Today is Celebrating the 45th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1, one of humanity’s iconic twin messengers into space. (Its sibling, Voyager 2, launched a few weeks earlier.) Now, in the dark, distant regions of interstellar space — more than 10 billion miles from home, where our sun looks like like any other bright star — the couple is still doing scientific research. They carry the Golden Records, bearing the sounds and symbols of Earth, should some extraterrestrial ever encounter one of the spaceships and become curious about its distant sender.
Linda Spilker, Voyager’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who began working at the agency in 1977, the year the probe was launched, said: “I’ve been following along. Follow Travel’s journey throughout his career. “I am amazed that both of these spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, have been able to keep going and return the unique science of new places that no spacecraft has ever visited before. . And now they have become interstellar travelers. How great is that? “
Two car-sized probes, each with a 12-foot antenna mounted on top, have one main mission: visit the gas giants of our own solar system. After launch, the Voyagers’ paths varied, but both took advantage of a rare planetary formation, capturing groundbreaking images as they flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Stars. Neptune and reveals amazing details about the moons of the planets. By the end of 1989, they had completed that mission. In 1990, Voyager 1 limited it by turning and taking poignant image our world, with which astronomers and scientists communicate Carl Sagan known as Light green dot.
“Look at that dot again. It’s here. It’s home. It’s us. It’s got all the people you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every child. who has lived, lived to the fullest,” wrote Sagan. The image of the Earth from a cosmic perspective — just “a speck of dust suspended in a ray of moonlight,” as he puts it — becomes memorable. like Earthrise This photo taken by an Apollo 8 astronaut shows the planet as seen from the moon.
The two probes, running on a nuclear-powered system known as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), continued to fly. Our solar system has no clear boundaries, but in the 2000s they passed an “end shock”, where solar wind particles suddenly slow down below the speed of sound due to pressure from the gas. and magnetic fields in interstellar space. Then, in the 2010s, they disrupted the helicopter nucleus, the boundary between the solar wind and the interstellar wind.
With four instruments operating aboard Voyager 1 and five aboard Voyager 2, they now have a new job: measuring the strength of the magnetic field, the density of the plasma, as well as the energy and direction of the charge carriers in it. the environment they pass through. “The purpose of the interstellar mission is to measure the impact of the sun as we get further and further away from Earth. We’re trying to understand how the sun’s heliosphere interacts with interstellar space,” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager of the Voyager interstellar mission at JPL. Travel 1 is currently 14.6 billion miles from home and Travel 2 is 12.1 billion miles away, but in view the nearest star is about 25 thousands of billions miles away. (NASA maintains someone who follows their journey.) It’s a remarkable coda for their mission, decades after the probes accomplished their primary goals.
