Where no man-made object has gone before. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
This month marks four decades since NASA's two pioneering spacecraft headed off to visit the gas giants.
Launched in 1977, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled further from the Earth than any other man-made object in history and remain fully operational despite 40 years of traveling through space.
Their original mission to visit the four gas giants was made possible by a rare planetary configuration that happens only once every 175 years - an opportunity that NASA couldn't afford to miss.
In addition to revealing these enormous worlds in more detail than anyone had ever seen before, the two probes returned a wealth of data, not just about the planets, but also about their moons.
"I believe that few missions can ever match the achievements of the Voyager spacecraft during their four decades of exploration," said Thomas Zurbuchen of NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
"They have educated us to the unknown wonders of the universe and truly inspired humanity to continue to explore our solar system and beyond."
The chance that they'll ever be seen by some other alien race out there is slim to none. The chance that they'll be seen by a future human generation that seeks them out to put them in a museum is probably a million times higher. The chance that the human race will survive long enough to see the latter is sadly, very slim. LOL...perspective...
no.. all we receive from them is basically status updates.. like 'I'm still here and working'.. the power output is so low that a burning match releases more energy then the signal from them.
Actually they are still transmitting some data for a few instruments and the research teams are gathering data on the interstellar medium from Voyager 1. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/mission/status/
It has left the solar system and entered interstellar space as defined by the heliopause. This is the point at which the influence of the sun in terms of emitted particles (the heliosphere) is equal to particles arriving fro interstellar space. Beyond the heliopause the influence of the interstellar medium is greater than that of the sun... interstellar space. This occurred for Voyager one when it was about 121 astronomical units (au) from the sun. However things aren't that simple, There is more than one way to define the edge of the solar system. The sun's gravitational influence extends far... [More]
Yes and as recently as 70,000 thousand years ago, another star passed through the Oort cloud. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150217114121.htm
It was very fun to see data about solar winds interaction with interstellar winds ( when news were released ). Just amazing for such an old probe and it's expected to send data back to the Earth till 2025. Fingers crossed.
Most of the instruments have not failed, they have been switched off because they are of no further use (for example why keep the cameras powered up when there is nothing for them to see?) Several instruments are still left running since they return useful information about the interstellar medium. The weakness in the signal received on Earth, that DingoLingo referred to, is partly due to the reduction in power output of the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) but mostly due to distance. Signal strength diminishes with distance according to an inverse square law. If you double the ... [More]
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