Indian Classical Music Still Resonates In Space As NASA’s Mission Voyager 2 Enters Its 40th Year

Indian classical music continues to resonate in space, 11 billion miles away from the Earth, forty years after America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched Voyager-2.

The spacecraft, launched on 20 August 1977, has a 12-inch gold-plated copper disc carrying a golden record of sounds of earth and international music. A Hindustani classical composition called “Jaat Kahan Ho”, rendered by Surshri Kesarbai Kerkar, a noted khayal singer of the second half of the twentieth century, is a part of the collection and is played for three minutes and 25 seconds in outer space.

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

Since 1977, Voyager-2 has travelled a massive 11 billion miles. It is humanity's farthest and longest-lived spacecraft, sending back unprecedented and mesmerising images and data from outer space. According to NASA, the probe sends observations about conditions where our Sun’s influence diminishes and interstellar space begins.