The Voyager Spacecraft

The Voyager Spacecraft

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The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft continue exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. In the 30th year after their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the Sun than Pluto is and approaching the boundary region -- the heliopause -- where the Sun's dominance of the environment ends and interstellar space begins. Voyager 1, more than three times as distant as Pluto, is farther from Earth than any other human-made object and speeding outward at more than 17 kilometers per second (38,000 miles per hour). Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network (DSN).

The primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. After making a string of discoveries there -- such as active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and intricacies of Saturn's rings -- the mission was extended. Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets. The adventurers' current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will explore the outermost edge of the Sun's domain. And beyond.

This is the gold cover of the phonograph record placed on each of the voyagers. 

It has images that communicate (mathematically) where in space we are located 

and a little bit about the chemistry of our planet.

Here is a photo of the SOUNDS OF EARTH record next to its gold-plated cover.


Sounds of Earth

Music Pictures Languages All Sounds

NASA placed a … message aboard Voyager 1 and 2: a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played.

It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music.

Once the Voyager spacecraft leave the solar system (by 1990, both will be beyond the orbit of Pluto), they will find themselves in empty space. It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

Relative sizes in our solar system.

This helps to visualize how big planets are compared to one another & the sun.

Views of other planets if they were as close as the moon is to us.

Venus--Mars--Jupiter

Saturn--Uranus--Neptune

At the edge!

VOYAGER 1 READY FOR A RIDE ON THE MAGNETIC HIGHWAY

Launched on Sept. 5th, 1977, Voyager 1 has travelled a vast distance from our solar system. Although it was launched 16 days after Voyager 2, its higher speed has taken it much farther. Now at a distance of over 11 billion miles(18 billion km) from the sun V1 has been through different regions of the Sun's "solar bubble" or heliosphere.

Inside the internal region of the heliosphere, charged particles ejected from the Sun travel at over 1 million km/h. This internal region has a radius of about 10 billion km or 6.2 billion miles. In December of 2004, V1 passed a point in the heliosphere called the termination shock where most of the charged solar wind particles became very turbulent. This region was the boundary for the heliosphere's outer layer called the "heliosheath" where the charged solar particles reach a stationary state. On July 28, 2012 The Voyager craft entered the outer boundaries of the solar bubble.

This outer boundary, dubbed by scientists the "magnetic highway" is a region where the lines of our Sun's magnetic field connect with interstellar magnetic lines. This connection makes it possible for the low-energy particles from our sun to leave the heliosphere and highly charged particles to create a pathway into the solar bubble. This means that the Voyager 1 spacecraft is now on its last leg of travel before it reaches interstellar space. Scientists hope that the direction of these magnetic lines will indicate when V1 transitions from stellar to interstellar space.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Source: NASA

Comet Lovejoy -- as seen from space

The relative sizes of planets:

Click to View

Rotation Around Polaris

This time-lapse image shows how the night

sky appears to revolve around Polaris as the

Earth spins on its axis.  Polaris (aka the North Star)

is positioned directly abopve the Earth's geographic north

pole, so is centedered on Earth's axis.  It appears

as a stationary dot in the center of the rotating star field.

Kind of a bleak way of looking at it ...

Eclipse Amazingness

 

This is the "pinhole effect" that happens under a tree

during a solar eclipse.

See all of the little crescent suns?

Wow, look at these.

The moon's shadow darkens part of Earth during a solar eclipse. Only people underneath the center of that dark spot will see the total eclipse; others will see a partial eclipse. This shot was taken from the Mir space station in August 1999.

Photograph courtesy Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales

The moon's lunar highlands (light areas) and maria, or volcanic plains, (dark areas) are clearly visible in this photograph taken by the Expedition 10 crew onboard the International Space Station.

Photograph courtesy NASA

These pictures are from National Geographic Photography.

World's Largest Vacuum Chamber

World's Largest Vacuum Chamber

The Space Power Facility at NASA Glenn Research Center's Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, houses the world's largest vacuum chamber. It measures 100 feet in diameter and is a towering 122 feet tall. The facility is currently undergoing construction to support Orion crew exploration vehicle testing in 2010.

Making its first flights early in the next decade, Orion is part of the Constellation Program to send human explorers back to the moon, and then onward to Mars and other destinations in the solar system. Orion also will carry crew and cargo to the International Space Station.

For more information on the project, read World's Largest Vacuum Chamber Gets an Extreme Makeover.

Image Credit: NASA/Michelle Murphy (WYLE)

2 big satellites collide 500 miles over Siberia

AP Associated Press:

NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the crash, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday.

"We knew this was going to happen eventually," said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA believes any risk to the space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course. There also should be no danger to the space shuttle set to launch with seven astronauts on Feb. 22, officials said, but that will be re-evaluated in the coming days.

The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. The Russian satellite was out of control, Matney said.

The Iridium craft weighed 1,235 pounds, and the Russian craft nearly a ton.

No one has any idea yet how many pieces were generated or how big they might be.

"Right now, they're definitely counting dozens," Matney said. "I would suspect that they'll be counting hundreds when the counting is done."

As for pieces the size of micrometers, the count will likely be in the thousands, he added.

There have been four other cases in which space objects have collided accidentally in orbit, NASA said. But those were considered minor and involved parts of spent rockets or small satellites.

Nicholas Johnson, an orbital debris expert at the Houston space center, said the risk of damage from Tuesday's collision is greater for the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-observing satellites, which are in higher orbit and nearer the debris field.

At the beginning of this year there were roughly 17,000 pieces of manmade debris orbiting Earth, Johnson said. The items, at least 4 inches in size, are being tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, which is operated by the military. The network detected the two debris clouds created Tuesday.

Litter in orbit has increased in recent years, in part because of the deliberate breakups of old satellites. It's gotten so bad that orbital debris is now the biggest threat to a space shuttle in flight, surpassing the dangers of liftoff and return to Earth. NASA is in regular touch with the Space Surveillance Network, to keep the space station a safe distance from any encroaching objects, and shuttles, too, when they're flying.

"The collisions are going to be becoming more and more important in the coming decades," Matney said.