The two spacecraft Voyagers’ journeys – Going out of our Solar System!  

   

The Voyager spacecrafts are in the news this week. After more than 35 years of travel, these two probes, which were launched in 1977, are nearing the edge of our solar system. Voyager 1 is very close to reaching interstellar space and will be the first manmade object to leave our solar system. I found it incredible that 35 years ago we built space probes that could maintain propulsion for such a long trip and still be able to communicate with us on Earth from such a great distance.

1. What questions come to your mind? Propulsion Evidently the probes still carry the momentum that was generated by the rockets that propelled them from Earth 35 years ago. In the flybys of Jupiter and Saturn they each received velocity boosts through gravitational sling shots around those planets. What’s a Sling shot boost?

Concept: Charles Kohlhase; Artwork: Gary Hovland

This cartoon helped me to better understand the sling shot maneuver used to gain speed. The Jupiter Express train is moving along towards the boy with the tennis ball. The planet Jupiter is also moving along in its orbit around the Sun. The boy throws a tennis ball towards the front of the train at 30 mph. To the conductor who is obviously riding on the train, the tennis ball comes at him at 30 mph and he is driving towards the tennis ball at 50 mph. So to someone on the train the ball is traveling at 80 mph. When the tennis ball bounces off of the train it will bounce with the same speed as it traveled towards the train = 80 mph + the train will give it a boost of its own velocity of 50 mph. So the ball heads off again at 80 + 50 = 130 mph.

I found that Jupiter is traveling through space at 13.07 km/s and the Voyager probe is traveling at about 17,043 m/s. These two speeds have different units. Jupiter’s speed is in kilometers per second and the Voyager spacecraft is in meters per second.

2. Change voyager’s speed to kilometers per second. 38,600 mph (62,100 km/h I also found that Voyager 1 is speeding away from the sun at 3.595 AU/year. An astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU) is a unit of length equal to exactly 149,597,870,700 meters or approximately the mean Earth–Sun distance.

3. If Voyager is traveling at 3.595 AU/year, what is that speed in meters/year?

4. In meters/day?

5. In meters/hours?

6. In meters/second?

7. Does your answer to #6 equal the meters/second that you determined in problem #2? Why or why not?

Communication back to Earth Remarkably, the two spacecraft still send and receive information with Earth. There are 3 huge antennas, ultra-sensitive receivers, and powerful transmitters that transmit and receive over those vast distances. The system is called the Deep space network (DSN). I have a diagram of the range of these stations on the next page. The diagram is from the point of view of the North Pole. The three stations are;

• The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex outside of Barstow, California. • The Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex 37 miles west of Madrid, Spain; • And the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex 25 miles southwest of Canberra,

Australia.

Author: Lou Scheffer

Notice that the ranges of the three stations overlap at about 30,000 kilometers away from Earth.

8. Is 30,000 kilometers about as high as airplane’s fly?

9. About where satellites fly around the earth?

10. Try to describe where 30,000 kilometers above Earth might be.

11. Use a compass to decide the angle of reach of each of these receiving and transmitting stations. There is one more element that I find really interesting about these Voyager spacecraft. Their instruments are powered by atomic batteries, which will fully run out of power in about the year 2020. The spacecraft will still be hurling on in space but will be almost nothing but space garbage ... except for Golden records contained on each craft.

The two Voyagers will have left our Solar system by then. Perhaps one day a being will scoop up those probes and examine them. This is the information that is stored on the Golden records. A stylus is included with the two records for ease of playing. Check it out!

• http://re-lab.net/welcome/sounds2.html

• http://re-lab.net/welcome/images.html

• http://re-lab.net/welcome/lang2.html

Read more about Voyagers 1 and2 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/04/space-voyager-idUSL1E8N407F20121204 http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/factsheet.html http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/didyouknow.html http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-reports/index.htm

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