Sunday September 15 Round-Up: Voyager 1 Has Left the Building

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the mainstream US media.  Today's subject is NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially leaving the solar system for interstellar space - the first man-made object to do so.  Sources include NASA, La Repubblica, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel.

 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech - Artist's conception of Voyager 1 entering interstellar space.

 

 

This is an historic moment.  Mankind, or at least one of man's creations, has officially reached interstellar space.  Recent data analysis shows that the event - Voyager 1 leaving the heliosphere, that region of space dominated by the sun, actually occurred about a year ago on August 25, 2012.  Launched in the late summer of 1977, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have traversed the solar system, adding immensely to our knowledge - especially of the outer planets.  They are our "Hello World!" to the universe, carrying gold LP's with information about humanity to the stars.

[NASA, Sep. 12, 2013]
Referring to the article published Thursday in the journal Science, NASA reports: "New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident." Interstellar space is dominated by the plasma, or ionized gas, that was ejected by the death of nearby giant stars millions of years ago.  The environment inside our solar bubble is dominated by the plasma exhausted by our sun, known as the solar wind.  Voyager project scientist Ed Stone notes: "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."  The joy in this accomplishment is evident in the words of NASA's John Grunsfeld: "Voyager has boldly gone where no probe has gone before, marking one of the most significant technological achievements in the annals of the history of science, and adding a new chapter in human scientific dreams and endeavors...Perhaps some future deep space explorers will catch up with Voyager, our first interstellar envoy, and reflect on how this intrepid spacecraft helped enable their journey.”

[Der Spiegel, Sept 12]
Before launching into a discussion of the challenges of the technical data analysis, our playful friends at Der Spiegel ask: "What do the rock and roll pioneer Chuck Berry, the exceptional pianist Glenn Gould and ...Austrian politician Kurt Waldheim [have] in common? They along with other people have been  immortalized on records and have been racing through space away from earth at approximately 60,000 kilometers per hour for 36 years on board two very special spacecraft....The so-called Golden Records aboard the "Voyager" twin probes are meant as messages to alien life forms - even if it would be unlikely that they will ever play."  Hmmm...somewhat pessimistic, aren't they?

[Le Monde, September 12]
Le Monde notes that although the expected life of the Voyager probes was originally estimated to be five years, the probes are still functioning and transmitting data to Earth. "The data collected by the probes make this the most successful scientific exploratory mission of the solar system in space history."  Voyagers 1 and 2 are really only at the start of what could turn out to be a very long journey.  "Scientists believe Voyager 1 and 2...will be in the vicinity of other stars and about two light years (one light year is equivalent to 9461 billion kilometers) from the Sun [in] forty thousand years... 'Nothing can stop the run of  the Voyager 1 spacecraft, it will continue its journey for a very long time, probably billions of years', predicts astrophysicist Marc Swisdal.

[La Repubblica, (TV), Sept 13]
Repubblica TV has a nice video presentation (in English) on the historic milestone, including the transmitted sounds of interstellar space.  They also note the assist given by the Sun with the data analysis that finally confirmed the event.  "The confirmation came through a 'help' just arrived from the Sun, responsible for a giant eruption in the direction of the area where the probe is traveling.  The vibrations of the plasma around Voyager, generated by the expulsion of solar particles..." were consistent with models of what would happen as the spacecraft entered interstellar space.


Voyager's "Pale Blue Dot"

[Photo is from the Cornell University website.]

Above is a re-oriented version of the famous image of "the pale blue dot" photographed in 1990 by Voyager 1 from beyond the orbit of Neptune, some 3.7 billion miles away.  The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of Carl Sagan. [Wikipedia]  Two years before he died, in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Sagan wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar', every 'supreme leader', every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

 

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