Lost in the Syrian miasma has been the news that the Voyager I space probe left our solar system August 25 of last year.
It took the little spacecraft 36 years' travel, at 38,000 miles per hour, to get to the near reaches of interstellar space. Voyager continues to send data back to earth, across nearly 12 billion miles; last week its transmissions took 17 hours, 22 minutes to reach home base neat the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Behind the headlines- such as they were- lies a fascinating back story of ingenuity at work, one reminiscent of the movie 2000 Space Cowboys. In that film, which starred Tommy Lee Jones, Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland and James Garner, Jones- a retired engineer- was called back to rescue a failing satellite.
In Voyager's case, the cowboys are on the ground. Head project scientist Edward C. Stone is77 and has been on the job since 1972. Project manager Suzanne Dodd is only 52 but has been working with Voyager since 1984.
For some time, the Voyager project's main challenge has been getting useful data back from an eight-track tape deck and a computer- as one report put it- with "one-240,000th the memory of a low-end IPhone"- that has the transmitting power of a refrigerator light bulb. As Voyager has moved further and further out in space, it has fallen further and further behind in technology.
In fact, as the craft neared its departure from out neighborhood, NASA asked the Voyager team if they could amp up the data stream some to see what crossing that barrier might be like. They turned, not to the whiz kids of current missions, but instead to a retired NASA engineer, Lawrence Zotarelli, who- at 77- came up with a solution an eight-track system could digest.
Voyager is expected to keep sending home information until sometime in 2025.
It took the little spacecraft 36 years' travel, at 38,000 miles per hour, to get to the near reaches of interstellar space. Voyager continues to send data back to earth, across nearly 12 billion miles; last week its transmissions took 17 hours, 22 minutes to reach home base neat the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Behind the headlines- such as they were- lies a fascinating back story of ingenuity at work, one reminiscent of the movie 2000 Space Cowboys. In that film, which starred Tommy Lee Jones, Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland and James Garner, Jones- a retired engineer- was called back to rescue a failing satellite.
In Voyager's case, the cowboys are on the ground. Head project scientist Edward C. Stone is77 and has been on the job since 1972. Project manager Suzanne Dodd is only 52 but has been working with Voyager since 1984.
For some time, the Voyager project's main challenge has been getting useful data back from an eight-track tape deck and a computer- as one report put it- with "one-240,000th the memory of a low-end IPhone"- that has the transmitting power of a refrigerator light bulb. As Voyager has moved further and further out in space, it has fallen further and further behind in technology.
In fact, as the craft neared its departure from out neighborhood, NASA asked the Voyager team if they could amp up the data stream some to see what crossing that barrier might be like. They turned, not to the whiz kids of current missions, but instead to a retired NASA engineer, Lawrence Zotarelli, who- at 77- came up with a solution an eight-track system could digest.
Voyager is expected to keep sending home information until sometime in 2025.
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