Voyager's Greatest Hits: The Epic Trek to Interstellar Space
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
THing 1 and THing 2 TRack 2 It’s 1965 and the Beach Boys are singing about California girls Over in Pasadena a graduate student named Gary Flandro is study ing aeronautics at Caltech Gary also has a part-time job not flipping burgers but investigating missile trajectories at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab JPL This is literally rocket science When Gary’s boss suggests he might also think about gravity-assist rocket trajectories to the outer planets Gary is psyched MR SpacEMan Unlimited gravity-propelled interplanetary space travel had been invented four years earlier by Michael Minovitch a graduate student studying physics and mathematics at UCLA Michael knew that the gravity of a planet could affect the path of an object flying by it This idea was not new In the early 1800s as tronomers looked through their telescopes and discovered that the orbit of a comet flying by Jupiter changed ever so slightly Clearly Jupiter’s immense gravity influenced the path of the comet Voyager 1 was launched on September 5 1977 aboard a Titan III-Centaur rocket
