NASA built this thing thirty-six years ago (in 1977) and it still works. Amazing.
Thirty-six years after it rocketed away from Earth, the plutonium-powered spacecraft has escaped the sun’s influence and is now cruising 11 1/2 billion miles away in interstellar space, or the vast, cold emptiness between the stars, NASA said Thursday.
And just in case it encounters intelligent life out there, it is carrying a gold-plated, 1970s-era phonograph record with multicultural greetings from Earth, photos and songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” along with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Louis Armstrong.
At this point in its journey, it takes seventeen hours for the Voyager signal to get back to Earth. My (very) rough math:
11,500,000,000 m / 186,000 mps = 61,827 seconds = 1,030 minutes = 17.17 hours
Cool.
I thought this happen last year. Plus what about Voyager 2?
It’s not an instant or even overnight transition. Instrument readings had shown that the direction of charged particles was starting to change for some time, indicating that the probe was starting to enter a different region of space, but they needed confirmation that this change wasn’t some temporary anomaly.
Voyager 2 is about 8 billion miles out, because although they only launched 5 days apart (and it actually launched first) it took a longer route and is travelling about 1.5 km/s slower than Voyager 1.
I guess it’s reasonable to assume the aliens will have a turntable. And pre-amp. And speakers. They’ll probably just print one with their 5D printer.
The record includes pictorial instructions on how to play it. I suspect aliens who can view the inscriptions (and think sufficiently like us) will make more sense of the pulsar map that points to the craft’s origin.