After 12,000 Days in Space, Voyager 1 Heads for the Solar System Boundary

If Voyager 2 reached its 12000 day milestone before Voyager 1 doesnt that make it Voyager 1 , Its been in space 2 weeks longer . Im confused .

Good question. Voyager 1 was actually launched after Voyager 2, but on a faster trajectory that enabled it to reach Jupiter and Saturn sooner.

Absolutely incredible. Makes me a little embarrassed of our current space initiatives to see technology from the 70's still functional and roaring across space.

I agree with jspinz...

Whats really interesting is that V1 made it from Jupiter to Saturn in about 1.5 years. That is some serious speed.

Long live VGers 1 & 2!

Dang. I remember when these were launched. We learned about them in school, we had to come up with our own ideas on what kind of message we'd put on them.

I have to agree that many of our endeavors today seem to pale in comparison to these two probes. smarter, smaller, faster, cheaper (or what ever it was called) was not a smart move by NASA. Its seems the more money they spend, the larger the device, and the more QUALITY time they spend on a project the better it works. please correct me if I am wrong, Cassini which is doing an equally amazing job up there is also an uber sizes probe? About the size of a small bus. Seems like most of the failures in the past 15 years were all from the tiny probes they tried to send to mars, the hayabusa (not nasa but still small), etc.

It looks like there are 3 moons in the picture, not two. Bottom right, next to the ring.

that is probably a shadow of one of the moons.

The caption of picture actually says that it is a shadow of Tethys.

I remember when these were launched, (a couple of years out of high school), and the years later is they past each planet. Always thinking about just how long the mission was, and wondering just how NASA maintains support for missions like these for so long. It is long enough for people to start and maybe end their careers, before they end.

I also wonder just how long it is currently taking for the signals/data to get back from there.

(I also wonder if we will ever send out voyager 6 so that alien machine race is really going to send it back {Star Trek movie. :-)}, I guess Hollywood thought we were going to have a few more in the Voyager series :-) )

I think Pioneer 10 it´s been forgoten here.

@tcolguin I believe I read that it takes 12 hours and some amount of minutes for the signal to get there one way.

I was talking to my kid the other day. Told him how disappointed I was that we still have no other options of living but Earth. I guess most people growing up dream of living on Mars or some other distant planet. Just to try it. See a totally different place. And yet, instead of moving forward, we get budget cuts and super expensive trips to sub-orbital tourist rides. I would even take the dreary reality of Blade Runner at this point.

DDTx2 - Pioneer 10 has gone silent. It's been in space longer, but we're not hearing from it any more.

One thing that helps these spacecraft is that they're not constantly going from hot/cold. Earth orbiting spacecraft do that, as do the Mars rovers. Changing thermal environments is what kills a lot of spacecraft.

The timelines in travel were short because the probes were relatively small to fly on a titan booster. Later probes (Galileo, Cassini) were larger (and needed more fuel since they orbited their target), so they needed to swing by Earth and or Venus (and Jupiter, for Cassini) to get to their final destination.

Veeja I may be the farthest man-made object from Earth, but Vanguard I, launched in 1958 during the Eisenhower administration and still in orbit is the oldest. I wish I was young enough not to remember its launch, but, alas...

Which mission turns into the borg?

I saw a photo recently on youtube where earth looked like a speck of dust about 1 pixel in size from that distance.

Wonder how far this thing will transmit? Infinitely, I hope.

ForestWander Nature Photography
Astrophotography from the Forests and Mountains
www.ForestWander.com/the-sky

Galactic Defender: That's probably a shadow of one of the moons.

The images remain stunning. Question: why aren't we using these long life nuclear batteries here on earth?

At 14,000,000,000 miles, it should take an electronic signal approximately 20.9 hours to reach Earth.

World owes thanks to one man's work at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, solving the problem of transmitting low res b/w pictures back to Earth on Voyagers backup antenna. Without his data compression algorithms, very few of the pictures would have actually made it back to be seen. Despite repeated attempts by JPL to block them, NASA finally recognized his contributions to this mission in 1998 with a substantial monetary award. Congratulations to Robert F. Rice and his Rice Algorithms!

Wow, 14 billion miles traveled. If my calculation is right, that would require nearly 21 hours at the speed of light. Amazing. It is sad how degraded our drive for space exploration has become; needs to change soon ...

They used RTG's, radioisotope thermoelectric generators. The fuel decays, producing heat, which is converted to electricity. Unfortunately the fuel is plutonium, nasty stuff that is very radioactive and can be converted to bomb use,and has to be made in a reactor.
Maybe the writer thought "Nuclear Battery" was easier to say or spell or understand, but RTG is the more scientificaly literate term, and I would think at least the writer would know, and share this, instead of assuming we are all dummies.

Actually, the NASA web site refers to them as "long-lived nuclear batteries."

we dont use rtg
1. becuase they produce watts of power not megawatts single watss.
2. plutonium lieing around = bad
but 100 watts of power for 50 or so years is pretty good

Re-reading the article, it appears that I made a typical, layman's error: though V1 has travelled more that 14 billion miles, it has NOT yet reached that distance from Earth. This would be because it is travelling in an ever-expanding arc (I suspect). Therefore, though it has travelled a great distance, it's straightline distance from Earth won't exceed 13 billion miles until 2020 (according to the article). Consequently, it's signal would take a bit less than the calculated 21 hours to reach us. Unfortunately, the writer did not give us an indication of it's straightline distance.

myfathersson

I appreciate the banter here folks. I am just an old guy interested in this stuff and enjoy learning as much from your exchanges as I do reading the articles themselves.

You are all missing the new primary duty of NASA. It no longer has anything to do with space. Did you miss the directive from the president that the primary purpose of NASA now is to make Muslims feel better about themselves? I presume that the reason is so that the radical muslims will stop trying to kill us and our families at every opportunity. Why are you wasting time taking about space exploration? For that matter, why are you wasting time reading POPSCI articles like the one about two weeks ago that was nothing more than a political hatchet job with more holes in it than a colander? If anyone can give me a reference to a good scientific magazine, I would greatly appreciate it.

Fascinating milestones and coooool photos. But I'd ask readers to ponder where are the modern-day equivalents of the senior engineers and technicians that produced these magnificent "flying machines" going to come from today?

The President apparently has very different (and much lower expectations) for NASA. What a freaking shame...screw him who must be obeyed, and his Congress of socialist weasels bastards.

When these spacecraft were launched I was just completing 20 years of US Naval service, and have followed the missions. It is fascinating how far we have gone in space exploration and all we have learned. We now need to forget the nonsense that seems to prevail that we abandon space exploration. OBAMA has subjugated this country in every way, and aquiesced to the Muslim world that we are inferior when in fact, we are AMERICA. Get rid of him and return to being the nation prefered by all freedom loving people.