Multiple Choice: How long will it take Voyager 1 to travel one light year at its current speed?
A. 5,000 years
B. 18,000 years
C. 23,000 years
Take a guess and then check your answer by going to the “Astronomy Question Answer Sheet” page.
Last week, NASA announced its decision to turn off one of Voyager 2’s scientific instruments to save energy. The plasma science instrument is now silent. It was used to measure the amount of plasma, or electrically charged atoms, as well as the direction it is flowing. The same instrument on Voyager 1 stopped working in 1980.
It is just amazing that the two Voyagers continue on their voyage beyond our solar system while sharing the experience with us. As of a few minutes ago, Voyager 1 was about 15.4 billion miles away (Voyager 2 is a little closer) and it took about 22 hours and 54 minutes for light to travel from the Voyager 1 spacecraft to Earth.
You can go to this NASA site to learn more about the mission as well as the status of the various scientific instruments.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is communicating properly again after having issues since November 2023. NASA was able to fix the spacecraft that is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth, which is a pretty impressive feat.
Late last week, NASA noted:
The team partially resolved the issue in April when they prompted the spacecraft to begin returning engineering data, which includes information about the health and status of the spacecraft. On May 19, the mission team executed the second step of that repair process and beamed a command to the spacecraft to begin returning science data. Two of the four science instruments returned to their normal operating modes immediately. Two other instruments required some additional work, but now, all four are returning usable science data.
Launched back in 1977, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft explored the solar system before starting a journey to the great unknown. Both are now the only spacecraft outside the heliosphere.
You can read more about the Voyager spacecraft and mission here.
Here are some recent stories of interest.
—ScienceAlert: “NASA Has Finally Identified The Reason Behind Voyager 1’s Gibberish“
For months now, the most distant spacecraft to Earth – Voyager 1 – has been talking gibberish on the interplanetary ‘radio’. The repetitive jumble of 1s and 0s it’s sending back to our planet, 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away, has made no sense to scientists until now. Turns out, officials at NASA just needed to give the oh-so-distant craft a bit of a ‘poke’ to ask it how it was feeling. The system returned a software readout to Earth that scientists have now used to confirm about 3 percent of its memory is corrupted. Which is why turning the FDS on and off didn’t resolve the issue back in November of 2023.
—CBS News: “3 Companies Win NASA Contracts to Develop New Artemis Moon Rover Designs“
Along with funding the commercial development of new rockets, Artemis moon landers and new spacesuits, NASA is pressing ahead with plans to buy an unpressurized moon rover that can carry astronauts, science payloads — or both — across the rugged terrain of the lunar south pole, officials said Wednesday. The agency announced contract awards to three companies to develop competing designs for a Lunar Terrain Vehicle, or LTV, similar in concept to the rovers that carried the last three Apollo crews across the moon’s surface more than 50 years ago.
—NOIRLab: “Construction of Largest Digital Camera Ever Built for Astronomy Completed“
After two decades of work, scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and their collaborators are celebrating the completion of the LSST Camera. Once mounted on Vera C. Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope, the 3200-megapixel camera will help researchers observe our Universe in unprecedented detail. During its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, the LSST Camera will generate an enormous trove of data on the southern night sky that researchers will mine for new insights into dark energy, dark matter, the changing night sky, the Milky Way and our Solar System.
In past NASA missions to the outer planets of our solar system, we attached messages for any distant civilization that might be out there. Both the Pioneer and Voyager missions contained such messages.
So what about NASA’s Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter’s moon set to launch in October? It too will have some messages, but these appear to be for the inhabitants of the moon rather than some distant civilization.
A triangular 7″ x 11″ metal plate attached to the spacecraft destined for Europa will carry messages on both sides. The image above shows one of these sides containing features waveforms that are visual representations of the sound waves formed by the word “water” in 103 languages.
The other side of the plate (shown below) contains a variety of messages:
The spacecraft will also carry a silicon microchip containing more than 2.6 million names that were submitted by the public as part of NASA’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign.
This is all interesting in itself, but not really a message to others. I expect it is not intended for anyone else but ourselves because the Europa Clipper is not expected to leave the solar system but instead crash into another of Jupiter’s moons – Ganymede.
Note: You may wonder about the message on the New Horizons spacecraft that is also travelling to the edges of our solar system. That message is somewhat controversial. I will let you read about that one in this Slate article, “Ashes and Small Change.”
Our Awesome Universe 