- 3815 - VOYAGER SPACECRAFT - Since the 1972 launch of Pioneer 10 we now have five spacecraft that have either reached the edges of our solar system or are fast approaching it: Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and New Horizons.
------------------------------ 3815 - VOYAGER SPACECRAFT
- Most of these probes have defied their expected deaths and are still operating long beyond their original mission plans. These spacecraft were originally planned to explore our neighboring planets, but now they're out of the solar system, providing astronomers with unique vantage points in space.
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- The Voyager
missions celebrated a very special anniversary this year: 45 years of operations. From close fly-bys of
the outer planets to exploring humans'
furthest reach in space, these two spacecraft have contributed immensely to astronomers'
understanding of the solar system.
- Their main project
now is exploring where the sun's influence ends, and other stars' influences begin. Voyager 1 crossed the
“heliopause”, the boundary where
the sun's flow of particles ceases to be the most important influence, in 2012 with Voyager 2 following
close after, in 2018.
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-The mission team hit one major
hiccup this year, when the spacecraft began
sending home garbled information about its location. The engineers found the cause, the spacecraft was using
a bad piece of computer hardware when
it shouldn't have, and restored operations.
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- The team is also
actively managing the power supply onboard each spacecraft, which is dwindling each year as the probes' radioactive generators grow increasingly inefficient.
This year, mission personnel turned off
heaters keeping a number of scientific instruments on board warm in the harsh, cold environment of space and, much to everyone's surprise, those instruments are still working perfectly well.
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-The cameras may have been turned off decades ago, but the
spacecrafts' other instruments are
collecting data on the plasma and magnetic fields from the sun at a great distance away from the star itself.
Because particles of the solar
wind , the constant stream of charged particles flowing off the sun, take
time to travel such a long way, distant observations allow scientists to see how changes from the sun propagate
throughout our neighborhood.
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- The edges of the
solar system have been full of surprises. It would make sense that plasma from the sun becomes more sparse and spread out
as you move away from the center
of the solar system, but in fact, the Voyagers have
encountered much denser plasma after crossing the heliopause. Astronomers are still puzzled about that one.
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- Pioneer 10 lost
communications back in 2003, and Pioneer 11 has been silent since its last contact in 1995. But both these spacecraft
are marks of humanity's presence in the
solar system, and they are still continuing on their journeys, even if we're not sending them commands or firing their
rockets anymore. Once a spacecraft
is set on a trajectory out of the solar system, according to the laws of physics, it won't stop unless
something changes its course.
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- New Horizons launched in 2006. After completing its famous
flyby of dwarf planet Pluto in 2015,
this probe has been zooming out of the solar system
at record speed, set to reach the heliopause around 2040.
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- Not only has it
completed its primary mission, but it successfully completed a flyby of the smaller Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in
2019 as its first mission
extension.- Earlier this year, the
spacecraft was put into hibernation mode
because an extended mission hadn't yet
been approved. But now it moving
into New Horizons' 2nd
Kuiper Belt Extended Mission, or
KEM2 for short. KEM2 began on Oct. 1,
although the spacecraft will
hibernate until March 1, 2023.
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- We may get new
views of Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), the chunks of ice and rock beyond Neptune. New Horizons' unique position in the outer
solar system provides new angles of
looking at these KBOs. Different views can tell
astronomers about how rough the objects' surfaces are, among other things, based on how light scatters and creates
shadows on them.
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- This next extended
mission will even venture beyond New Horizons' original
domain of planetary science. Now, the spacecraft will provide better-than-ever measurements of the
background of light and cosmic rays in space,
trace the distributions of dust throughout our solar system, and obtain crucial information on the sun's influence,
complimentary to the Voyagers. Since
the three functional far out spacecraft are heading in separate directions, they allow astronomers to map out
irregularities in the solar system's
structure.
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- The spacecraft
will have enough power to last through the 2040s and possibly beyond each year, moving 300 million miles, farther
into uncharted territory.
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- January 7, 2023 VOYAGER SPACECRAFT 3815
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--- Monday, January 9, 2023
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