November 11, 2003
Twin Voyagers... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
The two NASA Voyager spacecraft have been much in the news lately, although it's been Voyager 1 that's been getting all the press. The gist of the popular articles tells us that Voyager 1 is flying through the outer boundaries of the Solar System, literally going when no man has gone before, and in this case, that would be 8 billion miles away and still headed out of town.
Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 just weeks before Voyager 1, an out-of-number-sequence launch schedule which shall always be footnoted in space history. Fortunately, that's now easy to forget since Voyager 1 is out there in front - at least distance-wise, that is.
You might say they're more like fraternal twins with Voyager 2 being a touch slower and always on a different flight path.
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Hedging our bets on whether or not there's conscious and capable life out there in the great beyond, both Voyagers carry copper and gold disks containing audio and images of what life is like on planet Earth. Of course, that would have to mean life in the late 1970's.
Answering machines were just coming onto the market, and were as pricey as they were weighty. Cars didn't have cruise control, cell phones weren't in everyone's pocket, and heck, most television sets didn't even have remote controls. The Internet mainly referred to a few thousand people on the federal government's ARPANET, and the only personal computers around were contained in hobby kits.
Still, NASA was hard at work, building these buckets of bolts to send up into space. It's been 26 years, and while some of the instruments on Voyager 1 have given up the ghost, it's made its way to the turbulent outer boundary of the Solar System. There's no doubt, the human race is learning something new about our universe everyday, and no matter how you cut it, that's very exciting.
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Both Voyagers have had quite a trip so far: Jupiter and Saturn, while Voyager 2 also took a swing by Neptune and Uranus. But they have always been twin probes. The vision of their looping planet fly-by's is as wonderful as the idea that they are out there right now humming along in overdrive, at a cruise speed of something under 40,000 miles per hour. From the perspective of planet Earth, Voyager 1 is headed away in one direction while Voyager 2 is going in another. But back up, and you can see how they're operating in concert.
So often when it's time to raise money for space programs, we hear the inevitable argument that we have to invest now to reap the benefits of the future. And I always find that it's hard to get a feel for what this really means.
Well, try this: Every day of our lives since the summer of 1977, these two pups have been out there working hard. While we've lived every joy and tragedy life has sent our way, the two Voyagers have kept on point. And since they're due to keep on doing it for another twenty years, you might say they were born, came of age and have lived their lives right alongside us.
Our investment in space is more than money and new technology. It's about committing to time, like the time it takes to raise a family, and believing in a vision, that the lives of these two Voyagers - just like our own - will influence the trajectory of human life - quite simply - forever.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
