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What happens to 'Voyager 1'?: the old space probe has sent strange messages after years of silence

2022-05-24T12:53:42.867Z


After years and years of wandering through space, 'Voyager 1', a venerable space probe almost forgotten, has complained


The large antennas of the Deep Space Network (in California, Australia, and Madrid) periodically listen to the faint signals of the

Voyager 1

probe , which has been flying in space since 1977. Almost 45 years.

Typically, the data they receive is about plasma density, magnetic fields, and cosmic rays.

They are the only instruments on the ship that are still working, the others having been switched off long ago to save power;

furthermore, the region through which he moves now there is no longer anything that could be of interest for –for example- his television cameras.

But recently, telemetry indicated that the main antenna had drifted and was no longer pointing toward Earth.

And the signs kept coming.

Both things are incompatible and simply point to a failure in the sensors of the orientation mechanism: the ship is still in its correct alignment, but its messages insist that it is not.

The simplest explanation is that part of the data coding system has succumbed to the intense radiation it is experiencing.

Voyager 1

is the

spacecraft that has reached the furthest in space, to the point that it makes no sense to express its distance in kilometers.

They are tens of billions.

It is more practical to resort to units that are commonly used in astronomy: more than twenty light hours.

And it continues to increase, at a rate of about 60,000 kilometers every hour.

This probe was launched with the aim of closely studying the two giant planets: Jupiter and Saturn.

Despite its number, it took off fifteen days after its twin,

Voyager 2

, but by following a faster trajectory it would end up overtaking it and reaching its destination earlier.

The trip to Jupiter took almost two years;

to Saturn, the same, thanks to the acceleration it experienced when passing in front of Jupiter.

Voyagers

were not the

first to visit Jupiter and Saturn.

Two other vehicles in the Pioneer

series had done so before them

.

But its instrumentation, and especially its cameras, were very primitive.

The photographs of both planets and many of their satellites transmitted by

Voyager

discovered a series of worlds whose appearance no one had suspected before: the volcanoes of Io, the frozen plains of Europa, the impact of several asteroids or the intricate structure of the rings of Saturn, for example.

And, much later, the iconic family photo showing all the planets as tiny bright dots.

Among them, the "pale blue dot" with which Carl Sagan described the Earth.

Both

Voyagers

are on an escape path.

They will never come close to Earth again.

They have already crossed the border where the Sun's influence yields to interstellar fields and plasma concentrations.

But it cannot be said that they have completely freed themselves from their attraction.

Voyager 1

has not yet traveled half the distance to Sedna, one of the small dwarf planets, and it is two or three centuries away from reaching the Oort cloud, the theoretical spherical swarm where millions

of

comets that may one day fall towards the Sun.

NASA technicians calculate that the energy source that powers it – a plutonium reactor – will reach critical levels by 2025. Its emissions will be so weak that even large tracking antennas will not be able to pick them up.

From there, the Voyagers will continue on their way, blind and dumb.

Neither will pass reasonably close to another star, at least for tens of thousands of years.

By then, their trajectory will turn them into tiny objects spinning through the dust clouds of the Milky Way.

And attached to one side, both vehicles carry the equivalent of the classic message in a bottle, in the remotest hope that someone can one day rescue it: A metal disc on which images, noises, music and voices of the planet from where they have been recorded have been recorded. those first interstellar ships left, eons ago.

Rafael Clemente

is an industrial engineer and was the founder and first director of the Barcelona Science Museum (now CosmoCaixa).

He is the author of 'One Small Step for [a] Man' and 'The Other Apollos' (Dome Books).

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-05-24

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