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Voyager 1 (artist depiction) |
Mankind is about the leave the solar system. Well, sort of
anyway.
Voyager 1, the space probe launched by NASA over 35 years ago, has
reached a point in space about 18.5 billion miles from the sun, give or take. NASA,
which still monitors and communicates with the probe,
announced earlier this week that Voyager 1 has entered a region of space called the “magnetic highway”
a boundary area where highly charged particles from deep space interact with
solar particles. This region is very close to what’s been termed the
heliopause, the very outside edge of the
heliosphere, which is (the
heliosphere) the bubble of space where the Sun’s solar wind dominates the
background particles that permeate space. The heliosphere is used by
cosmologists to demarcate our solar system from interstellar space.
1
One way to conceptualize the heliosphere is to think of it like the solar
system’s version of Earth’s atmosphere, which encompasses us and separates us from
space. The further from the Earth’s surface you get the thinner the atmosphere
becomes until eventually it stops and space dominates. Same concept with the
heliosphere
2,
the further from the Sun you get the less its radiation dominates space until
eventually its influence ceases altogether.
It may actually take Voyager 1 another year or two before it
technically reaches interstellar space, such is the vastness of space, but
still this is a good time to reflect on the spacecraft and just how far it’s
travelled.
The Flights of Voyager
1 and 2
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Jupiter with moon Io and Europa as photographed by Voyager 1 |
By a quirk of planetary orbital dynamics, in the late 1970s
and 1980s the outer planets were in a favorable alignment for a space probe to
observe each one at close range (they were all on the same side of the Sun).
The relative position of the planets would allow for each planet’s gravity to
be used to assist in redirecting the probe onto the next planet. This alignment was
realized in the late 1960s and astronomers knew that this favorable positioning wouldn’t occur again
for 175 years, so time was of the essence. Fortunately NASA, in the wake of the
concluded Apollo lunar missions, took advantage and developed two probes, Voyager
1 and its sister craft
Voyager 2, which would be sent on close-up flybys of
each planet. Each probe weighed 1,500 pounds and was instrumented to observe
the planets in just about any way NASA engineers could want. NASA launched both
probes in late summer 1977.
3 Initially, owing to post-Apollo budget
cuts the two spacecraft were only going to observe Jupiter and Saturn, and indeed
that’s all Voyager 1 did. It reached the Asteroid belt three months after
launch, and approached Jupiter in early 1979. At its closest approach it came nearer
the Jovian “surface” than the Moon is to Earth. Among other things, the Voyager
probes discovered that Jupiter had rings and that its moon Io was volcanically
active. Voyager 1 then headed on to Saturn. It flew by the planet in November
1980, just 77,000 miles above Saturn’s outer atmosphere. Voyager 1 not only
observed Saturn, but its moon Titan and the combined gravities of these two
bodies hurled the spacecraft (as planned) toward deep space. Its primary mission
was over.
I was born just before Voyager 1 reached Saturn; for all
intents and purposes, the probe has been racing out of the solar system for my
entire life.
4 More on this below.
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Neptune as seen by Voyager 2 |
After the success of Voyager 1, NASA decided to direct
Voyager 2 to Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2 traveled slower than Voyager 1 (it
reached Jupiter shortly after Voyager 1 and Saturn about eight months after)
reaching Uranus in late 1985 and finally Neptune in mid-1989. To call the
missions a success would be an understatement. Along with valuable scientific data
about all of the gas giants, they provided gorgeous photographs. These are just
the type of results that both advance science and fire our imaginations, exciting
us to further explore and learn about space.
Both probes have enough power to operate until at least 2025.
After that, barring a collision with some interstellar object, they will
continue on into oblivion. Both probes include a Golden Disk that presents
information about Earth and mankind (including audio recordings). The chances
may be infinitesimal, but maybe sometime, millions and millions of years from
now and many many light-years away, some other intelligent species will find
these markers of man.
The Lessons of
Voyager 1 for Deep Space Travel
I've always been interested in the stark contrast between the realities of space and the fantastic ways that space travel is portrayed in science fiction. The journey of Voyager 1 illustrates this discrepancy. Voyager 1 is one of the fastest moving manmade objects. It’s
currently travelling away from the sun at more than 38,000 miles per hour,
that’s over 10.7 miles every second. Even at that speed it still took it 32
years to travel from Saturn to the edge of the solar system
5, a distance of roughly
17.6 billion miles. The nearest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, 4.24
light-years distant. A light-year is equivalent to about 5.87 trillion miles
(light travels at about 186,000 mi/s). 4.24 light-years is a bit less than 25
trillion miles. Don't bother trying to conceptualize this distance, it's far greater than anything we humans can relate to. At the current speed of Voyager 1, it would take the probe more
than 75,000 years to reach that star (and to be clear, it’s not headed towards
Proxima Centauri). That’s more than 1,000 lifetimes.
6
I highlight these huge numbers to show you just how
inconceivable it is for man to travel to another star system. The Apollo
missions used the Saturn V rocket to accelerate the lunar spacecraft to about
25,000 miles per hour (Earth’s escape velocity). This is as fast as man has
ever travelled, and had the astronauts been headed to Proxima Centauri instead
of the Moon, it would have taken 114,000 years. In fact had Apollo 11 been on a
mission to the stars when launched in July 1969, it would be about 9.5 billion
miles from Earth by now, barely half way out of the solar system. Double,
triple, multiply by tenfold the speed of human spacecraft and the time to
approach the nearest stars don’t get any more reasonable.
I’ve
written before about the questionable purpose of human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit. But while I think this debate is largely
academic (at least in the present fiscal climate), destinations like the Moon,
maybe Mars, and perhaps thinking more fancifully, some distant moon of Jupiter or
Saturn are at least thinkable. The simple reality of human existence and
mortality demonstrate that no one will ever leave our solar system.
The overwhelming odds are that for thousands or even millions
of years (or much longer) the Voyager spacecraft (along with the
Pioneer and
other distant probes) will transit through interstellar space, a virtual
emptiness, passing nothing of note and experiencing nothing worth remembering.
That’s no trip for humans to take and no place for humans to be.
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NOTES:
1. It worth a quick discussion of what exactly
comprises the solar system: There’s the Sun at the center with all of the
planets, moons, dwarf planets, asteroids, comets, and miscellaneous other space
objects that orbit the Sun. Less familiar, and well beyond the orbit of Neptune
is the
Kuiper belt, which is like a much larger version of the Asteroid belt.
Beyond that is a less cohesive collection of objects called the
Scattered disc,
which is where most periodic comets are believed to originate. Beyond that are
the limits of the heliosphere, including the termination shock, heliosheath,
heliopause, “magnetic highway” and other boundaries that mark the progressive
decrease in the dominance of the Sun over surrounding space.
Beyond these traditional (and very distant) limits of the
solar system there other highly scattered objects like
Sedna (observed) and the
Oort Cloud (hypothesized) that do/may orbit the sun over very long orbital
periods.
2. This is a much simplified analogy. In reality
the heliosphere is more like a combination of our atmosphere and Earth’s
magnetic field, which is critical in deflecting solar radiation and is a
crucial boundary separating the Earth below from space beyond.
3. Voyager 2 was actually launched two weeks
before Voyager 1.
4. In 1990, Voyager 1 did take a long range
picture of all the planets together (excepting Mercury and Pluto, which was
still a planet then).
5. Voyager 1 picked up speed after it passed
Saturn (it stole some of Saturn gravitational energy), so it left Earth slower
than it’s travelling today.
6. Using the biblical three score and ten years
definition of a lifetime.