Voyager: the most bad-ass satellite ever
Posted on November 9, 2003
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It appears that Voyager, the satellite that should have stopped working 20 years ago, is still spinning its way through space and definitely heading where no earth-made object has gone before:
The spacecraft Voyager 1 is still sending data back to NASA, the U.S. government space agency, after more than 26 years in space. It is now the most distant man-made object in space, traveling billions of kilometers from earth and perhaps reaching the outer edges of our solar system.
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There is no conclusion on whether or not Voyager has actually passed the so-called “Termination Shock,” where the spacecraft would encounter a dramatic drop in solar wind speed and an increase in interstellar plasma or particles. But according to the head of the space department at Johns Hopkins University, Stamatios (Tom) Krimigis, that has already happened. He says Voyager 1 crossed the threshold last year.
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On the other side of the debate is Frank McDonald of the University of Maryland whose teams’ findings will also be published in Nature. He says the Voyager has been on an amazing ride, traveling 13.4 billion kilometers, but he does not believe it has reached the region of the “termination shock.”
That’s pretty incredible. Built in 1976, constantly bombarded by the worst the solar system has to offer (we on Earth have it pretty easy, what with being protected by a giant magnetic field and an atmosphere and all) and still going strong. Whomever built Voyager, those are the guys I want to build my next laptop.
Congrats to the original Voyager team - I think this accomplishment makes you quite possibly the coolest engineering team ever.
(Idle thought : wouldn’t it be funny if Gene Roddenbury got it right after all?)
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