GeekwithEnvy

Planets

35 Years of Voyager

by Leave a Comment

September 5th,  2012 marks the 35th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1 which is now the most distant human-made object and the second longest operating spacecraft.

The mission of the Voyager spacecraft both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, was to explore Jupiter and Saturn. After major success, the mission was extended to have Voyager 2 explore Uranus and Neptune. Currently the only data we have from Uranus and Neptune came from Voyager, no other spacecraft have since explored these two planets.Voyager

Today, 35 years later these two spacecraft are still functioning and sending back information to Earth from billions of miles away, much farther away from the sun than Neptune and Pluto. The mission of both spacecraft today is to explore interstellar space and has been named the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) .

The VIM has three phases, termination shock, heliosheath exploration, and interstellar exploration. The spacecraft were in an area that was primarily controlled by the suns magnetic field and surrounded by supersonic solar wind, this is the termination shock phase. The spacecraft are now in the heliosheath phase, the outer reaches of the suns solar winds and magnetic influence.  Soon the spacecraft will begin to move into an area where interstellar winds become more prominent and push back and slow our suns solar winds to a sub-sonic speed, eventually there will be no influence and the spacecraft will then be considered to be in interstellar space. The point where deep space begins and our suns influence ends is called heliopause, reaching heliopause is the ultimate mission of Voyager and the spacecraft should have enough power and fuel to last until approximately 2025, which should allow for enough time to reach this disatance.golden recordVoyager

Voyager also contains a 12 inch gold plated copper disk that contains sounds and images from Earth. The sounds are of wind, thunder,birds and other animals. Human speech from different parts of the world and pictures form different cultures are also included on the disk. For a complete list of the disc contents including samples, head here.

For complete details on VIM click here.

 

 

Living on Another Planet

by Leave a Comment

Mars

Published on August 14, 2012, by admin in Science, Space. With the recent success of “Curiosity” at JPL I can’t help but ponder the possibility of living on another planet. How soon could this happen? Could it happen at all?

As I load up some of the latest imagery from Curiosity, I find my imagination wandering. I look at pictures of a dusty and red terrain littered with rocks and think to myself, this looks similar to some places on Earth and sometimes I almost forget these are images from another planet. It really is something amazing and for me it just throws my imagination into overdrive as I think about ways we could live, quite literally in another world.

There are many ideas that scientists have come up with that would make other planets like Mars a safe place for humans to live. Some suggest building a base camp that would be built much like a land based space station. Then, we find ourselves getting into deep conversations about how we could collect energy and how we would keep ourselves nourished. Other more extreme ideas suggest we terraform Mars. Terraforming is a hypothetical process that would involve humans changing the climate and other properties of Mars in order to make it suitable for life.

There are a few different ideas on how to terraform a planet like Mars and what makes this even more compelling is that many of the components necessary for life already exist in abundance on the red planet. One of the biggest issues with Mars is its lack of Oxygen, Nitrogen and Argon. The atmosphere of Mars is comprised of about 95% Carbon Dioxide. We would need to build up a stable thick atmosphere capable of protecting us from radiation and it must have a pressure and gas mixture that would allow us to breath. Changing a planet is a massive undertaking and leaves us to question, where would we gather the resources to accomplish such a feat?

Mars isn’t the only planet we have gazed upon with ambitious eyes. Why attempt to change an entire planet when there might be billions of other planets that have everything we need already set up for us? There have been many planets found to be be in what is called a “Habitable Zone”, which is a zone that isn’t too far or to close to the star that the observed planet is orbiting. What is even more exciting is that so many good candidates for possible habitation have been found, and in such a tiny fraction of the sky. This means there could be thousands and thousands of planets in this “Habitable Zone” with liquid water and other elements needed for life just waiting out there for us to explore.

Just imagine having all new continents to explore and new geological features never seen before. Perhaps there are multiple moons and mountains that reach miles into the sky, even higher than our own mount Everest. Who will move there first, and which country gets what land? It’s these kind of questions the we love to ask, and hopefully someday we can achieve what seems to be the impossible and live on another planet.