Some time soon we will have to say farewell to our most distant emissary – the Voyager 1 spacecraft. After almost 50 years in space, it’s 15 billion miles away and showing signs of wear and could soon stop transmitting.
Late last year, Voyager 1 began to decline, sending back spools of gibberish to its handlers on this planet. A few days ago, Nasa engineers finally traced the problem back to a single chip but it’s clear that Voyager 1 will shortly have to cut contact and make its way out across the universe on its own. It’s strange to think that it will be exploring on out into deep space long after its makers – humans – have become extinct.
Who knows what alien skies Voyager might traverse during some distant eon
Voyager’s isolation is impossible for us truly to comprehend. Light – the fastest possible traveller – takes just over a second to reach the moon, and about four hours to pass the most distant planet, Neptune. Yet to reach Voyager it takes more than 22 hours.
Along with its sister probe, Voyager 2, Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 to take advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets. The Voyagers found wonders, particularly on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. They sent back staggeringly detailed photographs of the planets as they passed. But once sent outwards there was no turning back. The Voyagers, along with two previous spacecraft, Pioneers 10 and 11, and the subsequent New Horizons probe that reached Pluto in 2015, are, along with a handful of ancillary objects, the only ones ever to leave our solar system.
From where Voyager is now, the sun is still the brightest star in the sky, though nowhere near as bright as it is from Earth. The planets and the Earth are barely visible at all.
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