Some people might think that it's nothing of any interest or importance that a relatively tiny bundle of electronics and metal is still travelling more than thirty-six years after it was first launched, but, all these years later, I still find it all a rather humbling and frankly astonishing human achievement.
Way back on the fifth of September, 1977 when Voyager One left the earth for the last time and set out on its mission towards the doorway of eternity, I was just a thirteen year old kid avidly reading my "Observer's Book of Unmanned Spaceflight" by Reginald Turnill, which was the natural follow-up to the "Manned Spaceflight" volume of a couple of years earlier when "Skylab" was still making all of the headlines.
I was already hooked on all things outer space-y, being a child of the Apollo generation, and at that time, the future of space exploration still looked so promising and seemed to offer so much that, perhaps, the significance of the launch of another space probe was lost on me.
Even when its fictional cousin did turn up in the first "Star Trek" movie a couple of years later, I rarely got quite as excited by the Voyager missions as I ought to have done.
Not, at least, until its job really started and those incredible pictures of the outer planets started to show up. Then I became well and truly mesmerised by the breath-taking images of both Jupiter and later Saturn which it beamed back to us sitting on our own tiny little blue jewel hanging in the endless night.
Because, once those mighty giants of planets had been encountered, Voyager moved on, pausing on Valentine's Day 1990 to take the first "family portrait" photograph of the solar system as seen from beyond the planets, and then, after passing Pioneer 10 in February 1998, becoming the farthest human-made object from the Earth.
And so, as Voyager One passes through the heliopause and out into interstellar space, I still think about it with a certain amount of awe and wonder, and remain, despite all of the terrible things that we are capable of doing to each other, amazed and impressed that humanity has finally managed to build an object capable of breaking free of its home solar system and heading out to explore a "strange, new" region about which relatively nothing was previously known.
So, perhaps we should keep on trying to remind ourselves by simply looking upwards every once in a while that, with every day that passes, Voyager One increases the distance humanity has reached out into the universe, adding a few more miles to the twelve billion it has already covered, and that is something that we, as a species, have done - a genuine, positive achievement.
It's likely to lead to a cold, dark and lonely ending for humanity's first interstellar spacecraft, however. After its batteries fail, in about a dozen years or so, it will continue blindly on through an endless night, with little prospect of meeting another object for an estimated forty thousand years.
Forty thousand years... or about the time it took for the human race to move on from starting to develop the rudiments of language to being capable of sending out space vehicles to explore the stars.
It's also, in some small way, rather comforting to know that, whatever humanity manages to do to itself over the next forty thousand years or more, somewhere out there between the stars is a little lump of metal machinery that might just serve to tell and remind the universe that we were once here...
I think you've covered that nicely - what more is left to be said.
ReplyDeleteOh, I'm pretty certain that you'll think of something :-)
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