Voyager spacecraft celebrate thirty years in space

Both spacecraft are moving rapidly towards interstellar space, an unprecedented and historically significant achievement for NASA

The spacecraft Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977 and its sister Voyager 1 was launched on September 5 of the same year. They continued to transmit information from distances 3 times greater than the distance to Pluto.

Pictured: Artist's impression of the Voyager spacecraft hurtling through interstellar space. Image: NASA / JPL

The Voyager mission is a legendary mission in the history of space exploration. It opened our eyes to the scientific horizons of the outer solar system, and it is also the farthest mission from the sun ever launched, says Alan Stern, NASA assistant administrator at the Science Mission Administration in Washington. "This is the will of the designers of the spacecraft, their builders and factories, when the two spacecraft continue to transmit important findings more than 25 years after their main mission - to explore Jupiter and Saturn, was completed.

In the first dozen years of their operation, the Voyager spacecraft made detailed observations of Jupiter, Saturn and their moons, and the first (and so far only) scan of Uranus and Neptune. The spacecraft transmitted images never seen before, and much scientific information, making fundamental discoveries about the outer planets and their moons. The spacecraft revealed Jupiter's swirling atmosphere, which included about a dozen interacting hurricane-like storms, and erupting volcanoes on the Jupiter moon Io. They also showed ripples and subtle structures in the rings caused by the pull of nearby moons.

For the past 18 years, the two Voyager spacecraft have toured the Sun's outer heliosphere and the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space. Both spacecraft are still functioning in good condition and continue to transmit scientific data thirty years after their launch.

Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object, having so far covered a distance of 15.5 billion kilometers from the Sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion km from the Sun. Initially, they were supposed to carry out a four-year mission to Jupiter and Saturn, and their mission was extended due to their achievements and also due to a rare alignment of all the planets that occurs once every 175 years (one of the dangers in which they scared us in 1984, but NASA did not panic, on the contrary, it took advantage of it). The mission became a journey of one of the spacecraft - Voyager 2, to four planets. After completing the extended mission, the two spacecraft began their new mission - to explore the outer heliosphere.

"The Voyager missions opened up our solar system in a way that was not possible before the space age," said Edward Stone, Voyager project science director at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "It revealed our neighbors in the outer solar system and showed us how much more there is to learn and how diverse the bodies that share the solar system with us are."

In December 2004, Voyager 1 began crossing the last boundary of the solar system - the heliosheath, an area full of turbulence about 14 billion kilometers from the sun. In this region, the solar wind slows down as it crashes into a thin layer of gas that fills the interstellar space. Voyager 2 is supposed to reach this limit later in 2007, thus both spacecraft will officially be in interstellar space.

Each spacecraft contains five fully functional scientific instruments that examine the solar wind, energetic particles, magnetic field and radio waves as they traverse the unexplored region of deep space. The spacecraft are too far from the sun to be able to use the sun's energy. They consume less than 300 watts, the amount of electricity needed to light one bright light bulb. Their thermonuclear reactors provide the power.

"The continued operation of the spacecraft and the stream of data reaching scientists is a tribute to the skills and dedication of a small operations team," says Ed Massey, Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Massey is in charge of a team of about a dozen people responsible for the day-to-day operation of the Voyager spacecraft.

The spacecraft communicate home through NASA's Deep Space Network, a network of antennas around the world. The spacecraft are so far away that communication with Earth, moving at the speed of Huo, takes 14 hours each way with Voyager 1 and 12 hours to reach Voyager 2. Each of the spacecraft covers about 1.5 million km per day. In each of the Voyager spacecrafts there is a golden record that serves as a time capsule containing peace messages, images and sounds from Earth. The disc also has an instruction on where to find Earth, should someone or something capture the spaceship in the distant future.

NASA's last mission to the edge of the solar system is New Horizons, which is behind Jupiter and continues to Pluto, which it will reach in 2015.

For information on the NASA website