Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977. For the past 46 years it has been traveling through space at over 38, 000 miles per hour. This spacecraft checks in at just under 1800 pounds (or about half the weight of a Volkswagen bug) has now traveled around 15 billion miles away from Earth.
Voyager 1 launches
For the most part, Voyager 1 still appears to be working correctly. It is still gathering and returning data. It's receiving and executing commands from Earth, although – because of its great distance from us – it takes around two days to send a message and get a response. This, however, is still faster than I return my emails!
Poor Voyager 1...all alone out there!
Voyager 1 has accomplished many things. This includes discovering a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons: Thebe and Metis. Voyager 1 also found five new moons and a new ring called the G-ring as it flew by Saturn. On Valentine's day in 1990, Voyager 1 sent us one last image before the cameras were turned off. This has become known as the "Pale Blue Dot".
Voyager 1 is now in interstellar space. It has left our solar system and is widely believed to be reaching the limits of being able to report data to Earth. The computers aboard Voyager 1 each have 69.63 kilobytes of memory, total. That's about enough to store one average internet jpeg file. Remember your Commodore 64? That is about the amount of memory each computer on Voyager 1 has!
I only had a vic 20!
Soon we will say goodbye to Voyager 1 for good. Either distance or a decaying power supply will eventually mean the end of communication with our deep space friend. I wonder, did Voyager ever look back at Earth one last time and wish to return to that pale blue dot?
Voyager has gone a long way in 46 years.
ReplyDeleteBut it will take another 18,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to earth.