TWhen Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, scientists hoped the craft would be able to do what it was built to do: take close-up images of Jupiter and Saturn. You succeeded, and so much more.
Voyager 1 discovered active volcanoes, moons and planetary rings, proving along the way that Earth and all of humanity could be compressed into a single pixel in a photograph, or “pale blue spot,” as astronomer Carl Sagan called it. The mission has been extended from the original four years to the present day. It was the longest space flight ever.
For now, Voyager may have finally said goodbye to that remote spot.
Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object in space, has not sent coherent data back to Earth since November. NASA has since been trying to diagnose what the mission's project manager, Susan Dodd, called “the most serious problem” the robotic probe has encountered since it entered service in 2010. For now, it has only emerged that the spacecraft experienced a malfunction in one of its computers, Which means it can no longer send technical and scientific data to Earth.
Scientific achievements
The loss of Voyager 1 would end decades of scientific achievements. It also marks the beginning of the end for a mission that shaped humanity's farthest ambition and inspired generations to look to the heavens. “It's a huge loss scientifically,” Dodd says. “I think – emotionally – it might be a bigger loss.”
Voyager 1 is half of the Voyager mission. The spacecraft has a twin, Voyager 2. Launched in 1977, it was designed primarily for a four-year journey to Jupiter and Saturn, expanding on the previous journeys of the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes. The Voyager mission took advantage of the rare conjunction between exoplanets that occurs once every 175 years, allowing probes to visit all four planets.
NASA said that using each planet's gravity, the Voyager spacecraft was able to veer toward the next planet each time.
The mission to Jupiter and Saturn was a success: flybys in the 1980s yielded many new discoveries, including new insights into Jupiter's so-called Great Red Spot, the rings around Saturn and many of each planet's moons.
Voyager 2 also explored Uranus and Neptune, becoming the only spacecraft to explore all four exoplanets in 1989. Meanwhile, Voyager 1 had charted its course for the universe and photographed the planets it left behind along the way with its camera. Voyager 2 will later embark on its own journey into deep space.
“Anyone interested in space is interested in the things that Voyager discovered about exoplanets and their moons,” said Kate Howells, a public information specialist at the Planetary Society, an organization co-founded by Carl Sagan to promote space exploration. “But ‘Pale Blue Dot’ I think is one of those things that was somehow more poetic and poignant.”
On Valentine's Day 1990, Voyager 1, which had flown 5.95 billion kilometers from the sun to the outer reaches of the solar system, turned around and captured an image of Earth that Sagan and others considered a humbling self-portrait of humanity. “The image is known around the world and connects humanity to the stars,” Dodd says of the mission. “I've had a lot of people come up to me and say, ‘Wow, I love Voyager.’ It got me excited about space. It got me thinking about our place here on Earth and what that means.”
tattoo
Kate Howells, 35, counts herself among those people. About 10 years ago, to celebrate the start of her space career, she spent her first Planetary Society paycheck on a Voyager tattoo. She says that although spaceships “all look the same,” more people are identifying with tattoos than she expected. “I think this shows how popular Voyager is.” Travelers left their mark on popular culture with highly intelligent vehicle 'Voyager 6' Star Trek: The Motion Picture And references The X-Files And West wing.
Even as more advanced probes were launched from Earth, Voyager 1 continued to reliably enrich our understanding of space. In 2012, Voyager became the first man-made object to leave the heliosphere, the space surrounding the solar system that is directly affected by the sun. There is a technical debate among scientists about whether Voyager 1 actually left the solar system, but the vehicle nonetheless became interstellar: it crossed interstellar space.
This charted a new course for heliophysics, which studies how the Sun affects the space around it. In 2018, Voyager 2 followed its interstellar twin. Before Voyager 1, scientific data about the Sun's gases and materials came only from within the confines of the heliosphere, according to Dr. Jimmy Rankin, Voyager's deputy project scientist.
“For the first time we can connect the inside-out view and the outside-in view, and that's a big part of it,” Rankin says. “But the other half is simply that a lot of this material can't be measured in any other way than sending a spacecraft back.”
Voyager 1 and 2 are the only spacecraft that can do this. Before going offline, Voyager 1 studied anomalous magnetic field disturbances and plasma particles in interstellar space. “There's nothing else being launched to go there,” Dodd said. “That's why we're spending so much time and so much care trying to recover this spaceship — because science is so valuable.”
Hood
But recovery means crawling under the cover of an ancient spaceship more than 15 billion miles away, equipped with yesterday's technology. It takes 45 hours to exchange information with the spaceship. Nowadays, a smartphone has hundreds of thousands of times more memory than Voyager 1, and a radio transmitter consumes as many watts as a light bulb in a refrigerator. “It's like trying to figure out where the cursor is on a laptop screen when the laptop screen isn't working,” says Dodd.
And her team still has hope, especially with the 50th anniversary of the launch approaching in 2027. Voyager 1 has survived failures before, but none this serious. Voyager 2 is still up and running, but it's also getting old. He also had his own technical problems. NASA had already calculated that the nuclear-powered generators on both spacecraft would likely die around 2025.
But even though Voyager's interstellar mission is coming to an end, the journey still has a long way to go. Voyager 1 and its twin, each 40,000 years away from the nearest star, will arguably remain on mission indefinitely. “If, at some point in the distant future, Voyager encounters beings from another civilization in space, it will carry a message,” Sagan said in an interview in 1980. Each spacecraft carries a gold-plated gramophone record with a series of audio recordings and photographs. Which represents the richness of humanity, its diverse cultures, and life on Earth.
“A gift across the cosmic ocean from one island of civilization to another.”
© The New York Times
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