VOYAGER 1 & 2

[auntym]

www.space.com/38049-william-shatner-beams-message-to-voyager.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social#?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=2016twitterdlvrit

William Shatner Beams a Message to NASA Voyager Probes for 40th Anniversary

By Sarah Lewin, Space.com Associate Editor
September 5, 2017





In honor of NASA's Voyager 1 probe's 40th anniversary today (Aug. 5), William Shatner helped send a special message to the distant spacecraft, selected by popular vote.

During a news conference on the mission from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., the action switched for a moment to NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California, where Shatner joined the JPL staff to send the one message, out of 30,000 submitted, chosen by popular vote to transmit to the Voyager spacecraft more than 13 billion miles from Earth.

Shatner, famous for playing Captain Kirk in the original "Star Trek" series and movies, opened the envelope to read the message, which was originally submitted on Twitter by Oliver Jenkins: "We offer friendship across the stars. You are not alone." While the message will not be stored in the same way as the probes' famous Golden Record, it will be beamed toward the spacecraft along with its normal instructions and communications.[The Golden Record in Pictures: Voyager's Message to Space Explained]

Shatner then directed JPL engineer Annabel Kennedy to send the message.

"Are the hailing frequencies opened?" Shatner asked.

"They are ready and set to go," Kennedy replied.

Over the course of 28 seconds, the message — no more than 60 characters — was emitted from Deep Space Network antenna DSS63 just outside of Madrid, whose dish stretches three-quarters of the length of a football field. The message will reach the spacecraft after about 19 hours.

Since their launches in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 have transmitted astounding views of the solar system back to Earth, giving researchers the first close-up looks of Jupiter and Saturn's planetary systems, plus Uranus and Neptune.

"Four decades ago, in 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 1 spacecraft, only a little over eight years after the blast-off to Apollo 11 in 1969," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's deputy administrator, said from the Smithsonian during the news conference. "In exploration terms, Voyager was and still is, to me and to so many, the Apollo 11 of space science. It's a mission that changed everything.

"It not only changed what we know, but how we think," Zurbuchen added. "It's about exploration of the unknown, and redefining what we can and cannot do as humans."

"From many points of view, Voyager really represents humanity's most ambitious journey of discovery," Voyager principal investigator Ed Stone added. "Voyager began when Gary Flandro discovered that there was a [window] near 1997, plus or minus a year, where a single spacecraft could be launched and could fly by all four giant planets — it was called the 'Grand Tour.' That was in 1965. By 1972, they had been sort of downsized to MJS77, which is Mariner, Jupiter, Saturn, a four year mission just to those two planets and their moons and rings. That, fortunately, was to be launched in 1977, however, so that if they continued to work, they could go on to Uranus and then finally Neptune, which is what Voyager 2 did, completing the grand tour of the outer planets … in 12 years rather than 30 years."

While Voyager 1 gave unprecedented views of the outer gas planets, Voyager 1 veered upward after Jupiter and Saturn and headed for the outer limits of the solar system. [Voyager at 40: 40 Epic Photos from the 'Grand Tour']

Each has redundant systems that has let the spacecraft continue to report back data as they cross through the threshold of interstellar space — Voyager 1 has already gone, and Voyager 2 should reach it soon.

"I'm a cosmic ray physicist, so getting Voyager 1 into interstellar space was the Holy Grail in my area of research," Alan Cummings, a researcher at Caltech who worked on Voyager from the 1970s, said at the conference. Suddenly, the cosmic rays obscured by the sun's steady stream of particles becomes possible to measure.

And researchers are eagerly waiting for Voyager 2 to reach that boundary, too.

"I like to say that the joy of having two, as Alan was saying, you have to have a model that fits both data points," Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL, said during the conference. The researchers said they anticipate Voyager 2 reaching that boundary within the next few years.

Today, Voyager 1 and 2 are "as healthy as senior citizens can be," Dodd said. "Each of them has had different ailments over the years. For example, Voyager 2 is tone-deaf: every time we send a command to the spacecraft we have to put it in two different frequencies in order for the spacecraft to hear it. Voyager 1 does not have an operating plasma science instrument, and what that means is Voyager 1 cannot really directly feel the solar wind and the high-energy charged particles coming from the sun." [Celebrate Voyager Probes' 40th Anniversary with Scientist Stories, Free Posters]

Soon, Dodd said, the researchers will have to decide which instruments to turn off to conserve power from the spacecraft's nuclear generators — some instruments should be running until at least 2025, and maybe longer. "I hope that I can sit here 10 years from now with all these folks and talk about the 50th anniversary of Voyager launch and still have them flying," she added.

Of course, even after NASA loses contact with the Voyager spacecraft, they will continue out into the unknown — and the Golden Records affixed to them are set to last for billions of years, the researchers said. So as NASA sent a message to Voyager, Voyager continues to travel outward, carrying its message to the stars.

"What an honor; I am so pleased to be here," Shatner added from JPL. "It's a magical place, JPL, and this is a magical moment. To send a message to Voyager. And once it reaches Voyager, it keeps going, so it's like an advance man: Voyager coming! Voyager coming! To all the little green people out there."


LISTEN TO MESSAGE: www.space.com/38049-william-shatner-beams-message-to-voyager.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social#?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=2016twitterdlvrit

[swamprat]

Voyager 1 fires thrusters after 37 years

By Deborah Byrd in SPACE
December 4, 2017

Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of 4 backup thrusters, dormant since 1980. The team says it’ll extend the life of Voyager 1 – the fastest and farthest craft from Earth – by several more years.

The Voyager mission team fired up a set of four backup thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft last Tuesday, November 28, 2017. The thrusters had been dormant since 1988. If you tried starting a car that’d been sitting that long, you might not expect it to respond. But – on Wednesday, November 29 – mission controllers learned that Voyager 1’s thrusters did respond. Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said:

"With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years."

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977. It’s the most distant spacecraft from Earth and likely to remain so. It took advantage of a cyclical positioning in the outer planets, during which they were all temporarily on the same side of the sun, and thus passed Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989.

Voyager 1 was judged to have crossed the heliopause on August 25, 2012 to enter interstellar space, the space between the stars.

This artist’s concept puts solar system distances in perspective. The scale bar is in astronomical units (1 astronomical unit = 1 Earth-sun distance). Each set distance beyond 1 AU representing 10 times the previous distance. Voyager 1, humankind’s most distant spacecraft, was at a distance of 138 AU (12.8 billion miles, 20.6 billion kilometers) from the sun as of early 2017. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The spacecraft relies on the thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or “puffs,” lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. A statement from JPL said:

"Since 2014, engineers have noticed that the thrusters Voyager 1 has been using to orient the spacecraft, called ‘attitude control thrusters,’ have been degrading. Over time, the thrusters require more puffs to give off the same amount of energy. At 13 billion miles from Earth, there’s no mechanic shop nearby to get a tune-up."

The Voyager team assembled a group of propulsion experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, to study the problem. Chris Jones, Robert Shotwell, Carl Guernsey and Todd Barber analyzed options and predicted how the spacecraft would respond in different scenarios. They agreed on an unusual solution: Try giving the job of orientation to a set of thrusters that had been asleep for 37 years …

On Tuesday, November 28, 2017, Voyager engineers fired up the four TCM thrusters for the first time in 37 years and tested their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses. The team waited eagerly as the test results traveled through space, taking 19 hours and 35 minutes to reach an antenna in Goldstone, California, that is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network.

Lo and behold, on Wednesday, November 29, they learned the TCM thrusters worked perfectly — and just as well as the attitude control thrusters.

Jones, chief engineer at JPL, said the team had to look back at historical data to devise its plan to use the thrusters:

"The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters."

Barber, a JPL propulsion engineer, commented:

"The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test. The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all."

JPL said the plan going forward is to switch to the TCM thrusters in January. To make the change, Voyager has to turn on one heater per thruster, which requires power — a limited resource for the aging mission. When there is no longer enough power to operate the heaters, the team will switch back to the attitude control thrusters.

The thruster test went so well, the team will likely do a similar test on the TCM thrusters for Voyager 2, the twin spacecraft of Voyager 1. The attitude control thrusters currently used for Voyager 2 are not yet as degraded as Voyager 1’s, however.

Voyager 2 is also on course to enter interstellar space, likely within the next few years.

Bottom line: Space engineers devised and successfully carried out a plan to fire up thrusters aboard Voyager 1 – needed to communicate with Earth – thus extending the life of the mission by several years.

PS: Additionally:

Where will the two Voyagers end up?


In early 2017, astronomers spoke of using the Hubble Space Telescope to provide a road map of the Voyagers’ trip through interstellar space. This artist’s concept depicts their paths. In the illustration, Hubble is gazing along two sight lines (the twin cone-shaped features) along each spacecraft’s path. Each sight line stretches several light-years to nearby stars. Image via NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI).

To read more about this image, go here: earthsky.org/space/voyager-spacecraft-paths-interstellar-space-hubble

And.....:

The Golden Record
Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious 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.

Wait! There's more! You can now BUY a copy of the Golden Record!

www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=voyager+golden+record&tag=googhydr-20&index=aps&hvadid=153681766013&hvpos=1t1&hvnetw=s&hvrand=3459696060403508268&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9011587&hvtargid=kwd-1698154005&ref=pd_sl_694r45h1m3_b

[swamprat]

What’s the most distant human object from Earth?

By EarthSky in SPACE
February 25, 2018

The most distant human object is now over 13 billion miles (21 billion km) from Earth.

The most distant human-made object is the spacecraft Voyager 1, which – in late February 2018 – is over 13 billion miles (21 billion km) from Earth. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched 16 days apart in 1977. Both spacecraft flew by Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 also flew by Uranus and Neptune. Now both Voyagers are heading out of our solar system, into the space between the stars. Voyager 1 officially became the first earthly craft to leave the solar system, crossing the heliopause, in 2012.

Both Voyager spacecraft were designed back in the early 1970s. They were built to take advantage of a rare grouping of planets on a single side of the sun in our solar system. This grouping, which happens only every 176 years, let the Voyagers slingshot from one planet to the next, via gravitational assists.




Source: SPACE.com.

The Voyagers began acquiring images of Jupiter in January 1979. Voyager 1 completed its Jupiter encounter in early April of that year. Voyager 2 picked up the baton in late April and its encounter continued into August. The two spacecraft took more than 33,000 pictures of Jupiter and its five major satellites.

And then the Voyagers went further. When they were launched, no spacecraft had gone as far as Saturn, which is 10 times as far as Earth’s distance from the sun. The four-year journey to Saturn was thus a major leap, with the Voyagers arriving at Saturn nine months apart, in November 1980 and August 1981. Voyager 1 then began leaving the solar system, and Voyager 2 went on to an encounter with Uranus in January 1986 and with Neptune in August 1989.


Voyager 1’s trajectory in Earth’s sky from 1977-2030. Image via Tomruen/Wikimedia Commons/based on data exported from NASA.

Ed Stone – who was Project Scientist for the Voyager mission – told EarthSky some years ago:

"We built the spacecraft with enough redundancy – that is, backup systems – so that they could keep going."

And keep going they did! The Voyagers have now been traveling for 41 years.

In 2017, astronomers described using the Hubble Space Telescope to look along the Voyagers’ paths. In about 40,000 years, long after both spacecraft are no longer operational, Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445, in the constellation Camelopardalis. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 is about 10.5 billion miles (17 billion km) from Earth. Voyager 2 will pass 1.7 light-years from the star Ross 248 in about 40,000 years.


| Artist’s concept of the paths of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft on their journey through our solar system and out into interstellar space. Image via NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI).

Bottom line: Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched 16 days apart in 1977. Voyager 1 is now the most distant spacecraft from Earth.

earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-most-distant-man-made-object-from-earth?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=df727328d8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-df727328d8-394368745

Click here for images Voyager took of Jupiter: voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-voyager-took/jupiter/

Click here for images Voyager took of Saturn: voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-voyager-took/saturn/

Click here for Voyager 2 images of Uranus: voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-voyager-took/uranus/

Click here for Voyager 2 images of Neptune: voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-voyager-took/neptune/

[auntym]

[swamprat]

"A few weeks ago, the Voyager 2 spacecraft beamed back the first hints that it might soon be leaving the heliosphere — the giant bubble around the Sun filled with its constant outpouring of particles, the solar wind."

"To go, where no one, has gone before."

[swamprat]

It's Official! NASA's Famed Voyager 2 Spacecraft Reaches Interstellar Space

By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer | December 10, 2018

This NASA graphic shows the locations of NASA's Voyager spacecraft in interstellar space. NASA announced the arrival of Voyager 2 in interstellar space on Dec. 10, 2018. Voyager 1 reached the milestone in 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON — It's time to say goodbye to one of the most storied explorers of our age: Voyager 2 has entered interstellar space, NASA announced today (Dec. 10).

Voyager 2, which launched in 1977, has spent more four decades exploring our solar system, most famously becoming the only probe ever to study Neptune and Uranus during planetary flybys. Now, it has joined its predecessor Voyager 1 beyond the bounds of our sun's influence, a milestone scientists weren't able to precisely predict when would occur. And intriguingly, humanity's second crossing doesn't look precisely like data from the first journey out.

"Very different times, very different places, similar in characteristics," Ed Stone, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and project scientist for the Voyager mission, said during a scientific talk before the announcement here at the 2018 meeting of the American Geophysical Meeting. "The next months ahead could be very revealing as well. … More to come!"
Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited all four gas giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — and discovered 16 moons, as well as phenomena like Neptune's mysteriously transient Great Dark Spot, the cracks in Europa's ice shell, and ring features at every planet.

Scientists have been watching for Voyager 2's grand departure since late August, when data beamed back by the probe suggested it was nearing what scientists call the heliopause, a bubble created by the solar wind of charged particles flowing out from our sun and influencing the environment within our solar system. Scientists use the heliopause to mark where interstellar space begins, although depending on how you define our solar system it can stretch all the way to the Oort Cloud, which begins 1,000 times farther away from the sun than Earth's orbit.

Beyond that bubble, spacecraft fly through many more cosmic rays — much higher-energy particles — than the lower-energy particles of our own neighborhood. Two instruments onboard the Voyager 2 probe track these particles as they collide with the spacecraft. The transition from mostly lower-energy particles to nearly none of these and a sudden surge of cosmic rays tells scientists the probe has crossed the heliopause.

It's a difficult transition to predict, since Voyager 2 is only the second spacecraft to cross that bubble with its instruments alert and communicative. Voyager 1 made the same journey in 2012. But the heliopause doesn't form a perfect sphere, and it shrinks and expands with the ebb and flow of the solar wind. So scientists had to wait and see what the data said, and beginning in August the data began to tell that story of cosmic departure, with a general increase in cosmic rays and decrease in local particles. But the grand exit took time.

"Something weird happened around day 310 [Nov. 5]," Rob Decker, who works with one of Voyagers particle detectors, said during the scientific talk. That something was crossing the heliopause. Scientists are particularly excited for this second crossing because Voyager 2 still carries an instrument that on Voyager 1 had stopped working long before the heliopause — the Plasma Science Experiment. That means Voyager 2's journey will create not just new data, but a new type of data, NASA officials said in the statement.

Where the two trips can be compared, however, instruments have shown how uneven that journey can be. Voyager 1 ran into flux tubes that created dynamic data, which Voyager 2 has not flown through. But the second probe has seen a strange bump in some of the data. "We haven't yet sorted out what these features are," Stone said. Voyager 2 also may not have as straightforward an exit as its predecessor because the current solar cycle phase means that the sun's bubble is growing a little. "We were probably chasing it and we may see it again," he said of the heliopause.

Despite the excitement surrounding the milestone, not much will change for Voyager 2 itself. It will continue beaming home updates to its scientists here on Earth for as long as it can. Eventually, the plutonium supply that powers the spacecraft will run out, and the probe will shut down instruments in turn.
Sometime after 2025, the team expects the probe will go quiet entirely, without enough power to cross the ever-wider abyss to Earth.

But even when that day comes, the probe will continue to live up to its name, the ultimate Voyager.

www.space.com/42680-voyager-2-reaches-interstellar-space.html

[auntym]

NASA’s Voyager 2 Enters Interstellar Space

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Published on Dec 10, 2018

Forty-one years after it launched into space, NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has exited our solar bubble and entered the region between stars. Its twin, Voyager 1, made this historic crossing in 2012. Edward Stone, the Voyager mission’s project scientist, and Suzanne Dodd, the mission project manager, discuss this major milestone and what’s to come for the trailblazing probe. For more about the Voyagers, including the Grand Tour of the Solar System and the Golden Record, visit voyager.jpl.nasa.gov






voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/downloads/


NASA Voyager
‏Verified account @nasavoyager


Been there. Done That. Got the poster. Download free print-quality #spaceposters, including this brand-new one celebrating Voyager 2's entry into interstellar space. go.nasa.gov/2gvaDcs

[swamprat]

The confounding magnetic readings of Voyager 1

The spacecraft’s arrival in interstellar space was expected to be accompanied by a significant shift in the magnetic field. Six years and one additional interstellar probe later, that shift still hasn’t happened.

Andrew Grant
15 Feb. 2019

In December 2012, a group of space scientists gathered in San Francisco to hold a vote. The lone issue on the ballot: Is Voyager 1 in, or is it out?

Throughout that year, the hardy spacecraft had beamed back tantalizing hints that it had left the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble inflated by the solar wind, and become the first human-made object to enter interstellar space. Yet mission scientists weren’t seeing what they had thought would be the unambiguous signature of Voyager’s departure: a sudden shift in direction of the magnetic field. It seemed inconceivable that the probe could have left a river of charged particles flowing from the Sun for an ocean of interstellar plasma without drastic magnetic deviations. “That was truly a shock to all of us,” says Len Burlaga, coinvestigator of the magnetometer instrument. “We figured that in a completely different region [the field direction] wouldn’t be the same.”

Subsequent measurements from the probe’s other instruments ultimately provided enough evidence to convince most of the voters in San Francisco that Voyager 1 had crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, some 122 AU from the Sun (see Physics Today, November 2013, page 18). Nonetheless, more than six years later, the spacecraft’s magnetic field readings are still conspicuously similar to those taken in the outer reaches of the heliosphere. The puzzling measurements have sent space scientists struggling to explain what Voyager is seeing just beyond the solar bubble.

“Boundaries are simple when you learn about them in books,” says Merav Opher, a space scientist at Boston University. “In nature, it’s never like in the book.” Opher and others will soon get to put their revised theoretical models to the test, as mission scientists recently reported that, judging from particle and plasma data, Voyager 2 joined its sibling in interstellar space in November. The readings of its magnetometer are expected to be announced at the International Astrophysics Conference in Pasadena, California, next week.

The first hint of Voyager 1’s heliopause crossing came on 28 July 2012, when galactic cosmic-ray intensity abruptly jumped, the concentration of solar particles plummeted, and the magnetic field intensity doubled, to about 0.4 nT. Four more inflection points occurred over the next month, marked by a fall in field intensity, then a jump, then a fall, and one last jump on 25 August, the currently accepted interstellar crossing date. Yet during those turbulent four weeks, the direction of the magnetic field barely budged. The big Science paper describing Voyager 1’s exit concluded with the observation that because of the lack of shift in field direction, “the very definition of the heliopause comes into question.”


Voyager 1 detected changes in magnetic field intensity (top graph) five separate times (B1–B5), presumably as it crossed the heliopause, in mid 2012. But the magnetic field direction, measured here in terms of azimuthal and elevation angle, remained steady. Credit: L. F. Burlaga, N. F. Ness, and E. C. Stone, Science2013

With the benefit of hindsight, Opher and several of her colleagues now say they shouldn’t have been surprised at the magnetic complexity relayed by the interstellar probe. After all, the heliopause is not a static boundary. Interstellar magnetic fields likely pile up and drape about the solar bubble, which could result in elevated field intensity and twists in field direction. Some of those field lines could break and reconnect in new orientations (see Physics Today, February 2019, page 20). Flux tubes may tunnel through the boundary and allow solar particles to leak into interstellar space.

Another complication is that although the interstellar magnetic field direction almost certainly differs from the heliosphere’s, it’s unclear what that direction should be. Voyager 1 is humanity’s first beacon in interstellar waters—all other clues have come indirectly. One important line of evidence comes from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft’s detections of energetic neutral atoms, cosmic messengers that can swim upstream through the heliopause into the solar bubble. In 2009 mission scientists reported a bright ribbon of neutral-atom emission that wraps around the nose of the heliosphere, between the positions of the two Voyager probes. Based on the IBEX data and other evidence, including the polarization of starlight and cosmic-ray anisotropies, some researchers suspect that the interstellar magnetic field is oriented toward the center of that ribbon.

Theorists are analyzing Voyager 1’s measurements in attempts to combine all those hints and hypotheses into workable models. In late 2013, Opher and colleague James Drake ran magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the heliosphere environment and found that interstellar magnetic field lines twist as they pile up in front of the advancing solar bubble. The researchers showed that the twist should result in an orientation very close to that inside the heliosphere, regardless of the direction of the interstellar field. They concluded that Voyager 1 may have to fly through the pileup region for many years before reaching pristine interstellar space.

Nathan Schwadron, a space scientist at the University of New Hampshire, says he thought he had things figured out after analyzing Voyager interstellar data collected from May 2013 to August 2014. During that time the field direction changed slowly but steadily, covering nearly 10° of ecliptic longitude, toward the position of the IBEX ribbon. Schwadron reckoned that after traversing some sort of transition region, the spacecraft had finally started to get a taste of the ambient interstellar field.
But by the time Schwadron’s paper on the subject made it into print in late 2015, the field direction had swerved away from the ribbon. “The simplified picture started to fall apart,” he says. Schwadron’s latest paper, authored with IBEX principal investigator David McComas, pins the recent deviation on several coronal mass ejections from the Sun during its last active period, in 2012. They say that the material should propagate through the heliopause as pressure waves, creating areas of compression ahead of their arrival and rarefaction in their wake. Interstellar magnetic field lines would drape differently in each of those regions. If Schwadron and McComas are right, then the field should soon reverse direction again, back toward the ribbon.

Though most researchers are focused on adjusting their models to fit the new measurements, a small but vocal minority maintain that Voyager 1’s magnetic readings demonstrate that the probe is still in the heliosphere.
Voyager scientists George Gloeckler and Lennard Fisk, who voted in 2012 against proclaiming
the probe interstellar, have devised a model that predicts the probe will reach the heliopause in four or five years, when it is about 160 AU from Earth. And when it does cross, they say it will detect significant magnetic field deviations. A definitive signature could come even sooner, if the spacecraft catches up to plasma that was emitted prior to one of the Sun’s periodic magnetic field reversals. In that case, a 180° flip in the measured field direction would signal that Voyager 1 is still in the heliosphere.

In mid 2013 Voyager 1 detected a shift in the magnetic field toward the IBEX ribbon (blue trend line). But in 2015 the direction changed (red). Credit: N. A. Schwadron and D. J. McComas, Astrophys. J. 2017

After several years of scratching heads and tuning models, those who have been following the two Voyager spacecraft’s exploits are now focused solely on the first interstellar magnetic results for Voyager 2, which are expected to be released at next week’s conference in Pasadena. Opher and Schwadron expect little to no change in the field direction, just as with Voyager 1. Burlaga and McComas expect a more significant shift, based on the hypothesis that the draping of the interstellar field should be different in Voyager 2’s neck of the woods.

Regardless of who’s right (an abstract of Burlaga’s talk hints that the field intensity jumped and the direction changed at least somewhat), the space science community will have a lot more work to do in the coming years to explain the probes’ two sets of readings. What everyone once thought would be the clear-cut harbinger of interstellar space will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be one of its most puzzling attributes.

physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20190215a/full/

[auntym]

astronomy.com/magazine/2019/08/how-an-interplanetary-mission-changed-the-world?utm_source=asytwitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=asytwitter

FROM THE October 2017 ISSUE

How the Voyager missions rippled through pop culture

Voyager 1 and 2 revealed much about the cosmos — and left a giant mark on pop culture.

By Shannon Stirone / astronomy.com/authors/shannon-stirone
Tuesday, August 13, 2019



© Jossdim | Dreamstime.com


The once-in-more-than-a-lifetime mission was born from a rare alignment of the planets that happens only every 167 years. With the right amount of planning and engineering, NASA realized it could send not just one, but two identical spacecraft on a journey from Earth to visit the four giant planets in the outer solar system.

At the time of their flybys, both craft brought incredible clarity to Jupiter and Saturn and their moons, which had previously been visited by Pioneers 10 and 11 and their more primitive cameras. At the time the Voyagers launched, there were no close-up images of Uranus and Neptune; two of our outermost planets were mysteries. The world waited for the spacecraft to fly past each planet and send back whatever treasures they found. Glimpses of the light teal of Uranus, the bright blue of Neptune, and those textured rings of Saturn infiltrated the nightly news and the collective consciousness.

“At the time, the mission was all over the news,” explains Voyager Project Manager Suzy Dodd. “In those days, the press came in person, and we would have these live press conferences every day from JPL.”

Each week, people watching the news would see the planets grow in size as each spacecraft got closer, and the public followed loyally along with the mission. Earthlings suddenly knew more about their home solar system, and that excitement bled into popular culture, especially science fiction. Just two years after the launch of the Voyagers, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released, featuring a familiar spacecraft. In the film, they called it “V’ger.”

“The main thing people reference when they talk about Voyager in the media is Star Trek,” says Dodd. “V’ger, V’ger, they always say.”

When NASA designed Voyager, they knew that someday it would leave the solar system entirely and might be visible to alien civilizations — if there were any out there to intercept it. In Star Trek, the fictional Voyager 6 has encountered a sentient artificially intelligent species that gave the spacecraft the gift of self-awareness. By the time the crew of the Enterprise meet V’ger 6, it’s likely the craft had encountered several civilizations.

After the discovery of the parked spacecraft, Spock decides to venture inside and find out more about what exactly V’ger is. As he’s flying through the ship, he says, “Curious. I’m seeing images of planets, moons, stars, whole galaxies all stored here, recorded. It could be a representation of V’ger’s entire journey. But who or what are we dealing with?” What Spock is seeing is a recorded database of V’ger’s encounters. Before the missions had even reached Saturn, people were already looking to Voyager as our future interstellar emissary.

In perhaps the perfect blending of real life and science fiction, Star Trek’s Voyager 6 encounter is what scientists had dreamed of when they launched Voyager 1 and 2 into space.

Out there

Star Trek wasn’t the only sci-fi hit to jump on the Voyager bandwagon. In a 1994 episode of The X-Files titled “Little Green Men,” FBI agent Fox Mulder narrates the story of Voyager while visiting the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. He starts the episode, “On August 20 and September 5, 1977, two spacecraft were launched from the Kennedy Space Flight Center, Florida. They were called Voyager. Each one carries a message. A gold-plated record depicting images, music, and sounds of our planet, arranged so that it may be understood if ever intercepted by a technologically mature extraterrestrial civilization.”

Mulder is searching (as always) for evidence of extraterrestrial life, and the Golden Record containing a message from Earth, calling attention to our own existence, is a fitting parallel to his journey. In the episode, a classical music selection from the Golden Record plays while Mulder has a bizarre alien encounter in Arecibo.

The Golden Record in and of itself is a vessel for a mixture of popular culture and general documentation of what it’s like to be an earthling. There were musical selections from the likes of Chuck Berry and Beethoven; rights management prevented “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles from being placed on the record. (The Fab Four were in favor of the move; their record label, which owned the rights to the recording, was not.) The record also contained 116 photos and images of scientific concepts and daily life worldwide; a “hello” in 55 languages; a recording of human brainwaves; various sounds of our planet, both human and geologic; and countless other time-capsule sights and sounds. Etchings of Earth’s position, guided by the position of local pulsars, were included on the outer cover.

Carl Sagan, who was a member of the Voyager imaging team at the time, found the right colleagues to work on the record. Jon Lomberg, an astronomical artist, chose the images. Linda Saltzman-Sagan, a writer and artist, compiled the language greetings; Ann Druyan, an artist, handled the everyday sounds; Rolling Stone editor Timothy Ferris lent his particular support on the musical selections; and SETI founder Frank Drake lent to the project his vast knowledge of trying to home in on the best way to communicate with alien species.

Since the 1970s, the symbolism of the record has shown up in TV shows, film, and even clothing. The record even recently became popular again when a Kickstarter campaign to reissue the full Golden Record set received over $1 million in funding from 10,000 people wanting their own copy of history.

The shores of the cosmic ocean

While working on the Voyager mission, Sagan and Druyan created a TV show called Cosmos. The PBS show, which debuted in 1980, not only highlighted the beautiful intricacies of Earth, but it gave viewers a perspective about our place in the cosmos, coinciding with the mission’s journey toward Saturn. (Sagan and Druyan met while working on the Golden Record and married in 1981.)

The impact of the show on popular culture is so great, it’s hard to quantify, though one benefit is that Cosmos ultimately inspired an entire generation of scientists. Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who worked on Voyager at the beginning of his career and would ultimately memorialize the mission in the oral history book The Interstellar Age, credits Cosmos with inspiring his career path.

“Voyager launched back when I was in high school, and the show Cosmos by Carl Sagan was enormously impactful,” he says. “It was the first time that science was on TV and being communicated by a real professional communicator who could speak the language of science and translate it.”

A mote of dust on a cosmic ocean

Perhaps more than anything else though, the biggest influence the Voyager mission had on popular culture came in the form of a single photo. The “Pale Blue Dot,” taken February 14, 1990, by Carolyn Porco and Candy Hansen at Sagan’s request, no doubt changed the world and how we saw ourselves. As one of its final images, Voyager 1 pointed its cameras toward Earth and snapped one final shot before the cameras were shut down to save power.

Sagan would later say the dot represented the human experience: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

As photos of Earth taken from space had done in the 1960s, the Pale Blue Dot put humanity’s place in perspective. We weren’t just one species uniting for our planet — we also weren’t the rulers of the universe, but rather an “insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people,” Sagan says.

“To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world,” Sagan says in Cosmos. “To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

The photo inspired Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot, which, in turn, would go on to inspire short films like Wanderers and television shows like The Expanse with its grand vision of humans wandering from the cradle of our planet into the wider expanse of our solar system and, eventually, the universe.

The closest thing to the Voyager mission in the modern age may be the New Horizons flyby of Pluto. Today, we can search every major body in the solar system online and find an image of that object, but it wasn’t always that way. In 2015, the previously blurry dot we called Pluto became crisp with color, geological features and even a heart-shaped glacier, as the spacecraft undertook a six-month reconnaissance of the distant planet and its moons. Like the Voyagers, New Horizons’ discoveries help us understand Earth’s place in the cosmos.

“For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young and curious and brave. It shows much promise,” Sagan says in the first episode of the original Cosmos. “In the last few millennia, we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the cosmos and our place within it.”

Thanks to the Voyagers and our continued exploration of the solar system, this statement still rings true. We know more about our place in space and can imagine other civilizations having an encounter with an artifact of humanity. Sometime around 2025, both Voyagers will go dormant. But they will always carry a cultural legacy that few robotic missions have before — or may ever again.

astronomy.com/magazine/2019/08/how-an-interplanetary-mission-changed-the-world?utm_source=asytwitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=asytwitter

[jcurio]

As photos of Earth taken from space had done in the 1960s, the Pale Blue Dot put humanity’s place in perspective. We weren’t just one species uniting for our planet — we also weren’t the rulers of the universe, but rather an “insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people,” Sagan says.

Read more: theedgeofreality.proboards.com/thread/2473/voyager-1-2?page=2#ixzz6EOkP3Y9j
______________________

But, there’s something here, on this little blue dot, that constantly reminds us that we are not insignificant 😊

[auntym]

NASA Says Voyager 1 is Sending a Strange Signal From Interstellar Space



Feb 7, 2024

Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object in space, is in trouble. The spacecraft, which has been traveling for nearly half a century, is experiencing serious issues transmitting data back to Earth. It has suddenly started sending a strange pattern of 1s and 0s, which makes no sense. This has put engineers and scientists on their toes to diagnose and fix the problem from 24 billion kilometers away so that the historic mission can continue to provide invaluable insights from its journey through space.

But what exactly is causing the spacecraft to transmit this mishmash of data? Is this just a small technical glitch or a significant malfunction happening in the background? Finally, and most importantly, considering the spacecraft's age and distance, is it even possible to address this issue?

[auntym]

apnews.com/article/nasa-voyager-spacecraft-contact-19e16b945869623cd94778795e62001b?utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter

SCIENCE

NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet



This illustration provided by NASA depicts Voyager 1. The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data in November 2023. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble. In mid-April 2024, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory declared success after receiving good engineering updates. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data. (NASA via AP)


BY MARCIA DUNN

April 23, 2024


CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.

The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.

It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.

Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space — the space between star systems — since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.

apnews.com/article/nasa-voyager-spacecraft-contact-19e16b945869623cd94778795e62001b?utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter