Sailing through an uncharted ocean of emptiness, more than 11.9 billion miles (19.1 billion kilometres) from its planet of origin, the Voyager 2 spacecraft continues to transmit data back to expectant scientists on Earth. Approximately 14.4 billion miles (23 billion kilometres) away from us, roughly in the opposite direction, its sister Voyager 1 continues its own lonely journey through a dark sea of nothingness. Since February 1998, in fact, Voyager 1 has held the record for the greatest distance from home of any explorer. It is a journey that these robotic emissaries have kept up for more than four decades, relentlessly pushing our knowledge of our celestial neighbourhood. In the early 1990s, they detected intense radio emissions thought to be coming from beyond the Solar System and within the last decade they passed the outer perimeter of the Sun’s vast empire – the ‘heliopause’ – to become the first pair of functioning artefacts fashioned by human hands to enter interstellar space. Voyager 1 did so on 25 August 2012, at more than 12 billion miles (19.3 billion kilometres) from the Sun, while Voyager 2 followed suit on 5 November 2018, some 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometres) from our parent star.
Chance of Three Lifetimes
Springer Praxis Books(formerly: Springer-Praxis Series)
24.08.2022
48 pages
Aufsatz/Kapitel (Buch)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
Spacecraft anomalies and lifetimes
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