(The following article is an excerpt from an article titled "Voyager-1", originally submitted as an entry to Sky Watchers' Association's monthly magazine)
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| Credit: RSA Cosmos |
“The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgement to have safely travelled from star to star.”
- Carl Sagan
A brave band of explorers, as we are, our thirst for knowledge can hardly be quenched. We’ve made ourselves capable of exploring what lies beyond the horizon, time and again, fighting through all odds to get an idea about our place in the cosmos and on one fine day, we got to know a part of it. This is the story of Voyager-1, humanity’s tool for rediscovering themselves.
The Voyager program, an initiative taken up by the American space agency, NASA, to perform scientific studies of the mighty Jupiter and the beautiful Saturn. The program focussed on deploying two spacecrafts into the interstellar space, namely Voyager-1 and Voyager-2, each with an array of instruments to carry out ten different experiments. Apart from the instruments, the Voyager spacecrafts carry something special, something that has been carrying our presence, as a species, in the never-seen-before arena of space.
The astronomer and science-communicator, Dr. Carl Sagan and his committee gathered 115 images, various sounds, greetings in several languages and music, all of which were meticulously selected to be put in a record. It was gold-plated and instructions to use were etched on it before attaching ‘The Golden Record’ to each of the Voyagers. Even though Voyager-2 was launched prior to Voyager-1, the latter overtook the former on December 15, 1977, thereby carrying the sounds and pictures of Earth to a yet farther point in space with the hope that if any extraterrestrial being encounters the spacecraft, they will possibly know about our species.
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| Carl Sagan holding the Pioneer plaque whose copy was later included in the Voyager spacecrafts. (Credit: Pinterest) |
Voyager-1 continued its journey through the darkness of space till it reached Jupiter and scanned its moons in the early 1979, followed by a close observation of one of its most active moons, Io, who reportedly has atleast eight active volcanoes making it a violent land to be considered for expedition. Soon after, in late 1979, Voyager-1 came in proximity to Saturn, exploring its magnificent rings made of gas clouds and moons with Titan being the centre of attraction, but the best of Voyager-1’s task was yet to come.
Dr. Sagan stumbled upon an idea, a task rather, he discussed it with the other members of the committee and they all agreed to give it a try. The task was carried out on February 14, 1990 when commands were sent and Voyager-1’s camera turned backwards to capture sixty images of the solar system. Out of these sixty images, one had our Earth on it, but not in a way we would have imagined, Earth looked no big than just a pinpoint in the night sky. Dr. Sagan called it “A Pale Blue Dot”, a term that became famous in a short span of time.
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| Voyager-1 team, 1972. (Credit: Business Insider) |
Voyager-1 earned its title of the most distant man-made object in existence on February 17, 1998 by being at a distance of roughly 1010 km from the Sun overtaking the US space probe, Pioneer 10. On December 16, 2004, Voyager-1 entered the heliosheath and took roughly eight years to exit the heliosphere. Currently, four experiments are ongoing inside the spacecraft – the cosmic ray telescope, the low-energy charged particles experiment, the magnetometer and the plasma waves experiment.
To read the first part of the Voyager two-part series, click here: Voyager-2: 43 years and Counting
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