Launched in Sept. 1977, The Voyager space craft has traveled to date, March 7 2011, a distance of 10,816,616,569 miles.
Traveling at 10.5 miles/second. 17km/s. 38.185 mph. This heavy 1,592 lb. little robotic space probe is not only very far away but traveling at a mind boggling clip toward the constellation Ophiuchus reaching one of its stars in approximately 40,000 years. Voyager was launched by NASA/JPL for the purpose of studying Jupiter Saturn and the outer solar system. As Voyager leaves the solar system and enters interstellar space it is encountering an area known as the heliosphere. Scientists at the ‘Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’ believe that Voyager had entered the termination shock area beyond the solar system in Feb. 2003. There are many unknowns about this area of space, but NASA is monitoring the probe on a daily basis.
On March 2006 the first known tracking of Voyager was done by amateur radio operators from AMSAT who used a 66ft dish to track and listen to signals from voyager, The data they collected was checked and verified by the Deep Space Network Station in Madrid, Spain. Patience is a must with Voyager as a signal traveling at the speed of light takes 16.13 hours to travel from the probe to earth.
Voyager may be most known for Dr. Carl Sagan’s ’Gold Record’ a visual /audio recording plated in gold and containing sounds and sights of earth. With a recording of President Jimmy Carter, greetings in 55 languages, pictures of everyday life, DNA, images of plants, insects, and music. As many believe it to be a recording for extraterrestrials, Dr. Carl Sagan stated, “The launching of this bottle into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet, Thus, the record is best seen as a time capsule or a symbolic statement rather than a serious attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life”
Godspeed Voyager, Wesley J Hunt
Visit the blog of Wesley J Hunt: http://wesleyjhunt.blogspot.com/
Crossroads Astronomy Club meets every third Monday at the University of Houston at Victoria, room 223 at 7:00 p.m. Call 361-648-0089 for more information.
