A Voyage Like No Other

[Guard Dog]

Excerpt:

 

The spacecraft is close to leaving the Solar System and into the uncharted territory of the Milky Way after more than three decades in space.

 

Voyager 1 was launched with its twin, Voyager 2, by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) in 1977.

 

Voyager 1 is travelling at just under 11 miles per second and sending information from nearly 11 billion miles away from the sun.

 

It is about to become the first man-made object to leave the Solar System, although Nasa expects it to take between several months and years before it completely enters interstellar space. Voyager 2 will follow later.

 

Ed Stone, the Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said: "Voyager tells us now that we're in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system. Voyager is showing that what is outside is pushing back.

 

Read the article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8...-Milky-Way.html

 

Voyager might actually be second probe to exit the solar system. Pioneer 10 may have done so by now but communication with it was lost in 2006. I remember clearly as a kid when the images transmitted back of Jupiter and Saturn by Voyager 1 & 2 were all over the nightly news. I was enthralled. It's simply amazing that not only do they still work but are expected to continue sending data back until their fuel is spent sometime around 2020. By that time Voyager 1 will have traveled some 12 billion miles from the sun. And in 76000 or so years it may well be captured by the star Proxima Centauri. It would be cool if the human race has already been there and someone is there to greet it. Don't you think?

[Gorth]

Some of us still remember Skylab

[Calax]

... wouldn't it be a tragedy if the Voyager probes were caught in the Oort cloud and demolished?

[Humodour]

As dense as the Oort cloud is, I think it's still pretty ****ing sparse, like an electron cloud. The chances of an object the size of Voyager hitting debris are slim.

[Guard Dog]

Jet Propulsion Labs (the company that runs most of the unmanned projects) has an excellent web site for Voyager 1 & 2.

 

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

[Walsingham]

And in 76000 or so years it may well be captured by the star Proxima Centauri. It would be cool if the human race has already been there and someone is there to greet it. Don't you think?

 

Agreed.

 

EDIT: Someone should seize all the money gathered by those bloody TV ads for snow leopards and put it into space exploration.

Edited December 10, 2011 by Walsingham