Its
official! Vaoyager 1 is now in interstellar space! The most distant object that
man has ever sent into space has finally crossed over into a region where the
sun no longer has any influence! Actually,
scientists believe that voyager 1 may have crossed this boundary some time last
year. Voyager was launched back in 1977 atop a Titan 3E Rocket as part of NASA’s
“grand tour”, an ambitious plan that would see the twin voyager probes visiting
the outer planets of the solar system. This venture would only be possible by
taking advantage of the alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto
in the late 1970s. Scientists jumped at the opportunity as this unique
alignment would not recur for another 175 years. Although Voyager 2 was
launched a week before Voyager 1, Voyager 1 was able to overtake her sister
craft and get to both Jupiter and Saturn sooner using a shorter trajectory.
Both Voyager 1 and 2 completed their prime missions studying
the outer gas giants in 1980 and have been darting towards the edge of the solar
system collecting a wealth of data ever since. Voyager 1 is currently traveling
at a speed of 38,120mph relative to the sun at a distance of 125 AU. Sounds
pretty fast huh? The thing is even at that speed it would still take voyager
thousands of years (73,775 years to be exact) to get to the nearest star Proxima
Centauri ! Voyager will continue to send back data until 2025 when all its
remaining instruments will be shut down.
Posted by Unknown
in 
0 comments:
Post a Comment