Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are approaching the farthest area that the sun can influence (Voyager 1 has flown out of the solar system), and further away is interstellar space. Scientists can only guess what they will meet there-nothing on earth is as far away as they are. In a little more than ten years, their nuclear power source will become very weak, and they will no longer be able to send back information to the earth. But even if there is no power source, they will continue their lonely expedition, and then their remaining tasks are just to survive and fly. Even if all life on the earth disappears, as long as there are other intelligent life in the universe, they will know that the spacecraft has been to several other planets from an asteroid in the Milky Way.
Edward Stone, the main executor of Voyager Plan and an internationally renowned physicist, has been tracking Voyager's trajectory since 1972.
Edward Stone
He later said with emotion: "In the past 40 years, travelers have been like my family. We * * * enjoy every milestone of the' traveler' on the journey. "
cross the border
From June, 5438 to February, 2004, Voyager 1 crossed the boundary shock zone at a distance of140 billion kilometers from the Earth.
In August 2007, Voyager 2 crossed the boundary shock zone at a distance of 65.438+0.26 billion kilometers from the Earth.
The boundary shock wave region refers to the region where the solar wind suddenly drops from supersonic to subsonic. Because this area is closer to a vacuum than anywhere else on earth, neither of the two "travelers" will be affected. In fact, only the instruments they carry are sensitive to shock waves. American scientists have confirmed that the unmanned space probe Voyager 1 launched by NASA on September 5, 977 has flown out of the solar system.
At present, "Voyager 1" has accelerated to jump out of the solar system's outermost layer-heliosphere. Heliosphere, also called solar wind layer, refers to the huge bubbles formed by charged particles ejected from the sun.
Breaking through the heliosphere, the pair of "travelers" will encounter ionized gas in interstellar space, and they will bring great surprises to scientists-they will fly out of the solar system. So far, everything built by human beings has never left the solar atmosphere. Except navigator 1.
Visit this planet
Voyager 1 launched on September 5th, 1977, and overtook Pioneer 10 on February 7th, 1998. By then, the former will relay the latter and become the man-made object that flies farthest in space.
This baton handover happened because the speed of Voyager 1 reached 6 1 155 km/h, while the speed of Pioneer 10 was 45,062 km/h. Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977 at a speed of 53913 km/h. The distance traveled by two "travelers" in an hour is equivalent to one and a half times the circumference of the earth. By the end of March 20 13, the distance between Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 was1800 million kilometers. Contact with the outer planets (once every 175 years) enables two "travelers" to visit all four outer planets along the way. The two aircrafts took different paths when launching: they both passed through Jupiter and Saturn,
Voyager 2 also visited Uranus and Neptune.
Interstellar travel
If these two detectors can be seen from the earth, Voyager 1 now looks like Ophiuchus.
In 40272, "Voyager 1" will pass by at a distance of 0.64 light years from the star/kloc-0 of Lubao constellation AC+79 3888. Voyager 2 should now look like it is in the telescope constellation in the southern sky. In another 40 176 years,
It will pass the red dwarf Ross 248 in Andromeda in the northern constellation within 1.65 light years.
border area
In the process of flying over the top of the heliosphere (the area where the solar wind slows down under the inward pressure of interstellar space gas and magnetic field), two "travelers" brought some surprises to scientists. Voyager 1 found that the magnetic field fluctuation of the solar system is mainly along the direction of planetary motion, rather than balanced distribution. It also found that, unlike scientists' previous expectations, the density of high-energy cosmic rays generally increases with the increase of magnetic field and its fluctuation. Scientists once thought that such fluctuations would disperse cosmic rays. Data from two Voyagers and another plane, NASA's interstellar boundary explorer, also show that the bow shock wave between heliosphere and interstellar space (similar to the shock wave leading to supersonic explosion) that scientists have long suspected does not exist. On the contrary, the heliosphere travels slowly enough through interstellar clouds (a thin mixture of hydrogen and helium) to form bow shock waves, but only bow waves.
detecting instrument
The planetary exploration instruments carried by two navigators, such as the imager, were closed in 1990, but they also carried instruments to study the heliosphere and interstellar space. Voyager 1 is equipped with magnetometers and detectors to measure the mass, velocity and direction of low-energy charged particles, cosmic rays and plasma waves. Voyager 2 not only carries these four instruments, but also carries a detector that directly measures the density of solar wind.
Huge data
The two Voyagers embody the most advanced technology in the 1970s, including 8-track magnetic tapes and similar instruments. Compared with today's deep space vehicles, these most advanced technologies were primitive. The memory of two "travelers" computers is only 16K, which is less than one hundred thousandth of that of mobile phones. However, these two detectors are also massive observers. So far, they have sent back more than 5 trillion bits of data to the earth, enough to fill more than 7,000 music CDs.
Task force
Two "travelers" send back data to the earth every day, but they are too far away from the earth, and their signals take almost 17 hours to reach the earth. Most of the information is sent back at the rate of 160 bits per second within 4 hours, and most of it is engineering data about the health status of the aircraft. These weak signals (the signal intensity is less than one billion times that of electronic watches) are collected by NASA's deep space network in California, Spain and Australia, and then sent back to the Jet Dynamics Laboratory, which continuously issues weekly status reports of Voyager. At present, Voyager's flight team is only about 10, and the scientific team has about 20 part-time scientists (they are also busy with other space missions). This is far from the number of full-time scientific team members during Voyager's visit to planets of the solar system, which is about 200, and it is pitiful compared with the number of flight team members at that time, which is about 325. At that time, the control center of the Jet Power Laboratory was crowded, and people flocked to watch the images sent back by "travelers", interview scientists and broadcast live on TV. However, today's "Traveler" project is not deserted, because scientists don't have to go in person now, they can use computers to analyze the "Traveler" data sent from their offices.
Looking for a bosom friend
Before and after the Voyager Plan, 2,000 scientists worked hard. About 5,000 names of them and their families were written on "Travelers". "Traveler" also carries CDs reflecting the portraits of the earth and various sounds of the earth, hoping to convey the information from the earth to possible extraterrestrial intelligent life. Regrettably, they have not met such a life so far.
In the past few decades, Voyager's camera has sent back many amazing images to the earth: the overturned Jupiter storm,
Io's volcano, Titan's orange cloud, the fractured surface of Venus, and so on. Together, Voyager shows us a more colorful solar system than we thought. Friends who like astronomical photos can look through the historical articles of the encyclopedia of the universe. )
Nowadays, although other aircrafts let us see more spectacular alien scenes, "Navigator" is still unique-they leave all other aircrafts far behind. 10000 generations later, Voyager 2 will reach Sirius, the brightest star in the earth's night sky, after flying 40 trillion kilometers.