The first craft to travel beyond the solar system reached space.
The probe launched on Sept. 5, 1977 and as of August 2022, it is more than 14 billion miles away from us. According to NASA, the space ship is speeding through space at a rate of 17 kilometers per second.
When the mission to explore the outer planets in our solar system was launched, nobody knew how important it would be.
The images of our solar system are amazing.
There are quick facts in the first voyager.
Size: Voyager 1's body is about the size of a subcompact car. The boom for its magnetometer instrument extends 42.7 feet (13 meters).
Weight (at launch): 1,797 pounds (815 kilograms).
Launch date: Sept. 5, 1977
Jupiter flies by on March 5, 1979.
The flyby of the moon was in 1980.
August 25, 2012 was the day that entered the universe.
Almost 35 years after it began, the spaceship entered space. When scientists had time to review the data from the first voyager, the discovery was made official.
It was the first to race by Jupiter and the second to race by the other planets. The images sent back by Voyager 1 have been used for a long time. The Golden Record is a record that is designed to bring voices and music from Earth into the universe.
There is enough fuel to keep the instruments running for at least a decade. The spaceship will be close to the sun by that time.
There is a special alignment of the outer planets that takes place once every 176 years. The most efficient use of their limited fuel is made possible by this alignment.
NASA had planned to send two probes past Jupiter and other planets. Budgetary reasons forced the agency to scale back its plans.
Both Voyager 1 and 2 flew past Jupiter and other planets.
The production of two Golden Records was given the go-ahead by NASA to be put on the spaceship. The sounds of whale calls and the music of Chuck Berry were placed on the ship.
The 12-inch-wide (30 centimeters) gold-plated copper disks were accompanied by pictures showing how to operate them and the position of the sun among nearby pulsars.
The heat from plutonium's decay is converted to electricity by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators. The probes had a number of scientific instruments, including a two-camera imager, multiple spectrometers, a magnetometer, and gear that can detect high-energy Cosmic rays. The total number of scientific investigations on each craft has been increased due to the use of the communications system.
It took 3.5 seconds for the rocket to run out of fuel at the start of the flight.
The probe made it to space and raced past its twin before the second one did. The first pictures of Jupiter were beamed back to Earth in 1978.
Were you aware?
Each voyager probe has about 3 million times less memory than a mobile phone and is 38,000 times slower than a internet connection.
In March 1979 a thin ring was spotted by the spaceship. Thebe and Metis were also discovered. Detailed pictures of Jupiter's big Galilean moons were sent back by Voyager 1
The look at Jupiter's moons revealed them to be active worlds of their own. Some interesting discoveries were made about the natural satellites. Like planets, Io's many volcanoes show that moons can have active interiors.
The photos sent back by Voyager 1 show a smooth surface broken up by lines and possibly an ocean underneath. It has been found that the ocean of liquid water may be able to support Earth-like life on the planet.
The closest approach to Jupiter was made on March 5, 1979. It was time for the probe to move on to the next destination.
It took scientists about a year to get a close-up picture of the planet. The planet was full of surprises like Jupiter.
The F ring was discovered by NASA's Pioneer 11 probe. The icy material in the F ring can be seen by the higher-resolution camera. It discovered a new ring and took pictures of other moons.
The second largest moon in the solar system is called Titan. Years of speculation about what it was like underneath was caused by the close-up pictures of Titan. It wouldn't be until the mid-2000s that we would find out, thanks to photos snapped from beneath the haze by the European Space Agency.
The end of the primary mission was marked by the encounter with the moon. The 1,590-pound craft was tracked as it sped toward the stars.
The most famous photo in spaceflight history was taken two decades before the milestone. The probe snapped a picture of its home planet from over six billion miles away. Earth is shown as a tiny dot in the sun.
The solar system was captured in a multi- image "solar system family portrait." The Pale Blue Dot picture reminds us that we are in an incomprehensibly large universe.
In August of 2012 the giant bubble of charged particles that the sun blows around itself broke free from the heliosphere and flew into the stars. A study about the discovery was published in the journal Science.
The results came to light after a solar eruption was recorded. The electrons vibrated when the eruption took place. Researchers found that the surroundings of Voyager 1 had a higher density than what was found in the heliosphere.
It seems odd that the electron density in the sun's neighborhood is higher than it is in the other side of the planet. Researchers said that the electron density is low at the edge of the heliosphere.
The official departure date was nailed down after researchers backtracked through the data. The date was fixed by the observations of the charged solar particles.
The probe saw a 1,000-fold drop in these particles and a 9% increase in Cosmic rays that come from outside the solar system on that day. At that point, the distance from the sun to the Earth was about 18 billion km.
The Earth- sun distance is about 93 million miles.
On the NASA website, you can keep an eye on the status of the mission.
A variety of valuable information about conditions in this zone of the universe has been sent back by the spaceship. Ed Stone, a project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told Space.com in September 2017: "Showing how charged particles from the sun interact with those emitted by other stars is one of the discoveries we've made."
Engineers continue to be amazed by the capabilities of the spaceship. In December of last year, NASA announced that it had successfully used its backup thrusters to orient itself. The trajectory correction maneuver hadn't been used in over 30 years. Since then, the spaceship has mostly used its attitude-control thrusters to communicate with Earth.
NASA decided to test the TCM thrusters as the performance of the attitude-control thrusters began to degrade. The test was a success.
"We will be able to extend the life of the spaceship by two to three years because the thrusters are still functional after 37 years," Dodd said.
Other measures have been taken by the mission team. The cameras on the spaceship were turned off after the Pale Blue Dot photo was taken. In the dark, the cameras wouldn't pick up much. The Cosmic Ray Subsystem, the Low-Energy Charged Particles instrument, and the Magnetometer are some of the scientific instruments that have been turned off by the mission team. The measures have been taken with the other instruments.
Forty five years in space is a monumental milestone for the twin probes.
"Over the last 45 years, the Voyager missions have been an important part of providing this knowledge and have helped change our understanding of the sun and its influence in ways no other craft can," says Fox.
Linda Spilker, the deputy project scientist at JPL, said in a NASA statement that "today, as both Voyagers explore interstellar space, they are providing humanity with observations of unexplored territory."
This is the first time we've been able to directly study how a star, our Sun, interacts with the particles and magnetic fields outside our heliosphere, helping scientists understand the local neighborhood between the stars. The Spilker is still going.
In 40,000 years, the probe will come within 1.7 light-years of the star AC. The star is approximately 17 light-years away. The falling power supply is likely to stop the collection of scientific data around 25 years from now.
You can find a lot of information about the design, scientific instruments and mission goals of the Voyagers at JPL's website. There is a lot of information about the Pale Blue Dot photo in NASA's website. The Golden Record can be found in this detailed New Yorker piece by Timothy Ferris.
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