Voyager 1’s Revival Offers Inspiration for Everyone on Earth
Instruments may fail, but humanity’s most distant sentinel will keep exploring, and inspiring us all
Artist’s rendering of a Voyager spacecraft in deep space.
Dotted Zebra/Alamy Stock Photo
Amid April’s litany of bad news—war in Gaza, protests on American campuses, an impasse in Ukraine—a little uplift came for science buffs.
NASA has reestablished touch with Voyager 1, the most distant thing built by our species, now hurtling through interstellar space far beyond the orbit of Pluto. The extraordinarily durable spacecraft had stopped transmitting data in November, but NASA engineers managed a very clever work-around, and it is sending data again. Now more than 15 billion miles away, Voyager 1 is the farthest human object, and continues to speed away from us at approximately 38,000 miles per hour.
Like an old car that continues to run, or an uncle blessed with an uncommonly long life, the robotic spacecraft is a super ager that goes on and on—and, in doing so, has captivated space buffs everywhere.
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Launched on September 5, 1977, the one-ton Voyager 1 was meant to chart the outer solar system, in particular the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, and Saturn’s moon, Titan. Its twin, Voyager 2, launched the same year, followed a different trajectory with a slightly different mission to explore the outer planets before heading to the solar system’s edge.
Those were NASA’s glory days. A few years earlier, NASA had successfully landed men on the moon—and won the space race for the U.S. NASA’s engineers were the envy of the world.
To get to Jupiter and Saturn, both Voyagers had to traverse the asteroid belt, which is full of rocks and debris orbiting the sun. They had to survive cosmic rays, intense radiation from Jupiter and other perils of space. But the two spacecraft made it without a hitch.
President Jimmy Carter held office when Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral; Elvis Presley had died just three weeks before; gas was about 60 cents a gallon; and, like now, the Middle East was in crisis, with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat trying to find peace.
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