Thursday, December 23, 2010

Voyager's way out there, man

Voyager 1 Spacecraft Arrives at the Cusp of Interstellar Space (Scientific American)

Thirty-three years into its voyage, the solar wind speed around Voyager 1 has dropped to zero as the space-hardened craft nears a milestone in its journey out of the solar system
. . .
Leaving the solar system, [chief scientist Edward Stone] says, will be "a milestone in human activity." Both Voyagers will likely outlive Earth, he notes. When, billions of years from now, the sun swells into a red giant, the Voyagers, albeit with their radioactive generators long exhausted and instruments frozen, will continue to wend their lonely ways through interstellar space and remain on course for the unknown, bearing a record disk and images of 20th-century Earth, music from many of its cultures, and greetings in dozens of its languages. They may be the only evidence the human race ever existed.
When they launched, they were "groovy"

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You know that gold on that spacecraft has gone up in value big time!

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...