NASA Asks Humans To Celebrate Voyager 1 Milestone With Nighttime Light Show

A giant leap for mankind just got a little gianter as Voyager 1 achieves a distance of one light day from earth on Wednesday, a journey that has been nearly 50 years in the making. NASA is commemorating the milestone with a “Shine Bright for Voyager” campaign. The space agency has created an automated flasher that will signal V-G-R in Morse Code. NASA is asking people to shine the flasher into the night sky on Tuesday. Individuals can also spell out the Morse code with a flashlight.“NASA invites the world to participate in a global symbolic wave of golden light to mark this historic moment,” the space agency’s vehicle propulsion group posted.“A simple act. A shared moment. A celebration of humanity’s farthest reach,” NASA states on its website where people can access the flasher. One light day — the distance that light travels in 24 hours — is approximately 16.1 billion miles. At that distance, a signal sent into the sky would take one day to arrive at its intended target. By comparison, it takes the sun’s light 8.3 minutes to reach Earth.NASA launched Voyager in 1977. It is currently traveling at 38,000 miles per hour and is at the farthest distance a human-made object has ever reached. Its goal is to reach a star, AC +79 3888, also known as Gliese 445, more than 17 light-years away located in the constellation Ursa Minor, popularly known as the Little Dipper or Little Bear. Voyager 1 is expected to pass within about 1.7 light-years of it in 40,000 years assuming it succeeds in its mission. Last month, NASA lost contact with Voyager 1 for about 48 hours after some of the vehicle’s thrusters went offline. A radio signal was captured on October 20 by Deep Space Network, the agency’s antenna array located around the globe to communicate with spacecraft, after Voyager 1’s backup thrusters turned on. In September after months of work, NASA engineers also remotely swapped three devices on Voyager 1 in order to prolong its power source. Voyager 1 relies on radioisotope thermoelectric generators that convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. The conservation project, which replaced the devices with alternatives known as the “Big Bang,” is intended to ensure that heat is properly distributed so that the vehicle’s science instruments can continue to operate, capturing and sending back data from interstellar space.Voyager 2, which departed 16 days before Voyager 1 but is not as far in space, was launched to study the Solar System’s outer planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—and their moons, rings, and magnetic fields. It is more than 20 hours of light time from Earth.

NASA Asks Humans To Celebrate Voyager 1 Milestone With Nighttime Light Show

NASA Asks Humans To Celebrate Voyager 1 Milestone With Nighttime Light Show

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