Voyager's Greatest Hits: The Epic Trek to Interstellar Space
AdvENTUre of a LIFETIme TRack 1 The year is 1990 and Voyager 1 is speeding through space at 39,000 miles per hour 17 43 kilometers per second Its camera has been turned off for ten years in order to save power and memory for future exploration But the urge to look back and take one last glance at home is irre pressible So on February 14 the camera aboard Voyager 1 is turned on for a few minutes From 3 7 billion miles 59 5 billion kilometers out Voyager 1 snaps sixty photos to make the most distant portrait of the solar system ever It is a valentine from outer space The image of planet Earth is so small it is easily missed a pale blue dot in a vast void But the message is clear It is a note to hu manity signed in a sunbeam Take good care TO THe STArs The Voyager Planetary Mission began in 1977 when the twin space craft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched on a four-year tour to Jupiter and Saturn They reached Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980 and 1981 but the mission did not end there In 1986 Voyager 2 The Voyagers are the first explorers from Earth to leave our solar system and enter interstellar space Image of star cluster NGC 290 by Hubble Space Telescope 2004
2 VoyagER’s GreaTEST HITS made it to Uranus and in 1989 it observed Neptune On January 1 1990 with all the planets behind the Voyagers the mission was ex tended one more time It became the Voyager Interstellar Mission VIM Its new goal to explore the space between the stars Human ity’s interstellar age had begun Cruising north at 38,000 miles per hour 17 kilometers per sec ond Voyager 1 entered interstellar space on August 25 2012 Trav eling along a southern route at about 34,000 miles per hour 15 4
TRack 1 AdvENTUre of a LIFETIme 3 kilometers per second Voyager 2 is close behind The Voyagers are explorers in a new frontier collecting data and revealing the unex pected The discoveries they’re making on their one-way ticket out of the solar system are helping scientists rewrite the astronomy books But wait not so fast Voyagers You can’t look back but we can All the way back to the beginning A long time ago in a galaxy called the Milky Way there was a rare planetary alignment a cool idea and a tiny bit of computing power A huge section of the Milky Way galaxy imaged by NASA’s WISE Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope
