Thursday, September 6, 2012

Far Out

The boundary comes closer. The luminosity of the pin-point of the central star is fading, and out here, at the outer reaches of the star's gravitational grip, the vacuum is becoming less a vacuum, and more a charged soup of ions, a stormy charged bubble. Past it, on the other side of the bubble, is true Outer Space.

Celebrating the 35th anniversary just recently was the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Armed with 68 kilobytes of computer memory, the craft has 20 years of fuel left.

About the size of a compact car, Voyager 1 was launched a few months after Voyager 2. Together they took pictures of the gaseous giants in our solar system, and then started off in different directions, off to explore the rest of the galaxy.

Voyager 1, using Saturn as a gravitational slingshot, headed for the boundary and is now the further from Earth of the siblings. At some point, a point we won't know for sure, Voyager 1 will leave the Solar System, and become the only object ever created by Homo sapiens to ever be that far away, to actually leave this system.

Supremely well designed, if primitive by today's standards, the fact that they'll be beaming information back to Earth for another two decades still astounds. Even as it takes seventeen hours for transmissions to get to and fro...that might help understand how far away the edge of the Solar System is: It's seventeen light-hours away.

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