The Voyager space mission was a historic and ground breaking moment, as it launched two probes into space to explore the outer solar system.
The Voyager probes launched on September 5th 1977 and were sent to explore the outer solar system. Even though they are billions of kilometres away, the probes still send back and receive information and commands from the depths of outer space, giving some fairly important stats to the guys back at NASA.
Perhaps the most famous thing about the Voyager project is the capsule, which contains a golden record of the sounds and sights of our planet.
There’s whale noises, surf, wind, and greetings in over 50 languages from the people of Earth, in the hope that there is some life somewhere which finds it. There’s also Mozart and a selection of other music from our planet, both Eastern and Western. If you think about it, this is a pretty amazing form of an interstellar message in a bottle.
As the probe passed Pluto on Valentine’s Day in 1990, they were going to shut the cameras off to save energy, but Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, convinced them to get the probe to take one last picture of our home planet from so far away. This is our world from the edge of the planets, over six billion kilometres away; everything we have ever known is all in this ‘pale blue dot’ (circled here in blue in case you missed it), as Sagan put it.
Picture via NASA
Scientists are not exactly sure when, but the Voyager probe could one day leave our solar system, out beyond the reaches of the Sun’s solar wind, which blows at 400 to 800 km/s, keeping everything else out of our solar system.
As of this exact moment, Voyager 1 is estimated to be about about 18,495,262,971 km from Earth, which seems like it’s fairly far away to us. Soon it could leave our solar system and enter interstellar space.
As astronomy professor Merav Opher told Radiolab, Voyager “would be the first man made object to leave any star”, which is an incredible feat. It will pass into the complete unknown, perhaps finding that something truly is out there.
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