A Brief History
On August 20, 1977, the United States space probe, Voyager 2 was launched with the mission of studying the outer portions of our solar system and then becoming the first (with its sister ship, Voyager 1, actually launched 2 weeks later) man made object to enter inter-stellar space.
Digging Deeper
These Voyager spacecraft have sent back information about Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter and Neptune and the moons of those planets, and are expected to continue to send back data (including images) until about 2020 when their Plutonium powered generators run down, with perhaps another 5 years of weak data. They have been operating in space for over 40 years, and still work as designed, though of course not perfectly.
Voyager 2 is currently over twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, and at would take over 80,000 years at its current speed to reach the nearest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri. That same speed translates into over 19,000 years to travel 1 light year. It is expected to be totally clear of our solar system around 2016, and even after its power source dies out will continue to travel away from our solar system, until perhaps it runs into something, although it has been given no particular target.
Both of the Voyager craft contain a gold plated audio record of various language messages and common “Earth” sounds, with the intention that intelligent Extraterrestrials would find it and somehow determine their source and meaning.
Brilliant scientist Stephen Hawking has called this effort a mistake, saying that it is most likely that any advanced life form that can travel to the Earth is likely to treat us the way we have treated lesser life forms, such as kill, enslave, or eat us. (Note: The author agrees with Hawking!)
Each of the Voyager space ships consist of over 65,000 parts, and the total cost so far has been a little under a billion dollars. That is only about 8 cents per year per American during the duration of the program so far, making this perspective seem like a bargain. The Voyagers have sent back over 5 trillion bits of data to the Earth.
Question for students (and subscribers): Is it worth the trouble and expense to send these space craft out of our solar system? Should we attempt to contact extraterrestrial beings? Let us know what you think about our space program, and what its goals should or should not be, in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Evans, Ben. NASA’S Voyager Missions: Exploring the Outer Solar System and Beyond (Springer Praxis Books). Springer, 2008.
