ky
Director of Manned Spaceflight
If my math is correct,Voyager 2 is either 90 or 100 AU's from the sun.
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The Voyager spacecraft - NASA’s longest operational interplanetary probes – are about to enter their 34th year of operation, as they continue their sail out of the confines of our solar system toward the ever-present void of interstellar space. And as controllers on Earth manage the gradual and progressive power-down of the two spacecraft, the Voyagers continue to beam back invaluable and never-before collected data on the calm and turbulent outer-most edges of our sun’s immediate zone of influence in local space.
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On August 20, 1977, the intrepid spacecraft Voyager 2 launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, FL on what was supposed to be only a four year mission to Jupiter and Saturn. But exactly 34 years later, Voyager 2 has cemented itself into the upper echelons of unmanned space exploration, continuing to beam back data as it searches for the barrier between our solar system and interstellar space.
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Like its sister probe Voyager 2, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been an instrumental force in our continued push to gain a better understanding of our solar system. From its encounters with Jupiter and Saturn, to its ongoing mission to explore the outer boundaries of the solar system, Voyager 1 stands as the farthest man-made object in our solar system and will eventually gain the distinction of being the first man-made object to enter interstellar.
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Why'd they have to add the third backup? The other ones fail? Or degrade?
They really don't make things like they used to, though...
The twin Voyager probes are so far from the sun that they can see a kind of light from the Milky Way that we on Earth cannot. The observations could act as a Rosetta stone for understanding star formation in more distant and ancient galaxies.
The veteran Voyagers, which were launched in 1977 and are slowly approaching the outer limit of the solar system, have detected a particular wavelength of light called Lyman-alpha emission coming from our home galaxy for the first time.
The light is useful because it is a trace of star formation in other galaxies. Hot young stars blast their surroundings with high-energy photons, stripping electrons from hydrogen atoms. Those stripped atoms eventually find another electron and absorb it to become whole again. When they do, they can emit two kinds of photons: H-alpha and Lyman-alpha.
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