Cultivating curiosity: Day 3🔭

THE STORY OF VOYAGER 1 & 2

Around 50 years ago, 2 revolutionary space craft were launched into space- voyager 1 and its sibling craft, voyager 2. The purpose of these crafts were to explore and image the objects, namely the planets, in our solar system and then travel into the cosmos. It took advantage of the fact that all the plants were geometrically aligned at the time, allowing for a relatively straight, clear path through the solar system.

Voyager 1 was launched first. The mission used minimal amounts of fuel, using the planets' gravity as a slingshot to move from planet to planet. This was a main point of success which the entire mission hinged on.

Voyager 1 (as well as voyager 2) gave us tremendous amounts of new information about our solar system. This includes:

🔹Active volcanism on Jupiter's satellite, Io

🔹The counterclockwise rotation of the storm on Jupiter called The Great Red Spot

🔹New details about Saturn's rings

🔹The atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan

After this, Voyager 1 was catapulted out of the solar system, while Voyager 2 continued its journey in to Uranus and Neptune, both of which had never previously been visited. Voyager 1 was sent "up" out of the solar system while voyager 2 was sent "down".

As Voyager 1 headed out of the solar system, it was turned back to take one last picture of Earth before cameras were turned off to reserve power, resulting in the famous picture, The Pale Blue Dot.

(picture at the bottom)

Often Quoted, Carl Sagan, a scientist working on the project at the time, said :"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… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Around 12 years ago, Voyager 1 reached the Heliopause, the boundary between the solar winds and interstellar winds, and then exited the solar system, travelling off into interstellar space.

Until today, both Voyager 1 and 2 are traveling further into interstellar space, Voyager 1 being the furthest man made of object to be this far into space. At the moment, Voyager 1 is 24,880,868,749 kilometers away, equivalent to 166.318335 Astronomical Units. It takes over 3 minutes for its broadcasted signals to reach us.

As the mission progressed, several pieces of equipment has been switched off to conserve power for Voyager's long journey into the universe. Currently, there is only 3 pieces of functioning equipment on Voyager 1, with the estimated death of the satellite being around 2030. It has served its purpose well and still continues to do so, despite the problems the satellite faced in its journey into the cosmos.

The golden disk is a phonograph record that is installed on Voyager 1, were it to chance upon something beyond Earth.

On the golden phonograph there is, among other things:

🔹Sounds of wind, sea, thunder, animals

🔹Laughter, steps, greeting, a variety spoken languages

🔹Messages in Morse code

🔹Pictures of animals and nature

🔹Information about our solar system, the human genome, math, physics

🔹Music

🔹The brainwaves of a person for an hour, as they thought about various things, including history, civilisation and what it's like to fall in love.

Side note:

😭Guys I can't. Just how incredibly human it is to send out pictures of our life into the great unknown of the cosmos and hope there'd be some life form to chance upon it and know us from across the galaxy.out in the dark empty vastness of space there's record of flowers and laughter and love. Even if you don't believe there's anything out there, the things this makes me feel fr😭😭

Hope you guys enjoyed! This was a very long post and I had a ton of fun writing about it. I loooove space stuff and voyager 1 is genuinely the goat. If you now have an attachment to a machine out in space like I do, you should check out the updates on it every few months. 😭❤️

Sources:

Everything about Voyager 1 and 2:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/mission-overview/

The golden record:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Previous posts in the series:

THE EFFECT OF EXCLUDING FEMALE ANIMALS IN NEUROSCIENCE LAB TESTING

https://www.skool.com/qurios/cultivating-curiosity-day-2?p=a328e8e9

THE REFLECTION OF SOCIETAL FEARS ON HORROR MEDIA

https://www.skool.com/qurios/cultivating-curiosity-day-1?p=79976c53

Enjoy💡❤️

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