On September 5, 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1. In March of 1979, it made its closest approach to Jupiter and went on to fly by Saturn in November of 1980. Since then, it has been heading towards interstellar space. Recently, NASA confirmed that the Voyager 1 spacecraft has indeed reached interstellar space.
Artist’s concept depicts Voyager 1 entering interstellar space, or the space between stars.
As of today, Voyager 1 has been operating for 36 years, 1 month, and 15 days and will continue to do so until sometime in 2025 when its power source (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) will finally run out of juice.
I have always been fascinated by the Pioneer and Voyager missions. To me, Voyager represents one of the most remarkable achievements of human ingenuity. It has opened the heavens to us and has sent back volumes of data about our solar system, including amazing images of Jupiter and Saturn.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 both have a greeting for any form of intelligent life they may encounter. The greeting is in the form of a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record. The disc contains sounds and images that were selected to illustrate the diversity of life and culture on our home planet Earth. Unless some spaceship out there intercepts it, it will be a while before it’s anywhere close to “potential” life forms. It has taken 35 years for Voyager 1 to reach interstellar space. The next time it will be anywhere close to a star other than the sun is in 40,000 years when Voyager 1 will be within 1.7 light years of Gliese 445.
Apart from its incredible journey, longevity and amazing accomplishments, consider these amazing facts:
Voyager’s Transmissions are VERY Faint
Voyager 1 communicates to Earth with a 22.4 watt transmitter. That’s roughly the equivalent of the light bulb in your refrigerator. When those signals reach Earth they are approximately one-tenth of a billion-billionth of a watt. NASA’s amazing deep-space tracking antennas capture the Voyager transmission from a signal that is so weak the power striking the antenna is only 1 part in 10 quadrillion. Your electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than Voyager 1.
At its present distance, it takes a signal from Voyager 1 17 hours to reach Earth.
Tiny Computers
Each Voyager computer has 69.6KB (kilobytes) of memory. A modern laptop computer with 4 gigabytes of memory has about 60,000 times more memory.
The master clock on the Voyager computers runs at 4 MHz. It can execute 8,000 instructions per second. Today, a smartphone runs at 1.5 GHz which yields over 14 billion instructions per second.
A Mountain of Data
Between the two Voyagers, five trillion bits of scientific data have been transmitted to Earth. How much data is that? It’s enough to fill over seven thousand music CDs!
The Human Effort
11,000 work-years have been devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter (Voyager 2 visited Neptune). This equates to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the great pyramid at Giza.
To me this simply says that when we work together, in harmony, with a goal and a purpose, there is nothing we cannot achieve.
And so, Voyager 1 boldly goes where no one has gone before. Voyager 2 will follow suit and eventually so will the Pioneer missions. Truly, an amazing feat!
Image Credits
All Images are Public Domain via NASA/JPL-Caltech and Wikipedia
Hey Gil! Look what I did! (New Gravatar!) Yippee!
Great post by the way, as usual!
Cheers,
David
Well done David! It’s YOU 😉
And thanks for your kind words!
Gileeeee