The Voyager-1 spacecraft was successfully launched in 1977, designed to travel through space while studying the planets and moons it encounters. Today the space probe has almost reached the outer Solar System, and is still perfectly functional.
Considered the farthest man-made object from Earth, the Voyager-1 has also travelled at a velocity higher than any other space probe. To boost its acceleration, the spacecraft utilizes the gravity force of the planets it encounters. It reached its highest acceleration after escaping from the high-energy gravitational field of Jupiter and Saturn, the largest bodies of our solar system. To stay powered, Voyager-1 has three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). These will continue generating electric power, enabling the probe to communicate with Earth until the year 2025.
The spacecraft’s primary mission is to help scientists better understand the Solar System. However, Voyager-1 also carries a golden record, which holds sounds and images of life on Earth. If this travelling probe is someday encountered by extraterrestrial life forms, this record will serve as a way of communicating that another intelligent community exists in the cosmos.
Voyager-1 has already accomplished an unplanned mission that many consider more significant than its original mission. On February 14, 1990, the spacecraft received a command to capture an image of Earth from more than 6.4 billion kilometres away. Carl Sagan, one of the project’s executive directors, called this monumental picture the “Pale Blue Dot.” In his book of the same name he writes, “We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space] and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”
