172 Hours on the Moon (27 page)

The signal 6EQUJ5 was actually received on August 15, 1977, at the Big Ear Radio Observatory (now known as the Ohio State
University Radio Observatory) in Delaware, Ohio — and the details in Coleman’s story on
pages 274
to
277
concerning the signal’s
reception are actual facts. It is also worth noting that on August 20 and September 5, 1977, two spaceships named
Voyager 1
and
Voyager 2
were launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In addition to taking pictures and solar measurements, they carried a
message: a gold-plated record containing images, music, and sounds from our planet, compiled in the event that the ships were
ever discovered by an extraterrestrial civilization. Thirteen years after the launch,
Voyager 1
passed Neptune’s orbit and left our solar system.
Voyager 1
and
2
are continuing their journey into space at a speed of seventeen kilometers per second, and they remain the man-made objects
that are farthest from Earth. If no one discovers them in the meantime,
Voyager 1
won’t reach Alpha Centauri, the closest star to our solar system, for at least forty thousand years.

JOHAN HARSTAD
(born 1979 in Stavanger, Norway) debuted in 2001 with the prose collection
Herfra blir du bare eldre
[
From Here You Only Get Older
]. The following year he published a collection of short stories titled
Ambulanse
[
Ambulance
], and in 2005 he published
Buzz Aldrin, hvor ble det av deg i alt mylderet?
[
Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?
], which has been published in thirteen countries, including the United States, France, Germany, Russia, and Korea, and was
a
Kirkus Reviews
Best Fiction of 2011 book. In 2007, Harstad published the novel
Hässelby
, which earned him the Norwegian Youths’ Critics Prize. He has also written four plays.
172 Hours on the Moon
(originally published in Norway as
DARLAH: 172 timer på månen
) is his first young adult novel, for which he received the 2008 Brage Award, one of the most prestigious literary awards
in Norway. The book is currently being published in ten countries in Europe, Asia, and America.