Stellar Horizons: Voyager 1

Margarita is a Student Ambassador in Greece, leading a series of articles about Aerospace Engineering as part of her leadership project.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft has been exploring our solar system since 1977 carrying onboard a Golden Record containing sounds, music and images from Earth, intended for any aliens or future humans who chance upon the craft. Sounds engraved into the copper vinyl include nature recordings of birdsong, thunder and wind, greetings in more than 50 languages, and music by artists including Bach, Chuck Berry, Beethoven, Blind Willie Johnson and Mozart.

Now it is in interstellar space, the region outside the heliopause. Heliopause is the bubble of energetic particles and magnetic fields from our Sun. It discovered the thin ring around Jupiter and two of its Jovian moons; Thebe and Metis. While on its journey it discovered five new moons of Saturn and the G-ring.

It was the first human-made spacecraft to exceed the heliopause where the forces of Space are stronger than our Sun’s.  Voyager 1 began studying Jupiter in April 1978 at a range of 165 million miles, taking a picture every 96 seconds to create a timelapse movie of the approach. In early 1979, Voyager 1 discovered a faint ring system around Jupiter. The spacecraft photographed Saturn’s moons Titan, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, and Rhea. All the moons appeared to be composed largely of water ice. Titan’s surface was coated in a thick atmosphere cutting off contact with its surface. It was composed of 90% Nitrogen, while more complex hydrocarbons indicated prebiotic chemical reactions.

One of its last images was a faint dot that was actually our Earth taken 3.7 billion miles away from the Sun on February 14 1990. Voyager 1 was so far away that from its vantage point Earth was just a point of light about a pixel in size. The American astronomer Carl Sagan poignantly wrote about the photo in his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space:

“Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives... every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there– on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

This article was written with the assistance of GenAI tools.