This is a story unlike any other. This is not the travel story of a human, but rather that of a robot. A robot built by humans.
This is the story of the Voyager spacecrafts and their interplanetary journey across the solar system and beyond.
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The Voyager 1 and the Voyager 2 are spacecrafts built by NASA's jet propulsion lab in Southern California and launched in 1977. Since their launch both voyager 1 and 2 have explored all the outer planets of the solar system before leaving it recently and entering interstellar space. These spacecrafts are the farthest outposts of human civilization.
The payload of the Voyager spacecrafts consists of 10 instruments. Gathered science data are returned to earth in real time at 160 bps. After transmission of the data it is processed and made available in electronic files to the science teams located around the world for their processing and analysis. Powered by a tiny plutonium reactor on-board which is down to about a half from when they were launched, the Voyager spacecrafts could continue to have enough power to transmit until the early to mid-2020s if they go into the mode of shutting down some of the more power-hungry systems.
The mission objective of the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) is to extend the NASA exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence, and possibly beyond. Both probes were the first to visit the solar system’s gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, and when Voyager 2 flew by the other outer planets Uranus and Neptune they changed our understanding of those worlds profoundly.
The Voyagers discovered many moons around the planets which were not known to us. The ones we knew were just points of light in telescopes. These points of lights were changed to geologic objects, to worlds that had weather and volcanoes and tectonics.
Just as Voyager 1 was about move away from Saturn and into interstellar space, NASA ordered the probe to turn back and take one last picture of the solar system. This picture would become one of the most famous pictures in the history of humanity. 'The Pale Blue Dot' is a picture of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990 from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers.
On board of these space probes, NASA placed a rather more ambitious message. The Voyagers carry “golden records” packed with recordings of sounds, songs and pictures to communicate a sense of life on Earth to any extraterrestrials that might encounter them. Carl Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages.
Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. NASA recently released their golden record version on soundcloud accessible for general public.
As Carl Sagan has noted, “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”
Solar system and beyond in the absence of sun or wind or anything that’s going to wear the Voyagers down they could easily outlast us—our entire civilization, outlast our planet. The Earth will eventually be swallowed by the sun and the Voyagers could still be out there. That’s what’s so exciting about having the golden records on them. Eventually when that day comes where the human species seize to exist, a reminiscent left by us would still be out there, out in the great enveloping cosmic darkness.
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