When you travel for some hours you feel much tired. Even our machines get heated and performance quality gets degraded if we make it run for longer time. Now imagine of a machine that is doing it’s work for 30 years in the same perfect and correct condition and still has not stopped. Yes my friends, this machine is the most distant unmanned man-made spacecraft from earth, The Voyager 1. It Started its journey in Sept. 5, 1977 and now is the most distant spacecraft from earth.
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| That small pale blue dot is us, yes its the Earth as viewed from Voyager 1, 4 billion miles away |
The current position of Voyager 1
Voyager is now lying somewhere at the boundary of our solar system known as Heliopause. This is the end of the heliosphere that is created by the charged particles of our sun, here wind travels at supersonic speed until it crosses a shockwave known as termination shock. Voyager has determined that the velocity of the wind at it’s current location has now slowed to zero. In simple language it means that voyager has reached the domain where the solar wind is starting to turn back on itself as it pushes up against the particles of interstellar space.
On Monday this week Voyager rolled 70 degrees anticlockwise as seen from Earth from its normal orientation. It held the position by spinning gyroscopes for two hours, 33 minutes. The spacecraft last performed such a manoeuvre in Feb. 14, 1990 when it took a family picture of our solar system as it was leaving behind. After that, Voyager again rolled back and locked on to its guide star, Alpha Centauri.
After enabling Voyager 1's Low Energy Charged Particle instrument, it gathered the details at it’s current location about the particles and charge and all those things that lie at the official edge of our solar system.
The Voyagers were built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which continues to operate both spacecraft. On march 7 it was at a distance of about 17.5 billion kilometers (10.8 billion miles), so far that it takes the satellite 16 hours for one command for it to receive and execute.
Really Voyager 1 is really making an extraordinary voyage (which fits its name). We hope that it would continue to do so in the coming years.
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