SOME HARD FACTS ABOUT VOYAGER 1: FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO, LIKE TIMUR, WANTED MORE ANSWERS after THE TALK BETWEEN Commander CHRIS HADFIELD AND TIMUR.
- Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, about two weeks before the Sept. 5 launch of Voyager 1. Why the reversal of order? The two were sent on different trajectories, and Voyager 1 was put on a path to reach its planetary targets, Jupiter and Saturn, ahead of Voyager 2.
- Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have 69.63 kilobytes of memory each. For comparison, an iPhone 5 with 16 gigabytes of memory has about 240,000 times the memory of a Voyager spacecraft.
- Both Voyagers communicate to Earth through NASA’s Deep Space Network. A signal from the ground, traveling at the speed of light, takes 17 hours one way to reach Voyager 1, and 14 hours one way to reach Voyager 2.
- Voyager’s Voice is Very Faint. Voyager communicates back to antennas on Earth with a 23-watt transmitter (or, more precisely, 22.4-watt on Voyager 1 and 23-watt on Voyager 2), which is about the equivalent of a refrigerator light bulb. By the time those signals get back to Earth, they are about one-tenth of a billion-billionth of a watt for Voyager 1 and two-tenths of a billion-billionth of a watt for Voyager 2.
- It took 35 years to reach interstellar space, but it will take 40,000 years for Voyager 1 to be closer to the star AC +79 3888 than our sun. Alpha Centauri is the closest star to our own right now, but because stars are moving, Voyager 1 will actually get within 1.7 light years of AC +79 3888 (aka Gliese 445) in 40,000 years.
- Voyager carries sounds from Earth on a golden phonograph record. A team led by the late astronomer Carl Sagan selected natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages and music from different cultures to serve as a message to any life form that might someday meet our spacecraft. The musical selections include Bach, Beethoven and Chuck Berry. Click on image to find out more –
- Voyager Showed Us How Small We Are The iconic “Pale Blue Dot” image taken by Voyager 1 is a part of the first-ever “portrait” of the solar system. From Voyager’s point of view in 1990, 4 billion miles away, our entire planet is a mere point of light measuring just 0.12 pixel in the original image.
- At 11.6 billion miles (18.7 billion kilometers) away from Earth (as of September 12, 2013), the Voyager 1 spacecraft is the most distant human-made object.
- Voyager will power down in about 5 to 10 years – it is too far from light to use photovoltaic cells for power so has a small Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators that provided approximately 470 w of 30 volt DC power at launch. Due to the natural radioactive decay of the Plutonium fuel source, the electrical energy is continually declining. At the beginning of 2008, the power generated by Voyager 1 had dropped to ~ 285 w. Starting around 2020, spacecraft engineers will turn off the fields and particles instruments one by one to conserve limited power, with the last instrument expected to go off around 2025.
- If Voyager breaks down – there is really nothing we can do and it is truly amazing that it has done what it has done with virtually no physical problems at all.
More facts about Voyager from JPL – http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/fact_sheets/voyager-fact-sheet-091213.pdf
Cool videos about Voyager –