 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

They were sent on a mission to look closer than any telescope on Earth at the four outer big planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

With onboard technology including TV cameras, ultraviolet sensors, magnetometers and plasma detectors, they have done a flyby of Neptune, found new moons and captured the first portrait of our solar system from outside it.

Soon contact with both probes will be lost for ever because their batteries are predicted to die.

But they will continue hurtling towards an unknown destination at more than 34,000 miles per hour.

Voyager 1 is currently some 15billion miles from Earth.

And Dr van Loon, of Keele University, Staffs, warned Voyager 2 could change course in future, making its ultimate path a mystery.

He explained: “It could be up to a hundred million or a billion years before it comes close to another star.

“The likelihood there would be life on those planets who are technologically advanced and can make sense of what this space matter is, is not very high, but it is possible.

“If we discovered something flying through our solar system, we would be excited and we would try to intercept it and find out more.”

To prolong battery life, the cameras were switched off on Voyager 1 in 1990 after taking a final iconic snap of the earth as a tiny blue dot.

Dr van Loon said: “We have learnt so much from the Voyager crafts about ourselves and our conditions on Earth and how our atmosphere protects us against radiation.

“The more we learn about space and other planets and the solar system, the more we realise how precious the Earth and its atmosphere is, and how fragile and vulnerable we are.

"This will help us define our own future on earth.”