VOYAGER SPACECRAFT
WHY IN NEWS ?
- Recently NASA detected a signal from its Voyager 2 spacecraft on August 1, after losing communication for over a week.
ABOUT VOYAGER SPACECRAFT :
- Launched around 46 years ago, Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to enter interstellar space — the region that lies outside the impact of our Sun’s constant flow of material and magnetic field.
- The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before.
- Continuing on their more-than-40-year journey since their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto.
- In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago.
- Voyager 2 entered interstellar space on November 5, 2018 and scientists hope to learn more about this region.
- Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network, or DSN.
- The primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn.
- After making a string of discoveries there — such as active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io and intricacies of Saturn’s rings — the mission was extended.
- Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets.
- The adventurers’ current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will explore the outermost edge of the Sun’s domain.
FEATURES OF VOYAGER SPACECRAFT :
- Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are identical spacecraft.
- Each of them is equipped with instruments to carry out 10 different experiments.
- The instruments include television cameras — to take images of planets and other celestial bodies — infrared and ultraviolet sensors, magnetometers, plasma detectors, and cosmic-ray and charged-particle sensors.
- Both spacecraft feature a large antenna, 3.7 metres in diameter, which is used to receive commands from Earth and radio their findings back to the planet.
- As their mission involved going far away from the Sun, they aren’t powered by solar power, like other spacecraft are.
- Instead, Voyager relies on a small nuclear power plant, drawing hundreds of watts from the radioactive decay of a pellet of plutonium.
- Each Voyager spacecraft is adorned with a golden phonograph record — a 12-inch disc, intended to be a sort of time capsule from Earth to any extraterrestrial life that might intercept the probes in the distant future.
- The covers of the records have several images inscribed, including visual instructions on how to play them, a map of our solar system’s location with respect to a set of 14 pulsars, and a drawing of a hydrogen atom.
- They are plated with uranium – its rate of decay will allow any future discoverers of either of the records to calculate when they were created.
NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS OF VOYAGER SPACECRAFT :
- Fifteen months after its launch, Voyager 1 reached its first target planet, Jupiter, on March 5, 1979, and was soon followed by Voyager 2, which arrived there on July 9.
- The most interesting discoveries made by Voyager 1 included the finding that Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, was geologically active.
- The spacecraft noted the presence of at least eight active volcanoes “spewing material into space, making it one of the most (if not the most) geologically active planetary bodies in the solar system.
- Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 discovered three new moons of Jupiter: Thebe, Metis and Adrastea.
- Voyager 2 arrived at Uranus in 1986, becoming the first human-made object to fly past the aquamarine planet.
- The spacecraft took stunning photographs and confirmed that the main constituents of Uranus are hydrogen and helium.
SYLLABUS: PRELIMS, CURRENT AFFAIRS
