35 years later, Voyager 1 is heading for the stars

[Abbey Marie]

Soo cool that it is still going!

...
Voyager 1 is currently more than 11 billion miles from the sun. Twin
Voyager 2, which celebrated its launch anniversary two weeks ago, trails
behind at 9 billion miles from the sun.
They're still ticking despite being relics of the early Space Age.
Each only has 68 kilobytes of computer memory. To put that in perspective,
the smallest iPod - an 8-gigabyte iPod Nano - is 100,000 times more
powerful. Each also has an eight-track tape recorder. Today's spacecraft
use digital memory.
The Voyagers' original goal was to tour
Jupiter and Saturn, and they sent back postcards of Jupiter's big red
spot and Saturn's glittery rings. They also beamed home a torrent of
discoveries: erupting volcanoes on the Jupiter moon Io; hints of an
ocean below the icy surface of Europa, another Jupiter moon; signs of
methane rain on the Saturn moon Titan.

Voyager 2 then journeyed to Uranus and Neptune. It remains the only spacecraft to fly by these
two outer planets. Voyager 1 used Saturn as a gravitational slingshot to
catapult itself toward the edge of the solar system.

"Time after time, Voyager revealed unexpected - kind of counterintuitive -
results, which means we have a lot to learn," said Stone, Voyager's
chief scientist and a professor of physics at the California Institute
of Technology.
...

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?se...rld&id=8796995

[Anton Chigurh]

Message on Voyager 1:

"We cast this message into the cosmos.... Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planet and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe."

—Jimmy Carter

[KarlMarx]

Soo cool that it is still going!


http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?se...rld&id=8796995

The nearest star is 24 trillion miles away, so it is 1/2000 th of the way there. At its current rate of travel (11 billion miles in 35 years), it will take 70,000 years to reach the nearest star.

[taft2012]

Each also has an eight-track tape recorder.

I find this miraculous. 8-Track tapes had a life expectancy of about six months in my car stereo.

[Little-Acorn]

Message on Voyager 1:

"We cast this message into the cosmos.... Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planet and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe."

—Jimmy Carter

Carter WOULD sign something like that.

What it should have said:

"If this were 'your time' or 'your era', you would have found us by now. As it is, this spacecraft is the means by which we have found you."

[Little-Acorn]

The nearest star is 24 trillion miles away, so it is 1/2000 th of the way there. At its current rate of travel (11 billion miles in 35 years), it will take 70,000 years to reach the nearest star.

Science-fiction writers have a ball writing about the possible results of traveling such vast distances.

One story I read, talked about a spacecraft that was launched from Earth, with is crew in deep sleep, super-cold preserved and all that. They used the most advanced super-drives, and the journey was expected to take only 300 years instead of the tens of thousands of Voyager.

When they got there, automatic systems thawed them out and woke them up... to find the system they were aiming for, already populated by millions of humans from Earth. A hundred years after their launch, people on the home planet had invented an even-more-super drive that allowed instant travel between stars. So they transported themselves to this remote system (and many others), and had set up complete civilizations out there by the time the earlier-launched deep-sleep bunch finally arrived after their 300-year journey.

Cool stuff.