What was that teaser in the patch notes? Someone discovered an ancient artefact. Spoiler warning!
In the recent patch notes from Frontier for Elite Dangerous there was a bullet point which simply read “Secret added” which was like waving a red rag at a bull. A player going by the name of Goldenvale hopped into the pilot seat to discover what this “secret” could be and managed to find it. If you don’t want to know what it is then stop reading right now.
The mysterious secret object turned out to be Voyager 2 and rather cleverly Frontier had positioned it roughly where it would be in the future what with the game being set in the year 3300. Some maths boffins got to work to see if the positioning was accurate working it out with a 4.056×1010s * 15.428km/s = 2.087×106 light seconds formula. Frightening I know but apparently this is where Voyager 2 would be.
Voyager 2 was launched back in 1977 and is travelling at 15.428 km/s relative to the Sun. The craft is expected to continue sending messages and data back to Earth until 2025 and contains the famous gold disc which features images of earth and its life, spoken greetings,  scientific information, and music which includes Chuck Berry, Bach, Mozart and more. If intelligent life ever encounters Voyager 2 is should be able to find us.
What have we here?
Looks like some ancient technology to me.
Oh! It’s that!
