Voyager's Amazing Tales

Last Sunday, the Flemish television showed the American documentary “The Fartest”, about the Voyager 1 and 2 missions. The Voyager missions aimed at observing the outer planets of the solar system and flying into interstellar space. The Apollo missions and the Space shuttle received a lot of attention in the press and they remain outstanding achievements. The Voyager missions on the other hand got a bit lost in oblivion, because of the huge time scale (40 years) in which they delivered their results.

I find them however mind-blowing. First, there were the amazing pictures of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and some of their moons. Then we received the amazing views of these remote giants from their undiscovered side. The Voyagers made measurements in the outer skirts of the solar system, confirming the predicted cosmic radiation and the drop of the sun's magnetic field. And last but not least, the Voyagers carried the golden record, which contains a message to any finder civilisation, about the earth and the human kind. The chance that this message is received sometime someplace, is ridiculously low. And yet this message is a message of a courageous and hopeful species. 

Speaking of low probabilities, the amazing thing about the Voyager missions is that they succeeded. The Voyagers had a reprogrammable computer with a memory of around 70 kbyte. They had to be reprogrammed after each planet fly-by. The cameras needed to be adapted to incredibly weak light conditions. The communication signals were also extremely weak at such distance and arrived with several hours delay. No mistakes could be made. An amazing piece of engineering.

I refer to my earlier blog about the book Cosmos , in which the Voyager missions received a dedicated chapter. The book (+1980) already contained the pictures of Jupiter and its moons. The breath-taking pictures we saw later of the giants Saturn, Uranus and Neptune had not even been taken yet when the book was published. Carl Sagan never even had the chance to live the moment the Voyagers left our solar system, now only a few years ago.

Picture from https://images.nasa.gov/