NASA’s Voyager mission still exploring space after 45 years, but winding down
Launched in 1977, the twin Voyager probes are NASA’s longest-operating mission and the only spacecraft ever to explore interstellar space.
NASA’s twin Voyager probes have become, in some ways, time capsules of their era: They each carry an eight-track tape player for recording data, they have about 3 million times less memory than modern cellphones, and they transmit data about 38,000 times slower than a 5G internet connection.
Yet the Voyagers remain on the cutting edge of space exploration. Managed and operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, they are the only probes to ever explore interstellar space – the galactic ocean that our Sun and its planets travel through.
The Sun and the planets reside in the heliosphere, a protective bubble created by the Sun’s magnetic field and the outward flow of solar wind (charged particles from the Sun). Researchers – some of them younger than the two distant spacecraft – are combining Voyager’s observations with data from newer missions to get a more complete picture of our Sun and how the heliosphere interacts with interstellar space.
“The heliophysics mission fleet provides invaluable insights into our Sun, from understanding the corona or the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, to examining the Sun’s impacts throughout the solar system, including here on Earth, in our atmosphere, and on into interstellar space,” said Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Over the last 45 years, the Voyager missions have been integral in providing this knowledge and have helped change our understanding of the Sun and its influence in ways no other spacecraft can.”
The Voyagers are also ambassadors, each carrying a golden record containing images of life on Earth, diagrams of basic scientific principles, and audio that includes sounds from nature, greetings in multiple languages, and music. The gold-coated records serve as a cosmic “message in a bottle” for anyone who might encounter the space probes. At the rate gold decays in space and is eroded by cosmic radiation, the records will last more than a billion years.
And now, all these years after Voyagers’ launch, this epic space mission is beginning to wind down.
According to reports, NASA is shutting down systems of the Voyager probes to save dwindling power. The probes are flagging after 45 years — the move is a way of keeping them going up until 2030. Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, have made it farther than any other object made by humans.
The probes’ primary purpose was to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, a mission that they soon fulfilled. Then they just kept going, sending back images of our solar system and beaming home readings from deep space. ~ Business Insider
And for sci-fi fans out there, recall that the 1979 release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was based on the crew of the Enterprise coming across Voyager in the future 2270s. But by that time, Voyager had evolved into a massive and sentient space alien named V’Ger who was on its way to find its creator and perhaps destroy Earth in the process.
For more on NASA’s Voyager mission, see the video below.
(Source and Cover Photo: Image credit: JPL / NASA)
Posted by Richard Webster, Ace News Today / Follow Richard on Facebook and Twitter
