Voyager 1 goes beyond Solar System!
Voyager 1
has gone where no spacecraft has gone before. It has left the solar system!
That’s the first time ever a spacecraft has gone that far.
There’s
nobody on board Voyager 1, of course, but it is sending back data,
although it takes us 17 years to get every message… no matter how old the
technology it was made with is (it dates back 37 years ago). Today a quite
basic smartphone stores more data than the Voyager... It is the size of a small
car.
Jupiter's Red Spot photography taken by the Voyager 1
In 1979, two
years after it was launched, it flew over Jupiter, taking pictures that amazed
the world. They were the first ones of the biggest planet in the Solar
System. Two years later it went by Saturn.
We have
almost lost the Voyager's signals. It is now so deep into the cosmos that we're
unable to receive them anymore.
The last
picture we received was in 1990. The Voyager turned around and
looked home. Earth was a tiny, blue dot almost no visible in the
sunlight...
Voyager is
still sailing away into the space. It will never come back. It will
continue along at a million miles a year (1.609.344 km a year). Voyager
1's next big moment? That should come in about 40,000 years! when it’s predicted to pass 3 trillion miles
from the next closest star (Alpha Centauri 1)
The batteries will long be dead, and Voyager will be
floating around in the vast universe. Anticipating
that, scientists placed a gold record on board carrying 115 pictures, music,
greetings, and sounds from Earth — like a message in a bottle!
