What if voyager

So, at certain times of the year, the distance between Earth and each Voyager actually decreases. It was never planned that the Voyagers would visit Pluto. The original mission of Voyager was to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Two spacecraft were sent on slightly different paths, first to Jupiter and then, with gravity assists, on to Saturn. Voyager 1 could have been aimed on to Pluto, but exploration of Titan and the rings of Saturn was a primary scientific objective.

This caused the trajectory to be diverted upward out of the ecliptic plane such that no further planetary encounters were possible for Voyager 1.

Once Voyager 1 had successfully gathered data at Titan, Voyager 2 was allowed to go on to Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2, theoretically, could have been aimed for Pluto, but the aim point would have been inside the planet of Neptune - not very practical. So Pluto was the only outer planet the Voyagers didn't visit. Pioneers 10 and 11 had preceded the Voyagers to Jupiter and the asteroid belt was a major concern for them.

By the 's more than minor planets had been discovered and their orbits well determined. Even 50, minor bodies spread over the volume of space occupied by the asteroid belt would produce little direct danger, although a chance collision with an uncatalogued object was possible.

Although the risk of a spacecraft colliding with a charted asteroid was negligible, there was no way to estimate how many particles the size of a grain of sand might be present in the asteroid belt to collide with the spacecraft and seriously damage it". I think you are referring to the series of photos taken by Voyager 1 on Valentine's Day These were the final images taken by either of the Voyager spacecraft. On Feb. Then select Voyager 1 or Voyager 2 and submit the query.

Select Voyager 1 for the portrait, PIA Once you click on a thumbnail, you will get an enlarged image, the original caption that accompanied the picture when released, instructions for downloading, and information for purchasing pictures. The book was a reprint of the Carl Sagan, et al, "Murmurs of Earth" that was originally published in Carl Sagan and his colleagues did the assemblage of the information on the Voyager Golden Phonograph Record.

We have included on the Voyager web site only that information for which we were able to get release, that's why everything, especially the music and the photos, is not there.

Your best bet to find one quickly may be in a public or university library or at a used bookstore. Look for availability of or later versions. In addition to these, Sagan also organized a small group of scientific consultants to provide advice on the message contents. They all worked in the U. We have received almost nothing but praise for the inclusion of the Golden Phonograph Record on Voyager.

We have also received lots of compliments on the contents, however, that praise rightly belongs to Carl Sagan and his colleagues who chose, assembled and got permission to use the material.

There were a few detractors, even as Sagan was formulating the disk. In the Sagan, et al book, "Murmurs of Earth, the Voyager Interstellar Record", while describing some of his earlier work in sending messages from the Arecibo radar, spoke of two protests to that effort. Excerpts from that passage follow: "One was from a few scientists who worried that we hadn't corrected for the speed of Earth in space in launching the message.

He wrote with great anxiety that he felt it was very hazardous to reveal our existence and location to the galaxy. For all we know, any creatures out there were malevolent or hungry, and once they knew of us, the might come to attack or eat us Many other less knowledgeable people had the same concerns. There is a sphere of radio transmission about thirty light years thick expanding outward at the speed of light, announcing to every star it envelops that the earth is full of people.

Our television programs flood space with signals detectable at enormous distances by instruments not much greater than our own. It is a sobering thought that the first news of us may be the outcome of the Super Bowl. Whether or not Sir Martin Ryle is justified in his anxieties about revealing the location of our civilization is of course a debatable subject. Even so, it is too late to worry about it, so we might as well try to be friendly".

There are so many. Voyager is probably the most scientifically productive mission ever. It was only the second mission to visit Jupiter and Saturn and the only one to visit Uranus and Neptune.

Voyager 1 and 2 obtained the first detailed profiles of the atmospheres of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and improved our understanding of the characteristics of the atmosphere of Jupiter. The Voyager spacecraft revealed the enormous amount of detail in the rings of Saturn, discovered the rings of Jupiter and provided the first detailed images of the rings of Uranus and Neptune.

Voyager imaged Earth's moon and discovered twenty-three new moons at the outer planets. Voyager made significant improvements in the measurements of the magnetospheres at Jupiter and Saturn and provided the first measurements of the magnetospheres at Uranus and Neptune. The significance of the Voyager is the vast amount of new knowledge about our outer solar system it provided and the interest in further exploration it generated.

That interest has resulted in the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn as well as the discovery of three new satellites at Saturn using Earth-based instruments. Discovery of active volcanism on Io, a satellite of Jupiter, was probably the greatest surprise.

It was the first time active volcanoes had been seen on another body in the solar system. It appears that activity on Io affects the entire Jovian system. The Voyager spacecraft weight, including hydrazine, at launch was kg or about pounds. It was almost the weight and size of a sub-compact car. The current approximate weight of Voyager 1 is kg and Voyager 2 is kg. The difference is in the amount of hydrazine remaining. Hydrazine is being used to control the spacecrafts' attitude.

The spacecraft, without the various booms could fit inside a cube that is about 4 meters on each side. The approximate measurements of the different structures follow - please refer to the spacecraft picture at the above web site. The high gain antenna is 3. The Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator boom is 3. The Bus Housing Electronics is about 1. The spacecraft height - from the top of the reflector structure in the middle of the high gain antenna to the bottom of the triangular feet below the bus housing electronics - is about 3.

There are messages on the Voyagers in the form of a phonograph record and drawings on the cover that protects the record. Helens was but a tiny hiccup in comparison admittedly, Io's surface-level gravity is some six times weaker than that of Earth. The smooth water-ice surface of Jupiter's moon Europa may hide an ocean beneath, but some scientists believe any past oceans have turned to slush or ice. In Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke wraps his story around the possibility of life developing within the oceans of Europa.

The rings of Saturn appeared to the Voyagers as a dazzling necklace of 10, strands. Trillions of ice particles and car-sized bergs race along each of the million-kilometer-long tracks, with the traffic flow orchestrated by the combined gravitational tugs of Saturn, a retinue of moons and moonlets, and even nearby ring particles.

The rings of Saturn are so thin in proportion to their , km , mi width that, if a full-scale model were to be built with the thickness of a phonograph record the model would have to measure four miles from its inner edge to its outer rim. An intricate tapestry of ring-particle patterns is created by many complex dynamic interactions that have spawned new theories of wave and particle motion.

Saturn's largest moon Titan was seen as a strange world with its dense atmosphere and variety of hydrocarbons that slowly fall upon seas of ethane and methane. To some scientists, Titan, with its principally nitrogen atmosphere, seemed like a small Earth whose evolution had long ago been halted by the arrival of its ice age, perhaps deep-freezing a few organic relics beneath its present surface.

The rings of Uranus are so dark that Voyager's challenge of taking their picture was comparable to the task of photographing a pile of charcoal briquettes at the foot of a Christmas tree, illuminated only by a 1 watt bulb at the top of the tree, using ASA film. And Neptune light levels will be less than half those at Uranus. Through the ages, astronomers have argued without agreeing on where the solar system ends. This boundary is roughly about halfway to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.

Traveling at speeds of over 35, miles per hour, it will take the Voyagers nearly 40, years, and they will have traveled a distance of about two light years to reach this rather indistinct boundary. But there is a more definitive and unambiguous frontier, which the Voyagers will approach and pass through. This is the heliopause, which is the boundary area between the solar and the interstellar wind.

When Voyager 1 crosses the solar wind termination shock, it will have entered into the heliosheath, the turbulent region leading up to the heliopause. Once Voyager is in interstellar space, it will be immersed in matter that came from explosions of nearby stars. So, in a sense, one could consider the heliopause as the final frontier. Were it not for these dwindling consumables and the possibility of losing lock on the faint Sun, our tracking antennas could continue to "talk" with the Voyagers for another century or two!

Overall Mission The total cost of the Voyager mission from May through the Neptune encounter including launch vehicles, radioactive power source RTGs , and DSN tracking support is million dollars. It is important to realize that: on a per-capita basis, this is only 8 cents per U.

A total of 11, workyears was devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the great pyramid at Giza to King Cheops.

Voyager Spacecraft Each Voyager spacecraft comprises 65, individual parts. Navigation Each Voyager used the enormous gravity field of Jupiter to be hurled on to Saturn, experiencing a Sun-relative speed increase of roughly 35, mph. Science The resolution of the Voyager narrow-angle television cameras is sharp enough to read a newspaper headline at a distance of 1 km 0.

In a remarkably short time by cosmic standards the universe being This particular emissary from the human race carries a recording of greetings in 55 languages as well as images explaining who we are.

Although the Voyager scientists had no particular expectation of encountering other civilizations, they knew the mission would go forth unimpeded for millenniums. So they prepared a message for any distant future being who might stumble across this man-made artifact. If "E. We know that planets around other stars "exoplanets" are abundant, and that when liquid water and carbon-based compounds and an energy source are present even in the most inhospitable zones on the Earth, life arises easily.

But the kind of intelligent life that can build and launch a pioneering spacecraft is surely much more rare. And if someone answers the call, it will be sufficiently far in the future that the Earth-bound world as we know it will have changed beyond recognition. Meg Urry. Unlike missions to nearby Mars or Venus, Voyager 1 and 2 both spacecraft were launched in and their older siblings, Pioneer 10 and 11 launched in and , respectively headed for outer space from the beginning. They visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, taking photographs of unprecedented clarity and making complex measurements of the particles and magnetic fields around the planets.

Voyager 1 is the fastest-moving and most distant of the four spacecraft. Data collected by its remaining instruments have been interpreted by scientists as indicating a crossing of the boundary between our solar system and interstellar "between the stars" space. It's not a sharp boundary, and there are definitely no signposts, so there has been some debate about the exact moment of transition.

In fact, the exact date doesn't matter. Whether it was July or August or even months earlier or later, humans have unquestionably projected their presence well beyond any previous location. More Videos NASA: Voyager 1 has left solar system Where no man-made object has gone before It's a bit different from Magellan's voyage, however.

In those ancient days, travel was the only way to investigate the world.