There are few things in life that truly justify the word “extraordinary”. The Voyager space craft though are most certainly among them.
Voyagers 1 and 2 are small, now rather primitive space probes that, at their launch way back in 1977, weighed in at just over 800kgs each. Built with early 1970s technology and nuclear powered, they were designed to visit Jupiter and Saturn and then, just perhaps, go a bit further depending upon how long their plutonium lasted. No doubt ambitious at the time, their journeys have now become quite the most extraordinary odysseys whose scale and duration are moving beyond our ability to comprehend in terms of time and distance.
For instance, when Voyager 2 reached Uranus in 1986, NASA estimated it was about 120 miles of its pre-planned course. At the time scientist Carl Sagan compared this to the equivalent of throwing a pin through the eye of a needle that was 50 km away. But for Voyagers 1 and 2 such statistical miracles are now common place.
But amidst the near statistical impossibilities, there is poignancy too. The last picture ever taken by Voyager 1 was to look back over its shoulder for one final glimpse of our solar system though which it had travelled so far. Even then, the picture showed our sun as just another star in Voyager’s sky, so far had our intrepid explorer travelled from home. That was 22 years ago. Voyager’s camera has been still ever since. Yet, its other tiny measurement systems, ancient by today’s technological standards, continue to send almost impossibly faint signals home, whispered data steams arcing back over tens of billions of miles, telling a story of a journey into the true unknown. However, scientists reckon that by 2025 the last of its instruments will fall into silence and Voyager will be, finally and utterly, alone as its last link with earth is lost.
Already though, for the Voyagers the outer planets of our solar system are long distant memories. Voyager 1 is now passing out of our solar system. Last month (October 2012) evidence emerged to show that Voyager 1 was entering deep, interstellar space, the first human made object ever to do so. In cosmological terms, I guess you could consider it to be leaving the local neighbourhood.
As it does so, Voyager 1 is now on the verge of entering what is known as the Oort cloud, a vast area of space debris and comets, ever so loosely kept in orbit by the sun’s faint and fading gravity. Passing through the cloud, which hopefully it will do without incident, may take it up to 28 000 years. In terms of the journey that awaits Voyager 1 however, this will be no more than the blinking of an eye. Thereafter, it will continue into the nothingness that is interstellar space, a tiny mote of ancient technology moving in a near infinite gulf of emptiness.
For Voyager though time will have for all intents and purposes stopped. Perhaps, long after our sun has exploded and consumed earth and all trace of life here have vanished forever, Voyager will still be on its eternal passage across the void and into infinity. It is destined to be a lone ambassador carrying with it the simple story of our race, with its gold record of earth recordings from the sound of whales whistling to greeting in a number of earth languages through to Chuck Berry rockin’ out to Johnny B Goode.
Yet amidst the marvels of Voyager 1, there is room for a little retrospective irony too. Aboard there are printed messages dated 1977 from the US President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. Should space faring aliens ever encounter Voyager, little would they know these noble missives penned on behalf of planet earth and the human race are being conveyed from possibly the feeblest ever leader of a distant planet’s super power, and the other from a man subsequently outed as a former Nazi?
Yet the chances that alien eyes and ears will ever experience our long lost messages, is a near impossibly small probability. Moving at 37 500 miles an hour, its unlikely Voyager will ever be disturbed again; an infinitesimally small frozen dot of wires and metal on an extraordinary, never ending journey to the stars.
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