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Math on Voyager's Golden Record Tells a Story

Copies of the Golden Record, sent journeying into deep space on the sides of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes in 1977, carries the sounds and music of Earth as well as a series of images to help characterize it.

The Voyager 1 probe, which launched 40 years ago today (Sept. 5), is humankind's most distant physical emissary, at almost 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) from Earth. Voyager 1 and its sister-spacecraft, Voyager 2, which launched two weeks earlier in 1977,

By Sarah Lewin Space.com 9-5-17

gave scientists their first close-up views of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And the spacecraft famously carried with them what could be aliens' first views of Earth, its inhabitants and their culture: copies of the Golden Record.

The astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan curated the record selections, and it carried sounds and music from Earth as well as greetings in 55 languages. But the record also contains encoded photos seeking to teach aliens the mathematics — or really, the measurements — needed to understand humans' lives and their place in the universe.

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U.S. Government Shut-Down Reaches Mars & Beyond; The Mars Curiosity Rover Will Stop Collecting Data

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The Mars Curiosity Rover will stop collecting data during the shutdown.

By Jenny Marder
www.pbs.org
10-1-13

      Just before 11 p.m. Monday night, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft sent this message via Twitter:

Of course, it wasn't Voyager sending the tweet, it was Voyager's handlers here on Earth.

But the slight whiff of snarkiness coming from the intrepid spacecraft, hurtling through deep space -- and depending very much on government funding to do so -- highlights the powerful impact this shutdown has on science and the nation's scientific agencies.

At NASA, Mission Control in Houston remains active to support the crew aboard the International Space Station. But nearly all other space agency operations have ground to a halt. Most of the agency's 18,000 employees have been placed on furlough, spacecrafts and satellites not yet launched are grounded and while the Hubble Space Telescope will continue peering into far flung galaxies, no one will be there to collect the data. . . .

. . . Even the Mars Curiosity spacecraft, the Atlantic reports, "will face its own little robot furlough: The explorer will 'be put in a protective mode' for the duration of the shutdown, and will not collect any new data during that time." . . .

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Voyager-1 Approaches Where No Spacecraft Has Gone Before — The Edge Of The Solar System

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By Tom Spears
The Ottawa Citizen
6-6-12

     OTTAWA — New evidence from NASA suggests Voyager-1, launched in 1977, may finally be leaving the solar system — something no spacecraft has ever done.

For more than a month, the space environment around Voyager-1 has been changing. The little spacecraft is being hit by increasing numbers of high-energy particles, suggesting it’s in a region outside the sun’s influence where there are more cosmic rays.

Our sun sends out particles called solar wind that continue far past the most distant planets. It also has an enormous magnetic field. Astronomers generally define our solar system as the area where the solar wind and magnetic field extend.

NASA has been estimating for years that Voyager-1 will reach the edge of the solar system around 2014. It is 17.9 billion kilometres from Earth, just over 120 times the distance from the Earth to the sun.

Data from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center show that for most of the past year, Voyager-1 was being hit an average of 1.7 times a second by high-energy particles such as protons. Around the beginning of May, that rate started climbing steadily. It’s about two particles per second now.

The implication is that more cosmic rays are hitting the spacecraft because there’s less solar influence to deflect them, “in which case Voyager-1 has reached the magnetopause boundary (i.e. where the magnetic field ends) and thus the boundary of the Solar System,” astronomer Nick Suntzeff of Texas A&M University wrote in an email. . . .

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Voyager Spacecraft Still Seeking The Edge of The Solar System

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By Frank D. Roylance
The Baltimore Sun
1-22-11

     BALTIMORE — You probably have more computing power in your pocket than what NASA's venerable Voyager spacecraft are carrying to the edge of the solar system.

They have working memories a million times smaller than your home computer. They record their scientific data on 8-track tape machines. And they communicate with their aging human inventors back home with a 23-watt whisper.

Even so, the twin explorers, now 33 years into their mission, continue to explore new territory as far as 11 billion miles from Earth. And they still make global news. Scientists announced last month that Voyager 1 had outrun the solar wind, the first man-made object to reach the doorstep to interstellar space.

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