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Voyager I is close to leaving the solar system.
Seriously, let that sink in. A man-made object didn’t just leave our planet… didn’t just go to the moon… didn’t just land on Mars (which is fucking incredibly respectable in its own right!)… didn’t just pass the asteroid belt, or the gas giants, or the Kuiper belt…
A man-made spacecraft is LEAVING THE SOLAR SYSTEM.
The outer boundaries of our solar system aren’t way out there where Pluto orbits either. The distance from Earth to the Sun is 1 “astronomical unit.” Voyager I is 120 AU away (~11.1 billion miles). It’s data transmissions, travelling at the speed of light, take 16 hours to reach Earth.
Back when it was around 40 AU (3.7 billion miles) away (1980) it turned around and took a picture of the solar system, now known as the “family portrait” with Earth famously being called the “pale blue dot”
Here's where the pic was taken:
Here’s what it looked like:
Click on the high res, full size, then look at the inset zoomed areas, then look at the tiiiiiiiiiiny dots that are planets. Scale, motherfuckers!
Hi-res: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._and_Venus.jpg
As Carl Sagan noted:
Anyway, Voyager I's primary job was to explore the Jupiter and Saturn systems and it’s “mission” ended in 1980 when those tasks were completed it was directed outward again and tasked to study the interstellar medium with no specific target. Just see how long it would last.
As of today it has been operational, with zero mechanical support (obviously) for 34 years, 9 months, and 16 days.
Right now it is nearing the edge of the Heliopause. This is where the outward pressure of the solar wind starts to be overcome by the insterstellar wind created as the solar system travels through the galaxy. Think of that boundary like the waves on the bow of a boat.
It's out there on the left where the orange meets the light blue.
And it has enough fuel to send data until 2020.
Seriously, let that sink in. A man-made object didn’t just leave our planet… didn’t just go to the moon… didn’t just land on Mars (which is fucking incredibly respectable in its own right!)… didn’t just pass the asteroid belt, or the gas giants, or the Kuiper belt…
A man-made spacecraft is LEAVING THE SOLAR SYSTEM.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977. After exploring the outer planets, it was pointed toward deep space and a new mission. Today scientists announced it's going to get there a lot sooner than expected.
They're already seeing a change in the neighborhood.
"We are clearly in a new region where things are changing more quickly," says Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology. "It is very exciting. We are approaching the solar system's frontier."
They're already seeing a change in the neighborhood.
"We are clearly in a new region where things are changing more quickly," says Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology. "It is very exciting. We are approaching the solar system's frontier."
when Voyager 1 crosses the heliopause mankind will have entered a new era in space exploration. We will have a probe for the first time outside our own solar system and will be able to study particles unaffected by our sun.
The outer boundaries of our solar system aren’t way out there where Pluto orbits either. The distance from Earth to the Sun is 1 “astronomical unit.” Voyager I is 120 AU away (~11.1 billion miles). It’s data transmissions, travelling at the speed of light, take 16 hours to reach Earth.
Back when it was around 40 AU (3.7 billion miles) away (1980) it turned around and took a picture of the solar system, now known as the “family portrait” with Earth famously being called the “pale blue dot”
Here's where the pic was taken:
Here’s what it looked like:
Click on the high res, full size, then look at the inset zoomed areas, then look at the tiiiiiiiiiiny dots that are planets. Scale, motherfuckers!
Hi-res: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._and_Venus.jpg
This color image of the sun, Earth and Venus was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft Feb. 14, 1990, when it was approximately 32 degrees above the plane of the ecliptic and at a slant-range distance of approximately 4 billion miles. It is the first -- and may be the only -- time that we will ever see our solar system from such a vantage point. The image is a portion of a wide-angle image containing the sun and the region of space where the Earth and Venus were at the time with two narrow-angle pictures centered on each planet
From Voyager's great distance both Earth and Venus are mere points of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. Detailed analysis also suggests that Voyager detected the moon as well, but it is too faint to be seen without special processing. Venus was only 0.11 pixel in diameter.
From Voyager's great distance both Earth and Venus are mere points of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. Detailed analysis also suggests that Voyager detected the moon as well, but it is too faint to be seen without special processing. Venus was only 0.11 pixel in diameter.
As Carl Sagan noted:
"But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, pp. 8–9
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, pp. 8–9
Anyway, Voyager I's primary job was to explore the Jupiter and Saturn systems and it’s “mission” ended in 1980 when those tasks were completed it was directed outward again and tasked to study the interstellar medium with no specific target. Just see how long it would last.
As of today it has been operational, with zero mechanical support (obviously) for 34 years, 9 months, and 16 days.
Right now it is nearing the edge of the Heliopause. This is where the outward pressure of the solar wind starts to be overcome by the insterstellar wind created as the solar system travels through the galaxy. Think of that boundary like the waves on the bow of a boat.
It's out there on the left where the orange meets the light blue.
And it has enough fuel to send data until 2020.
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