We seem to have strange and strong bonds with the spacecraft we send out into space. I remember watching the documentary, Good Night Oppy, awhile back and I felt emotionally connected to the Mars rover Opportunity after it was over. What was only supposed to be a 90 day mission on the red planet, turned into a 15-year odyssey of huge success. I can only liken it to how you feel about a dog. We know they have short lives and yet they are so loyal and consistent, not without some issues, that they become family and we love them. So, it was with Opportunity and now Voyager 1.
Voyager 1 and 2 were both launched in 1977, 16 days apart. They cost $250 million, which is nothing by today's standards. The mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn and they did so in stunning fashion, discovering active volcanoes on the moon Io and teaching us about Saturn's rings. The two craft were originally built to last 5 years, but with the mission's objectives completed and awesome pictures and data sent back to earth, mission scientists couldn't resist expanding the mission to see all the outer planets. Voyager 2 went to Neptune and Uranus, while Voyager 1 continued on to Pluto. NASA used the smart technique of slingshotting the craft around the planets by using gravity to increase speed and send them towards their objective. In a rare bit of luck, once in 175 years luck, the four planets were aligned in their orbits to accomplish seeing all four of them. Sometimes, things just work out.
On Valentines Day of 1990, Voyager turned its gaze back to earth and snapped its most iconic photo. A shot of earth from nearly 4 billion miles away. As famed Astronomer Carl Sagan put it, "A pale blue dot." A lot was made of that photo as some sort of self portrait of earth and our insignificance in it all.
In 2012 Voyager 1 had flown past Pluto into the Kuiper Belt and interstellar space. No craft had ever gone that far before. Six years later, after completing its Neptune and Uranus mission, Voyager 2 reached interstellar space as well. Interstellar simply means the space between stars. Until November of last year, Voyager 1, having travelled over 15 billion miles, had been sending data and communication was regular. Suddenly, the data coming in was garbled and incomprehensible due to a computer glitch. Mission scientists, all of whom were not born when the crafts launched, tried resetting the computer several times, it now takes 45 hours to communicate with it, but nothing has worked and the craft has gone dark. For those of us into sci-fi and pop culture, Voyager made a dramatic entry into the lexicon from the movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, when possibly in a premonition of its fate, Voyager had gained its own consciousness and had become massive with unseen before powers of understanding from its travels across the galaxy. The Enterprise was sent to discover what this entity was after it had destroyed several Klingon ships and a space station. Scanning the massive cloud of energy they discovered it had a center craft at its heart. As it threatened earth, the crew is able to get to the craft and speak with their adversary, who speaks to them through replicating one of the crew down to the cellular level so precise it had some of her memories, but no real understanding of humans. As they struggle to communicate, it is discovered to be a Voyager craft sent from earth in the 20th Century, but has lost some of the letter off its name and called itself V'ger. It wanted to evolve as its only goal with the back story of having travelled outside its galaxy and fell into a black hole, emerging on the far side of the universe. It came across a planet of learning machines. Finding the probe primitive and uncovering its 20th Century programming of, learn all that is learnable and return that knowledge to the creator, it took its programming literally and set about to learn everything.
Perhaps we will run into Voyager 1 again a millennium from now. Voyager 2 is still going strong, but Jet Propulsion Labs, the creator of the Voyager crafts, believes its nuclear power source will die in 2025. Nevertheless, Voyager 1 had far exceeded its mandate and had sent valuable data for 47 years deep into undiscovered space. It carries with it a gold phonograph record embedded with sounds and images from earth just in case it runs into intelligent life. I have no doubt that one day it will. Perhaps V'ger still has a role to play. Good Night V'ger and thank you.
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