Chuck Berry's Music Is Traveling Through Interstellar Space

A view of Chuck Berry's Hollywood Walk of Fame Star in Hollywood, California. Berry passed away March 18, 2017 at a residence outside St. Louis. His song "Johnny B. Goode" is flying through interstellar space on NASA's Voyager 1 golden record.
A view of Chuck Berry's Hollywood Walk of Fame Star in Hollywood, California. Berry passed away March 18, 2017 at a residence outside St. Louis. His song "Johnny B. Goode" is flying through interstellar space on NASA's Voyager 1 golden record. (Image credit: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)

While rock and roll legend Chuck Berry died this Saturday (March 18), his music will live on for an eternity, going where no Earthling has ever gone before.

Two NASA spacecraft, the Voyagers, are heading into interstellar space carrying golden records with music and other messages from Earth, just in case intelligent extraterrestrials ever stumble upon them. Berry's 1958 hit "Johnny B. Goode" was among the tracks that made it onto the record.

NASA launched the Voyagers in the late 1970s to study the outer planets. In 2013, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space. Voyager 2 is expected to do the same in the next decade or so. [The Golden Record in Pictures: Voyager Probes' Message to Space Explained]

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Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan wrote this letter to Chuck Berry for his 60th birthday. (Image credit: U.S. Library of Congress)

The late cosmologist Carl Sagan convinced NASA to put a special message for aliens on each of the two spacecraft. Sagan chaired a committee that selected 90 minutes of music from around the world, including classical tunes by Bach and Beethoven and jazz by Louis Armstrong. The golden records can also play greetings in 55 languages and have several natural sounds like thunderstorms, volcanic eruptions and animal noises.

For Berry's 60th birthday in 1986, Sagan and his colleague Ann Druyan, who co-wrote the PBS documentary series "Cosmos," wrote a letter to remind him that his music "will live forever" on the Voyagers. "These records will last a billion years or more," Sagan and Druyan wrote to Berry.

Berry passed away at his home near St. Louis on Saturday, the Associated Press reports. He was 90 years old.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.