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{{Infobox_Spacecraft| Name = Voyager 1| Image = | Caption =
Voyager spacecraft| Organization = NASA and [Saturn, [1977 IIIE [Centaur rocket rocket| Orbital_elements =| Semimajor_Axis =| Eccentricity =| Inclination =| Orbital_Period =| Apoapsis =| Periapsis =| Orbits =-->
The
Voyager 1 spacecraft is a 722-kilogram [Robotic spacecraft
space probe of the outer
solar system and beyond, launched
September 5, 1977, and currently operational. It visited Jupiter and
Saturn and was the first probe to provide detailed images of the moons of these planets.
Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth, traveling away from both the Earth and the Sun at a relatively faster speed than any other probe. Though its sister-craft,
Voyager 2, was launched one month earlier,
Voyager 2 will never pass
Voyager 1. Neither will the
New Horizons mission to Pluto, despite being launched from Earth at a faster speed than both
Voyager craft, since during its flight
Voyager 1 benefited from a number of
gravitational slingshot speed boosts.
As of August 10,
2007,
Voyager 1 is over 15.49
terameters (15.49 meters, or 15.49 km, 103.6
astronomical unit, 14.36 light-hours, or 9.6
1000000000 (number) miles) from the Sun, and has thus entered the
heliosheath, the termination shock region between the solar system and Interstellar medium, a vast area where the Sun's influence gives way to the other bodies in the galaxy. If
Voyager 1 is still functioning when it finally passes the heliopause, scientists will get their first direct measurements of the conditions in the interstellar medium. At this distance, signals from
Voyager 1 take more than fourteen hours to reach its control center at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a joint project of NASA and Caltech near Pasadena, California.
Voyager 1 is on a hyperbolic trajectory and has achieved escape velocity, meaning that its orbit will not return to the inner solar system. Along with
Pioneer 10,
Pioneer 11,
New Horizons, and
Voyager 2,
Voyager 1 is an
interstellar probe.
Voyager 1 had as its primary targets the planets Jupiter and Saturn and their associated moons and rings; its current mission is the detection of the heliopause and particle measurements of
solar wind and the interstellar medium. Both
Voyager probes are powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which have far outlasted their originally intended lifespan, and are now expected to continue to generate enough power to keep communicating with Earth until at least around the year 2020.
Mission profile
Centaur (rocket stage)Voyager 1 was originally planned as
Mariner 11 of the
Mariner program. From the outset, it was designed to take advantage of the then-new technique of gravity assist. Luckily, the development of interplanetary probes coincided with an alignment of the planets called the
Planetary Grand Tour. The Grand Tour was a linked series of gravity assists that, with only the minimal fuel needed for course corrections, would enable a single probe to visit all four of the
solar system's
gas giant planets:
Jupiter,
Saturn,
Uranus (planet) and
Neptune (planet). The identical
Voyager 1 and
Voyager 2 probes were designed with the Grand Tour in mind, and their launches were timed to enable the Grand Tour if desired.
Because of this alignment,
Voyager could visit each of these planets in just twelve years, instead of the 30 that would usually be required.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5,
1977 by
NASA from
Cape Canaveral aboard a
Titan rocket IIIE
Centaur rocket rocket, shortly after its sister craft,
Voyager 2 on August 20,
1977. Despite being launched after
Voyager 2,
Voyager 1 was sent on a faster trajectory so it reached Jupiter and Saturn before its sister craft.
Initially, an underburn in the second stage of the Titan IIIE rocket left an estimated one second's worth of fuel remaining in that stage. Although ground crews were worried that
Voyager 1 would not make it to Jupiter, the Centaur upper stage proved to have enough fuel to compensate.
For details on the
Voyager instrument packages, see the separate article on the
Voyager program.
Jupiter
Voyager 1 began photographing
Jupiter in January 1979. Its closest approach to Jupiter was on
March 5, 1979, at a distance of 349,000 kilometers (217,000
miles) from its center. Due to the greater resolution allowed by close approach, most observations of the moons, rings, magnetic fields, and radiation environment of the Jupiter system were made in the 48-hour period bracketing closest approach. It finished photographing the planet in April.
The two
Voyager spacecraft made a number of important discoveries about Jupiter and its satellites. The most surprising was the existence of volcanic activity on
Io (moon), which had not been observed from the ground or by
Pioneer 10 or
11.image:790106-0203 Voyager 58M to 31M reduced.gif |
Voyager 1 time lapse movie of Jupiter approach.image:Great Red Spot From Voyager 1.jpg | The Great Red Spot as seen from
Voyager 1.Image:Volcanic crater with radiating lava flows on Io.jpg | Color picture of Io, Jupiter's innermost Galilean satellite.image:Jupiter from Voyager 1.jpg | False color detail of Jupiter's atmosphere, as imaged by
Voyager 1.image:Valhalla crater on Callisto.jpg | Valhalla crater on Callisto. Image taken by
Voyager 1 in 1979.
Saturn
The gravity assist at Jupiter was successful, and the spacecraft went on to visit
Saturn (planet).
Voyager 1's Saturn flyby occurred in November 1980, with the closest approach on
November 12 when it came within 124,000 kilometers (77,000 miles) of the planet's cloud-tops. The craft detected complex structures in Saturn's rings, and studied the atmospheres of Saturn and
Titan (moon). Because of the earlier discovery of a thick atmosphere on Titan, the
Voyager controllers at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory elected for
Voyager 1 to make a close approach of Titan and terminate its Grand Tour. (For the continuation of the Grand Tour, see the Uranus and Neptune sections of the
Voyager 2 article.) The Titan-approach trajectory caused an additional gravity assist that took
Voyager 1 out of the plane of the
ecliptic, thus ending its planetary science mission.image:Vg1_p23254.gif|
Voyager 1 image of Saturn from 5.3 million km, four days after its closest approach.Image:Titan Harze.jpg | Layers of haze covering Saturn's satellite Titan.image:Titan's thick haze layer-picture from voyager1.jpg | Titan's thick haze layer is shown in this enhanced
Voyager 1 image.image:Voyager1-saturn-f-ring.jpg|
Voyager 1 image of Saturn's F ring.
Interstellar mission
It is estimated that both
Voyager craft have sufficient electrical power to operate at least some instruments until 2020, which will be 43 years after launch.
{| class="wikitable"! Year || End of specific capabilities as a result of the available electrical power limitations|-| 2003 || Terminate scan platform and UV observations|-| ~2010 || Termination of gyro operations|-| ~2010 || Termination of DTR operations (limited by ability to capture 1.4 kbit/s data using a 70 m/34 m antenna array)|-| ~2016 || Initiate instrument power sharing|-| > 2020 || Can no longer power any single instrument|}
Heliopause
.
As
Voyager 1 heads for interstellar space, its instruments continue to study the solar system;
JPL scientists are using the plasma wave experiments aboard
Voyager 1 and
2 to look for the
heliopause.
Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory believe that
Voyager 1 entered the
termination shock in February 2003.Some other scientists have expressed doubt, discussed in the journal
Nature (journal) of November 6 2003. In a scientific session at the American Geophysical Union meeting in
New Orleans on the morning of
May 25 2005, Dr. Ed Stone presented evidence that
Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock in December 2004. The issue will not be resolved for some months as other data become available, since
Voyager's solar-wind detector ceased functioning in 1990. However, in May 2005 a NASA press release said that consensus was that
Voyager 1 was now in the heliosheath. Scientists believe the craft will reach the
heliopause in 2015.
Current status
As of August 22,
2007,
Voyager 1 was at a distance of 103.6 astronomical unit (approximately 15.5
terameters, 9.7 1000000000 (number)
miles or 0.0016 light years) from the
Sun, which makes it the most distant human-made object from Earth. Pioneering NASA Spacecraft Mark Thirty Years of Flight Aug 20, 2007, Week Ending
March 9 2007 At this distance, it is more distant from the Sun than any known natural solar system object, including 90377 Sedna. Though Sedna has an orbit that takes it 975 AU away from the Sun at
apsis, as of 2006 it is less than 90 AU away from the Sun and approaching its
perihelion at 76 AU.CNN: " NASA: Voyager I enters solar system's final frontier", May 25, 2005CNN: " NASA: Voyager II detects solar system's edge", May 23, 2006
At its current distance, light (which travels at
Speed of light) takes over 13.8 hours to reach the spacecraft from
Earth. As a basis for comparison, the Moon is about 1.4 light seconds from Earth, the
Sun is about 8.5 light minutes away, and Pluto is at an average distance of approximately 5.5 light hours.
As of 2005, the spacecraft was traveling at a speed of 17.2 kilometers per second relative to the sun (3.6 AU per year or 38,400 miles per hour), 10% faster than
Voyager 2. Accurate information concerning its location can be found in this NASA paper with heliocentric coordinates extrapolated up to 2015 of both probes.
Voyager 1 is not heading towards any particular star, but in 40,000 years it will be within 1.7 light years of the star AC+793888 in the
Camelopardis constellation.
On
March 31 2006, the
amateur radio operators from AMSAT
Germany tracked and received data from
Voyager 1 using the dish at
Bochum with a long integration technique. Its data were checked and verified against data from the
Deep Space Network station at
Madrid,
Spain. AMSAT-DL article in German; ARRL article in English This is believed to be the first such tracking of
Voyager.
Voyager 1, as of 2006, is at 12.22° declination and 17.051 hours right ascension, placing it in the constellation
Ophiuchus. NASA continues daily tracking of the spacecraft with the Deep Space Network stations.
See also
References
External links
- NASA Voyager website
- Voyager Spacecraft Lifetime — interstellar mission coverage.
- Voyager 1 Mission Profile by NASA's Solar System Exploration
- Spacecraft Escaping the Solar System — current positions and diagrams
- Weekly Mission Reports — includes information on current spacecraft state
- We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot. A short film on The Pale Blue Dot picture taken by Voyager. Narrated by Carl Sagan.
{{Infobox_Spacecraft| Name = Voyager 1| Image = | Caption =
Voyager spacecraft| Organization =
NASA and [Saturn, [1977 IIIE [Centaur rocket rocket| Orbital_elements =| Semimajor_Axis =| Eccentricity =| Inclination =| Orbital_Period =| Apoapsis =| Periapsis =| Orbits =-->
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is a 722-kilogram [Robotic spacecraft space probe of the outer solar system and beyond, launched September 5, 1977, and currently operational. It visited Jupiter and
Saturn and was the first probe to provide detailed images of the moons of these planets.
Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from
Earth, traveling away from both the Earth and the Sun at a relatively faster speed than any other probe. Though its sister-craft,
Voyager 2, was launched one month earlier,
Voyager 2 will never pass
Voyager 1. Neither will the
New Horizons mission to
Pluto, despite being launched from Earth at a faster speed than both
Voyager craft, since during its flight
Voyager 1 benefited from a number of
gravitational slingshot speed boosts.
As of August 10,
2007,
Voyager 1 is over 15.49 terameters (15.49 meters, or 15.49 km, 103.6
astronomical unit, 14.36 light-hours, or 9.6
1000000000 (number) miles) from the Sun, and has thus entered the
heliosheath, the termination shock region between the solar system and
Interstellar medium, a vast area where the Sun's influence gives way to the other bodies in the galaxy. If
Voyager 1 is still functioning when it finally passes the
heliopause, scientists will get their first direct measurements of the conditions in the interstellar medium. At this distance, signals from
Voyager 1 take more than fourteen hours to reach its control center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a joint project of NASA and Caltech near Pasadena, California.
Voyager 1 is on a
hyperbolic trajectory and has achieved escape velocity, meaning that its orbit will not return to the inner solar system. Along with
Pioneer 10,
Pioneer 11,
New Horizons, and
Voyager 2,
Voyager 1 is an interstellar probe.
Voyager 1 had as its primary targets the planets Jupiter and Saturn and their associated moons and rings; its current mission is the detection of the heliopause and particle measurements of
solar wind and the
interstellar medium. Both
Voyager probes are powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which have far outlasted their originally intended lifespan, and are now expected to continue to generate enough power to keep communicating with Earth until at least around the year 2020.
Mission profile
Centaur (rocket stage)
Voyager 1 was originally planned as
Mariner 11 of the Mariner program. From the outset, it was designed to take advantage of the then-new technique of gravity assist. Luckily, the development of interplanetary probes coincided with an alignment of the planets called the
Planetary Grand Tour. The Grand Tour was a linked series of gravity assists that, with only the minimal fuel needed for course corrections, would enable a single probe to visit all four of the
solar system's gas giant
planets:
Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus (planet) and Neptune (planet). The identical
Voyager 1 and
Voyager 2 probes were designed with the Grand Tour in mind, and their launches were timed to enable the Grand Tour if desired.
Because of this alignment,
Voyager could visit each of these planets in just twelve years, instead of the 30 that would usually be required.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5,
1977 by NASA from
Cape Canaveral aboard a
Titan rocket IIIE Centaur rocket rocket, shortly after its sister craft,
Voyager 2 on August 20, 1977. Despite being launched after
Voyager 2,
Voyager 1 was sent on a faster trajectory so it reached Jupiter and Saturn before its sister craft.
Initially, an underburn in the second stage of the Titan IIIE rocket left an estimated one second's worth of fuel remaining in that stage. Although ground crews were worried that
Voyager 1 would not make it to Jupiter, the Centaur upper stage proved to have enough fuel to compensate.
For details on the
Voyager instrument packages, see the separate article on the
Voyager program.
Jupiter
Voyager 1 began photographing Jupiter in January 1979. Its closest approach to Jupiter was on March 5, 1979, at a distance of 349,000 kilometers (217,000 miles) from its center. Due to the greater resolution allowed by close approach, most observations of the moons, rings, magnetic fields, and radiation environment of the Jupiter system were made in the 48-hour period bracketing closest approach. It finished photographing the planet in April.
The two
Voyager spacecraft made a number of important discoveries about Jupiter and its satellites. The most surprising was the existence of
volcanic activity on Io (moon), which had not been observed from the ground or by
Pioneer 10 or
11.image:790106-0203 Voyager 58M to 31M reduced.gif |
Voyager 1 time lapse movie of Jupiter approach.image:Great Red Spot From Voyager 1.jpg | The Great Red Spot as seen from
Voyager 1.Image:Volcanic crater with radiating lava flows on Io.jpg | Color picture of Io, Jupiter's innermost Galilean satellite.image:Jupiter from Voyager 1.jpg | False color detail of Jupiter's atmosphere, as imaged by
Voyager 1.image:Valhalla crater on Callisto.jpg | Valhalla crater on Callisto. Image taken by
Voyager 1 in 1979.
Saturn
The gravity assist at Jupiter was successful, and the spacecraft went on to visit
Saturn (planet).
Voyager 1's Saturn flyby occurred in November 1980, with the closest approach on November 12 when it came within 124,000 kilometers (77,000 miles) of the planet's cloud-tops. The craft detected complex structures in Saturn's rings, and studied the atmospheres of Saturn and
Titan (moon). Because of the earlier discovery of a thick atmosphere on Titan, the
Voyager controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory elected for
Voyager 1 to make a close approach of Titan and terminate its Grand Tour. (For the continuation of the Grand Tour, see the Uranus and Neptune sections of the
Voyager 2 article.) The Titan-approach trajectory caused an additional gravity assist that took
Voyager 1 out of the plane of the ecliptic, thus ending its planetary science mission.image:Vg1_p23254.gif|
Voyager 1 image of Saturn from 5.3 million km, four days after its closest approach.Image:Titan Harze.jpg | Layers of haze covering Saturn's satellite Titan.image:Titan's thick haze layer-picture from voyager1.jpg | Titan's thick haze layer is shown in this enhanced
Voyager 1 image.image:Voyager1-saturn-f-ring.jpg|
Voyager 1 image of Saturn's F ring.
Interstellar mission
It is estimated that both
Voyager craft have sufficient electrical power to operate at least some instruments until 2020, which will be 43 years after launch.
{| class="wikitable"! Year || End of specific capabilities as a result of the available electrical power limitations|-| 2003 || Terminate scan platform and UV observations|-| ~2010 || Termination of gyro operations|-| ~2010 || Termination of DTR operations (limited by ability to capture 1.4 kbit/s data using a 70 m/34 m antenna array)|-| ~2016 || Initiate instrument power sharing|-| > 2020 || Can no longer power any single instrument|}
Heliopause
.
As
Voyager 1 heads for interstellar space, its instruments continue to study the solar system;
JPL scientists are using the plasma wave experiments aboard
Voyager 1 and
2 to look for the
heliopause.
Scientists at the
Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory believe that
Voyager 1 entered the termination shock in February 2003.Some other scientists have expressed doubt, discussed in the journal
Nature (journal) of
November 6 2003. In a scientific session at the
American Geophysical Union meeting in
New Orleans on the morning of May 25 2005, Dr. Ed Stone presented evidence that
Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock in December 2004. The issue will not be resolved for some months as other data become available, since
Voyager's solar-wind detector ceased functioning in 1990. However, in May 2005 a NASA press release said that consensus was that
Voyager 1 was now in the
heliosheath. Scientists believe the craft will reach the
heliopause in 2015.
Current status
As of
August 22,
2007,
Voyager 1 was at a distance of 103.6 astronomical unit (approximately 15.5
terameters, 9.7 1000000000 (number)
miles or 0.0016 light years) from the Sun, which makes it the most distant human-made object from Earth. Pioneering NASA Spacecraft Mark Thirty Years of Flight Aug 20, 2007, Week Ending
March 9 2007 At this distance, it is more distant from the Sun than any known natural solar system object, including
90377 Sedna. Though Sedna has an orbit that takes it 975 AU away from the Sun at
apsis, as of 2006 it is less than 90 AU away from the Sun and approaching its
perihelion at 76 AU.CNN: " NASA: Voyager I enters solar system's final frontier", May 25, 2005CNN: " NASA: Voyager II detects solar system's edge", May 23, 2006
At its current distance, light (which travels at Speed of light) takes over 13.8 hours to reach the spacecraft from
Earth. As a basis for comparison, the
Moon is about 1.4 light seconds from Earth, the Sun is about 8.5 light minutes away, and
Pluto is at an average distance of approximately 5.5 light hours. As of 2005, the spacecraft was traveling at a speed of 17.2 kilometers per second relative to the sun (3.6 AU per year or 38,400 miles per hour), 10% faster than
Voyager 2. Accurate information concerning its location can be found in this NASA paper with heliocentric coordinates extrapolated up to 2015 of both probes.
Voyager 1 is not heading towards any particular star, but in 40,000 years it will be within 1.7 light years of the star AC+793888 in the Camelopardis constellation.
On March 31
2006, the amateur radio operators from AMSAT
Germany tracked and received data from
Voyager 1 using the dish at
Bochum with a long integration technique. Its data were checked and verified against data from the
Deep Space Network station at Madrid,
Spain. AMSAT-DL article in German; ARRL article in English This is believed to be the first such tracking of
Voyager.
Voyager 1, as of 2006, is at 12.22° declination and 17.051 hours right ascension, placing it in the constellation Ophiuchus. NASA continues daily tracking of the spacecraft with the
Deep Space Network stations.
See also
References
External links
- NASA Voyager website
- Voyager Spacecraft Lifetime — interstellar mission coverage.
- Voyager 1 Mission Profile by NASA's Solar System Exploration
- Spacecraft Escaping the Solar System — current positions and diagrams
- Weekly Mission Reports — includes information on current spacecraft state
- We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot. A short film on The Pale Blue Dot picture taken by Voyager. Narrated by Carl Sagan.
Voyager, The Interstellar Mission
Detailed information on NASA missions to the outer planets and the first spacecraft to reach Uranus and Neptune.
Voyager 1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is a 722-kilogram robotic space probe of the outer solar system and beyond, launched September 5, 1977, and currently operational.
Lisol Voyager 1.2.6
Welcome to Caerphilly County Borough Council's installation of Lisol Voyager. This software is designed to support two very important aspects of school work - assessment and ...
Voyager
1977 : Mariner Jupiter/Saturn 1977 is renamed Voyager: Aug. 20: Voyager 2 launched from Kennedy Space Flight Center: Sept. 5: Voyager 1 launched from Kennedy Space Flight Center
NASA - Voyager
NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has followed its twin, Voyager 1, into the solar system's final frontier, a vast region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up ...
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Voyager 1 pushes for deep space
The Voyager 1 probe, the most distant human-made object, is fast approaching the edge of the Solar System.
NSSDC: Voyager Project Information
Data collected by Voyager 1 and 2 were not confined to the periods surrounding encounters with the outer gas giants, with the various fields and particles experiments and the ...
Voyager
Voyager 2 was launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1, which was put on a faster, shorter trajectory to Jupiter on September 5, 1977.
Voyager 1: exit stage left • The Register
Voyager 1 has officially left the solar system, having crossed the so-called termination shock in December last year. The craft crossed the boundary 94 astronomical units (the ...
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Voyager going strong 25 years on
Voyager 2 was launched first, on 20 August, followed by Voyager 1 some 16 days later. During the first 12 years after launch in 1977, they produced a wealth of discoveries about ...
