Space, There is the sound of India, How did It Happen..?

Forty years on and 11 billion miles from earth in the huge vastness of space there is the sound of India. And how did this happen?



As Nasa's ground-breaking Voyager-2 mission enters its 40th year this month, not many are aware that the spacecraft is carrying a golden record with different sounds of earth and international music and one of them is from India.



Voyager-2 was launched on August 20, 1977, and is the first spacecraft to have flown by all the four outer planets--Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter and Neptune. The music of India is a Hindustani classical composition called "Jaat Kahan Ho", rendered by Surshri Kesarbai Kerkar, a noted khayal singer of the second half of the 20th century.



The recording, which lasts for three minutes and 25 seconds, forms part of the 12-inch gold-plated copper disc carried by Voyager-2. Its twin, Voyager-1, launched on September 5, 1977, also carries a similar disc.



The Indian music was chosen by a Nasa-appointed committee chaired by Carl Sagan. In the book "Murmurs Of Earth - The Voyager Interstellar Record", published in 1978, Ann Druyan, Sagan's wife, recalls that Robert Brown, then executive director for the Centre For World Music in Berkeley placed "Jaat Kahan Ho" at the top of his list of world music for outer space.