Voyager Golden Record: Encyclopedia II - Voyager Golden Record - Journey

Voyager Golden Record - Journey

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, and left the solar system (in the sense of passing the termination shock) in November 2003. It is now in empty space, with forty thousand years expected to elapse before it or Voyager 2 makes a close approach to any other solar system.

The Voyagers are identical but on different flight paths. In May 2005, Voyager 1 was 8.7 billion miles from the Sun and traveling at a speed of 3.6 AU per year while Voyager 2 is about 6.5 billion miles away and moving at about 3.3 AU per year. One 'AU' equals the distance between the Sun and Earth, or 93 million miles.

Voyager 1 has entered the heliosheath, the region beyond the termination shock. The termination shock is where the solar wind, a thin stream of electrically charged gas blowing continuously outward from the Sun, is slowed by pressure from gas between the stars. At the termination shock, the solar wind slows abruptly from its average speed of 300 to 700 km per second (700,000 - 1,500,000 miles per hour) and becomes denser and hotter. [1]

As Carl Sagan has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

Some others suggest that the only civilization that will encounter it will be our own, when in a few hundred years it is retrieved and placed into a space museum.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Journey", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki