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Monday 5 September was celebrated the 45th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1, one of the two iconic space probes of the homonymous NASA program (the sister probe, Voyager 2, had left a couple of weeks earlier). Now, in the darkness of interstellar space – more than 15 billion kilometers from home, a distance from which even the sun appears like any other bright star – the couple continues to work for science. The two probes carry the so-called Golden Records, discs that contain sounds and symbols of the Earth, designed for the eventuality that an extraterrestrial runs into one of the spacecraft and wants to know more about the distant planet from which they come.
“I have followed the path of Voyager throughout my career – says Linda Spilker, scientist of the Voyager project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Jpl) of NASA, who started working for the US space agency in 1977, the year of the launch of the probes -. I was surprised how long both probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, managed to keep going, providing us unique scientific data on new places that no spacecraft had ever visited before. And now they have become interstellar travelers. This is great!“.
The first mission
The two probes, which are the size of a car and are equipped with an antenna with a diameter of 3.7 at the top, had one main task: visit the gas giants of our solar system. Although the paths of the two Voyagers separated after launch, both probes took advantage of a rare planetary alignment, taking groundbreaking photos as they flew over Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and revealing intriguing details about the moons of these planets. At the end of 1989, the mission was completed. In 1990 Voyager 1 concluded the mission by taking a ‘moving image of our planet, that the astronomer and scientific popularizer Carl Sagan he renamed “Pale blue dot“, the pale blue dot.
“Look at that point again. It’s here. It is our home. We are. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve heard of, every human being who has ever lived has lived their own life.“wrote Sagan. The image of the Earth from a cosmic perspective – a simple “speck of dust suspended in a moonbeam“, to always use Sagan’s words – became almost as memorable as Earthrise (the dawn of the Earth), the photo taken by an Apollo 8 astronaut showing the planet seen from the Moon.
The new goal
The two probes, powered by nuclear-powered systems called radioisotope (RTG) thermoelectric generators, continued to fly. Even though our solar system has no defined boundary, spacecraft crossed the so-called in the 2000s termination shock, the region of the heliosphere where solar wind particles slow down sharply below the speed of sound due to gas pressure and magnetic fields in interstellar space. Then, in the 1910s, they passed theheliopausewhich marks the boundary between the solar wind and the interstellar wind.
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