Are we alone?
Forty years ago, NASA rocket scientists sought to answer this question by launching the Voyager spacecraft, twin unmanned spaceships that would travel further than any human-made object in history.
They are still travelling.
Voyager 1 and 2 were launched about two weeks apart in 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
“None of us knew, when we launched 40 years ago, that anything would still be working, and continuing on this pioneering journey,” said Voyager project scientist Ed Stone.
Voyager’s main mission was to explore other planets, including Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, but it also carried the story of humanity into deep space.
On board each Voyager is a golden record — and record player — that is built to last one billion years or more and contains key information about humanity and life on planet Earth, in case of an alien encounter.
The sounds include the calls of humpback whales, the Chuck Berry song “Johnny B Goode,” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a Japanese shakuhachi (a type of flute), a Pygmy girls’ initiation song, and greetings in 55 languages.
Late American astronomer Carl Sagan, one of the lead scientists involved with the project, also asked his son, Nick, who is now 46, to record his voice on it.
“Hello, from the children of planet Earth,” says the young American boy.
But Voyager faced many challenges from the start, from tight budgets to the limits of modern technology in the 1970s.
Then-president Richard Nixon wanted to contain the mission to a two-planet flyby and a five-year life, but scientists building Voyager planned for a longer mission just in case.
The cosmic duo went on to unveil planetary features unlike anything ever seen. Astronomy textbooks were rewritten on a wide scale, thanks to Voyager, which zoomed past Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus and “revolutionised the science of planetary astronomy,” NASA said.
When Voyager had no more planets to be encountered on its trajectory, Carl Sagan pressed to have its cameras turn back toward Earth for a final snap of the planet that sent it.
Voyager 1 has travelled father than any human-made spacecraft, and made it to interstellar space, about 13 billion miles away from Earth, in August 2012.
Voyager 2 is on its way there too, and is the only spacecraft to have flown by all four outer planets in our solar system. —AFP
Kerry Sheridan
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
