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Voyager Set To Enter Interstellar Space
Phoghat writes "More than 30 years after they were launched, NASA's two Voyager probes have traveled to the edge of the solar system and are on the doorstep of interstellar space. Today, April 28, 2011, NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished — and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of the Milky Way itself."
Congratulations to the engineers working on the original project all those years ago. I couldn't fathom designing something like this with the toolset they had 30+ years ago. Props to them for creating a set of probes that are still relevant 30 years after their launch.
I bet Voyagers won't fly forever. When space travel become cheap and safe enough, they will be seen as collectible items, and will be recovered. The two golden records will probably become the most expensive records money can buy.
Radio Lab has a great episode interviewing Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, regarding her part in developing the sound recordings for the voyager mission. She beautifully captures the art and love inherent in such an awesome act of science and exploration. If you have a free few minutes, you won't be sorry you listened.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
You're probably thinking of the Oort Cloud.
From the wikipedia
In August 2009, Voyager 1 was over 16.5 terameters (16.5×1012 meters, or 16.5×109 km, 110.7 AU, or 10.2 billion miles) from the Sun, and thus had entered the heliosheath region between solar wind's termination shock and the heliopause (the limit of the solar wind). Beyond heliopause is the bow shock of the interstellar medium, beyond which is interstellar space, a vast area where the Sun's influence gives way to that of the Milky Way galaxy in general. At this distance, light from the Sun takes over 16 hours to reach the probe.
The Kuiper belt extends from 30 AU to 55 AU.
The Voyager probes are approximately three months younger than me. All my life, I have followed the magical images and data these probes have been sending back to earth. In fact, it was the first images of saturn and jupiter that inspired me to be a scientist. It wasn't the pharma industry in which I work now. It wasn't the lure (lie?) of riches received for making the next big discovery. It was those probes, hurling through space sending back the most fascinating shit my young mind had ever witnessed. I spent almost my entire youth with my head buried in encyclopedias and books about astronomy, all made possible by Voyager 1 and 2. In the end I chose a different science path, but who knows...I could have ended up being a financial analyst (**shudders**)
It's not aimed at any other solar system, and the times involved are such that we can't predict what's going to happen very well.
In places like Wikipedia you will read things like
"in about 40,000 years [Voyager 1] will pass within 1.6 light years of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Camelopardalis."
but this is highly misleading. 1.6 light years is almost 1000 times further away from that star than either Voyager is from the Sun right now, so it won't in any sense be "in" that stellar system.
Worse, stars travel (relative to each other) at ~ 0.001 c, so even in 40,000 years all the nearby stars will move around by 10's of light years. We can estimate stellar velocities reasonably well, but their accelerations are very poorly measured, and so, after a few million years at most, we really don't know which star will go where.
The bottom line is, it will be millions of years before any of these spacecraft get as close to another star as they are now, and we have no idea which star that will be... ... unless, of course, our descendants pick them up and put them in a museum somewhere, which is what I would predict.