The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft have been navigating space for years with a recording of Earth’s sounds, images, and messages. Voyager 1 is currently 23.3 billion km from Earth, while Voyager 2 is 19.3 billion km away. That means it took two days for engineers to send a message to the spacecraft and receive a response. But NASA’s two iconic vehicles now seem to have come to an end.
SYSTEMS ON VOYAGER WILL START SHUTTING OFF
According to the news of the British Daily Mail newspaper; Launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are designed to take five years to study Jupiter and Saturn. However, they far exceeded that time as they have been traveling in space for 44 years. But NASA now wants to extend the spacecraft’s journeys to about 2030. For this, it plans to start shutting down some systems of vehicles.
“If all goes really well, maybe we can extend the missions into the 2030s. It just depends on energy. That’s the limiting point,” planetary scientist Linda Spilker, who started working on the Voyager missions before they even started, told Scientific American. she said.
ENGLISH MESSAGE ON VOYAGER 1 AND VOYAGER 2
Each Voyager vehicle carries a gold-plated recording of sounds and images from Earth in the event of being captured by an extraterrestrial civilization. There is also a Turkish message in the records saying “Dear our Turkish-speaking friends, good morning sheriffs”.
Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in August 2012 and continues to collect data. No man-made object has traveled farther than NASA’s iconic spacecraft.
“PALE BLUE POINT”
Passing Uranus on February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 photographed our planet as a tiny dot. Four years later, renowned astronomer Carl Sagan shared the photograph’s significance with an audience at Cornell University, naming it the later famous “Pale Blue Dot”.