A while back in 2023, Voyager 1, which set out in 1977 to fly by the outer planets and then head off into the void, stopped sending usable data. I did a News Of The Church podcast about that. HERE (Ever listen to one of those?) It has flown for 40 years past its mission date and is now so far away that it takes 22 hours for a message to reach it and another 22 for it to respond. Light from the sun reaches Earth in 8 minutes. It’s power source, radioactive isotopes, are decaying into lead. NASA was shutting down systems trying to conserve power. It is unfathomably cold out there.
It runs on magnetic tape. Some of you younger readers might not have every seen any of that.
Voyager went nuts, sending back gibberish.
Once large, Voyager Mission Control is now a single office room between a dog training school and a McDonalds. A handful of people work there, some … not young.
How to fix Voyager? It’s 15 billion kilometers away. It’s not like you can upload a new OS. It’s flying away at a million miles a day.
NASA came up with something. HERE
Voyager has something called the flight data subsystem (FDS) which sorts data before it’s sent back to Earth. They figured that a chip that stored part of the FDS memory isn’t working. Since they couldn’t replace the chip, they put the chips code somewhere else. However, no single location is large enough to hold it all. Hence, they divided the code into sections and put them in different places in the FDS. They will have to tell it where to find all the bits and pieces. They sent code back to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. On April 20 they got usable data for the first time in five months. They can now monitor the Voyager’s status. With more shifting, they should get other science data, too.
So, Voyager is talking again and doesn’t sound like a curial document anymore. Now if we could get the Voyager team to work on the curia….
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Not too shabby for a 77’ model.
What happened to Voyager 2? And what sort of “science” data will Voyager 1 soon be able to resume transmitting? This is so cool and I can’t wait to let my Catholic grade school students know about it. Maybe they can write a dialogue on what Voyager 1 is trying to say to us — (Baby, it’s cold outside. . . )
Understatement of the year: they don’t make them like that anymore!
Now this is very interesting. Not just looking up at some small dots of light overhead!
I guess Voyager I gives new meaning to the poem High Flight.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air . . .
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977, from Cape Canaveral. Voyager 1 launched from Cape Canaveral on 5 September 1977. They are the 3rd and 4th spacecraft to fly beyond all the solar systems planets.
In 1998 Voyager 1 passed Pioneer 10 to become the most distant man-made object.
Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock of the heliosphere in December 2004 and Voyager crossed it in August 2007. Voyager 1 is traveling up and away from the plane of the planets. It entered interstellar space on 25 August 2012. Voyager 2 is headed away from the sun and down beneath the plane of the planets. It reached interstellar space on 5 November 2018.
Voyager 1 is travelling about 3.6 AU per year.
Voyager 2 is travelling about 3.3 AU per year.
There’s a mission status page which is updated every few minutes HERE.
The Voyagers have enough electrical power and thruster fuel to keep its current suite of science instruments on until at least 2025. By that time, Voyager 1 will be about 13.8 billion miles (22.1 billion kilometers) from the Sun and Voyager 2 will be 11.4 billion miles (18.4 billion kilometers) away. Eventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will drift within 1.6 light-years (9.3 trillion miles) of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis which is heading toward the constellation Ophiuchus. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass 1.7 light-years (9.7 trillion miles) from the star Ross 248 and in about 296,000 years, it will pass 4.3 light-years (25 trillion miles) from Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. The Voyagers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way and then become characters in Star Trek.
Too bad the Curia has drifted too far from its power source…
Being from Florida, I remember when both Voyagers launched – you could see them from our house. At that time, being in junior high, I NEVER thought they’d be around that long. I also remember my issue of Astronomy magazine that covered the Voyager fly-bys of first Jupiter and then Saturn. A testament to how they built ’em back then is that they are still flying and sending back data.
No Voyager 6 to become V’Ger….pity.
Fr.Z sez: …The Voyagers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way and then become characters in Star Trek….
V’ger!!
https://youtu.be/gxAaVqdz_Vk?t=96
Thanks Father Z, cosmology lesson as only you can impart.
I’ve heard it said there are as many galaxies as grains of sand.
Here is interesting facts about our Milky Way Galaxy
…” Our home galaxy’s disk is about 100,000 light-years in diameter and just 1000 light-years thick, according to Las Cumbres Observatory.”
https://www.space.com/19915-milky-way-galaxy.html
I love the News of the Church. I even go back and listen to them again. Well all of your podcast. Just wish they were on some sort of podcast streaming service. Please consider putting them back on soundcloud or wherever.
Ok I have a question, I asked it of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Kelly, and I distinctly remember her looking at me, blink, blink, but no satisfactory answer, and I have never heard the answer, but perhaps Fr. Z you know or someone here knows. Maybe nobody knows!
What…is the end of space. What’s at the END. As I said to Mrs. Kelly, how can there be an end to space, but how can there be NO end. It’s all incomprehensible, as it was then, the stats you gave on Voyager, Fr. Z, it’s mind blowing. I would love to know what the answer to that question is. Thank you in advance if anyone knows the reasonable theory. How can Voyager have gone a million miles a DAY. Did God just watch it go past him, and be amused?
@ grateful, I enjoyed reading that, thank you. That certainly describes something amazing, doesn’t it.
Kathleen10: who told you there is an END to space? The same who said you’d fall off the edge of our flat earth? If God the Creator is infinite, so are the Heavens.
adriennep, that’s what I mean, it’s the same question I had in grade four. I’m just as stymied by the thought now as then, how can there be no end, but how can there be an end. I mean, what is “nothing” made of? So I guess you’re saying it does go on and on forever. My gosh, how can that be…I’m the only one who wondered what’s at the end, nobody told me, I just can’t comprehend something never ending, or in this case, ending.
Our finite brains can’t comprehend the infinite. If we could understand, we’d be
God.