The story of voyager: Humanity’s farthest foray into Space

Important for

Prelims Exam: Voyager spacecraft

Mains Exam: About the mission

Why in news?

• NASA detected a signal from its Voyager 2 spacecraft on August 1, after losing communication for over a week. Launched 46 years ago, Voyager 2 is currently in interstellar space. Along with Voyager 1, it has provided invaluable data and inspired future space missions.

The mission:

• It was Launched in 1977, the voyager mission –1 &2 sent the first two human made objects to region of space between star systems within a galaxy( interstellar space)
• Later on in 1974, Uranus and Neptune were added to the mission’s fold.
• It was scheduled to take-off for late 1970’s to make a rare alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that occurs once every 175 years possible, to utilise the gravity of each planet.

An illustration of the trajectories of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The spacecraft and its features

• The twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched by NASA in separate months in the summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
• The instruments used in the spacecraft include television cameras — to take images of planets and other celestial bodies — infrared and ultraviolet sensors, magnetometers, plasma detectors, and cosmic-ray and charged-particle sensors.
• As their mission involved going far away from the Sun, they aren’t powered by solar power instead relies on a small nuclear power plant, drawing hundreds of watts from the radioactive decay of a pellet of plutonium.
• The space craft is studded with a golden phonograph record — a 12-inch disc, intended to be a sort of time capsule from Earth to any extra-terrestrial life that might intercept the probes in the distant future.

Notable achievements of the Voyager spacecraft

• Voyager 1 reported that Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, was geologically active.
• It finds the presence of at least eight active volcanoes “spewing material into space, making it one of the most geologically active planetary bodies in the solar system.
• Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 discovered three new moons of Jupiter: Thebe, Metis and Adrastea
• Voyager 1 discovered that Titan (one of the moon of Saturn) wasn’t the biggest moon of our solar system.
• Voyager 2 became the first human-made object to fly by the planet Neptune in 1989.
• The Voyager 2 observed the Great Dark Spot, which was essentially a huge spinning storm in the southern atmosphere of Neptune and it was about the size of the entire Earth.