What's the secret code for talking to spacecraft?

What's the secret code for talking to spacecraft?

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Amazing Fact:

In sending us the beautiful, true-color planet pictures below, the spacecraft communicated using only ones and zeroes!

Pass your mouse over the pictures to see what the raw data looked like before processing.

All these pictures were made by the Voyager spacecraft. Find out more amazing facts about their Grand Tour of the outer planets between 1979 and 1989.


Jupiter with Io. Mouse over swaps with binary image data.

This is Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun, and its moon Io.

Saturn. Mouse over swaps with binary image data.

This is majestic Saturn, sixth from the Sun, with its jaunty rings. If you look very closely, you can see four of Saturn's moons, too.

Outer planet montage. Mouse over swaps with binary image data.

This is a montage of all four of the outer planets visited by Voyager 2. They are (front to back, farthest from Sun to nearest) Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter.

article last updated June 4, 2018
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The signals Voyager sent to Earth to give us these pictures looked something like this:

. . . 1101 0010 1001 0101 0000 1011 0001 . . .

How did we ever make enough sense of these 1's and 0's to get these magnificent images?


Spacecraft engineers and computer scientists have had to solve many big problems. But none of these problems could be tackled without one thing: a special language so people could communicate with machines. That language makes . . .

But none of these machines can learn English, or Spanish, or any other human language the way people can. These machines understand only two ideas:

Cartoon light switch turns on and off with mouse hover.

So the big question is.

How do we feed complicated information IN and get complicated information OUT, if we can only say "ON" and "OFF"?

Let's find out!