Voyager 1 Research Paper

Space travel is a relatively new thing. The first thing to be made by humans to be put in space was a German V2 rocket on October 3rd 1942. On April 12 1961 the first ever man was sent to space. Between the time the first man left the earth’s atmosphere and to today there have been many advancements made in space travel and the different shuttles, satellites and space probes. But which one of these has been to most useful to us on our mission to under stand what goes on outside of our planet? Many people would say that the voyager 1 is one of the most important things that we have ever sent to space. The voyager 1 space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral on September 5th, 1977 the main mission of the voyager 1 was to go to Jupiter and

The space probe is extremely complex being made up of nearly 65 000 individual parts while the computer memories on board are made up of almost one million different electronic parts. Voyager 1 is the farthest space craft from Earth. As of May 20th, 2018, it is currently 13.14 billion miles away from earth and the missions has been going on for 40 years, 8 months and 15 days. It has been travelling around 38 000MPH for years which means its been travelling nearly a million miles a day. If the space probe was to send a message back to earth it would take nearly 19 hours to get here travelling at the speed of light. Currently only four of the original ten systems remain online. On February 14th 1990 engineers turned the cameras around to take one last pictures before shutting down the systems to maintain maximum energy reserves for its trip into interstellar space. The picture it took is widely regarded as the most important photo ever taken. The photo is commonly referred to as the pale blue dot and it is the only picture shows the family portrait of our solar system containing all the planets. It shows earth floating in the emptiness of space as a small pale blue dot floating in a ray of light. This is considered one of the biggest feats of engineering just like in End of days they refer to the launch of all the shuttles armed with warheads as “the culmination of the thinking of the greatest minds on the planet”