As it heads out of the solar system never to return, the deep space probe Voyager 1 is headed for yet another cosmic milestone. In late 2026, it will become the first spacecraft to travel so far that a radio signal from Earth takes 24 hours, or one light day, to reach it.
  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    1 day ago

    I was 6-yo, don’t remember watching the launch, but I remember something of the hype. Fucking amazing.

    You would think after all these years and miles that enough dust would have ablated something to failure, cosmic rays would have flipped enough bits to strangle the logic, something, but it rolls on.

    • CentipedeFarrier@piefed.socialEnglish
      20·
      1 day ago

      Fun fact: now that the probes are in interstellar space, they are finding that the universe is full of ……stuff.

      For example, voyager 2, back around May, hit a weird pocket of, they think, plasma. Possibly built up on the edge of the heliosphere like a ship displaces water, or possibly a huge cloud. It changed the course of the probe. So that’s fun and alarming!

      https://blog.sciandnature.com/2025/05/voyager-2-just-turned-back-and-confirms.html?m=1

      Also when they crossed the heliopause (the “boundary” between the magnetic sphere our solar system is in, and interstellar space), they hit a termination shock multiple times each, meaning the heliosphere probably expands and contracts. Neat! Unfortunately we only have two data points so no idea if it’s the same everywhere. And the heliopause, it turns out, is thousands of degrees (30,000-50,000 kelvin), but there are so few particles out there, despite the solar wind pushing stuff away from the sun, that only the sensors picked up the high particle energy, no significant heat transfer happened. Probably why they haven’t suffered failures from ablation, there’s just not much out there.

      Edit to add:

      Apparently a faint signal was detected from near where voyager 1 is now, earlier this month, and it was a weird planned transmission TO voyager, like a ping! Holy shit that’s neat!

      https://www.ecoportal.net/en/voyager-1-receives-ghostly-signal-nasa/14167/

      And another edit for funsies because I found an article from 1993 about the first evidence of the heliopause 15 years after launch, and I think that’s just swell.