Voyager 1: Boldly Going Where None Has Gone
The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977 to study the outer planets of our solar system. It sent back some of the iconic photographs of Jupiter and other outer planets that were the best views ever seen and certainly much better than any of the views astronomers were able to get with Earth-based telescopes. However, the mission of the spacecraft turned out to be more than just looking at planets.
In August of 2012, Voyager 1 became the first man-made object to leave our solar system. It has escaped the gas bubble from the sun and is moving in the space between stars. It is in territory that has never been explored.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is traveling at about 38,000 miles per hour and has a very small amount of computer memory as part of its equipment. As a comparison, an average smartphone has 270,000 times more memory than Voyager 1, and the spacecraft doesn’t have a processor like anything we have today. When Voyager 1 sends messages to the earth, they take about 17 hours to reach us traveling at the speed of light. Voyager 1 is currently more than 18 billion kilometers away from the earth.
There is enough power on Voyager 1 to power the craft and send measurements from its science instruments until 2020. At that point, some instruments will be shut down over the years until 2025. It is possible that information from the craft could still be received as far out as 2036. It is no wonder that Voyager 1 has been hailed as “the little spacecraft that could”.
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