NASA’s Voyager 1 is about to do something no human-made object has ever done: reach a point one full light-day from Earth.
That means a radio signal traveling at the speed of light will need 24 hours just to cross the distance between Earth and the spacecraft. A command sent from mission control would take another full day to produce a reply.
The milestone arrives Wednesday, November 18, at 5:16:07 a.m. Eastern, when Voyager 1 will be 16.094 billion miles from home.
NASA is preparing a public mission update with the men and women who have kept the twin probes alive far beyond anything their original designers could have expected:
NASA Science reports that Voyager 1 will become the first object built by humanity to reach this distance. It and Voyager 2 are also the only spacecraft operating beyond the heliosphere, the immense protective bubble created by the sun’s particles and magnetic fields.
Voyager 1 has been traveling for more than 49 years. It launched in September 1977, swept past Jupiter and Saturn, and entered interstellar space in 2012.
The spacecraft is now so far away that the ordinary rhythm of mission control has become almost unimaginable: send a command, wait a day, and then wait another day to learn whether it worked.
The probe is still returning measurements from interstellar space, even as engineers carefully ration its dwindling electrical power.
NASA says the agency will mark the occasion with a worldwide event on Tuesday night. Participants are being invited to flash Voyager’s three-letter call sign, V-G-R, in Morse code using phones and flashlights, creating a symbolic wave of golden light around the planet.
The agency also gives the public a live way to explore the spacecraft’s extraordinary distance:
JPL will then host a public mission discussion Thursday with scientists, engineers, and mission leaders. The event will cover the condition of both Voyager spacecraft, the science they continue to collect beyond the heliosphere, and the increasingly difficult work of operating machines built nearly half a century ago.
The agency says JPL built and still operates the probes, while NASA’s Deep Space Network maintains the extraordinary communications link. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in 2018 after visiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune; Voyager 1 followed a faster route and became the first to cross the heliosphere.
Keeping a machine from the 1970s alive at the edge of interstellar space requires ingenuity that borders on the unbelievable.
The same official thread points readers to NASA’s cosmic odometers for both Voyager spacecraft:
The Associated Press reports that Voyager 1 continues moving at roughly 38,000 miles per hour while returning science and engineering data. The surviving instruments measure the magnetic field, surrounding pressure, dust, plasma waves, and galactic cosmic rays in a region no other operating spacecraft has reached.
Voyager 2, which followed a different route through the outer planets, is not expected to reach the same light-day threshold until 2035. The two probes carry matching Golden Records with greetings, music, sounds, images, and diagrams from Earth—time capsules built to represent humanity if either machine is ever found.
America launched Voyager 1 when Jimmy Carter was president, the first personal computers were just reaching consumers, and most of today’s digital world did not exist. Nearly half a century later, that same spacecraft is still working, still communicating, and still carrying Earth’s Golden Record into the dark.
The distance is humbling. It took Voyager 1 almost 50 years to travel as far as light travels in a single day.
A full light-year is 365 times farther.
Voyager 1 may be a tiny machine in an ocean of stars, but it carries an unmistakable message about American daring: build boldly, aim farther than anyone thinks possible, and never stop exploring.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
The post NASA’s Voyager 1 Is About To Cross A Frontier No Human-Made Object Has Ever Reached appeared first on 100PercentFedUp.com.
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