『Voyager 1: The Late Launch That Left Earth Behind』のカバーアート

Voyager 1: The Late Launch That Left Earth Behind

Voyager 1: The Late Launch That Left Earth Behind

無料で聴く

ポッドキャストの詳細を見る
September fifth carries some wonderful science history, but let's take a joyride with NASA's Voyager 1, which launched on this date in 1977 from Cape Canaveral atop a Titan IIIE Centaur rocket. Here's the delicious irony to start with, Voyager 1 actually left Earth about two weeks after its sibling Voyager 2, yet because it was placed on a faster, shorter trajectory, it ended up overtaking its twin and reaching Jupiter and Saturn first. Sometimes in the cosmic race, it truly is about the route, not just the head start. Picture the scene, humanity had just packed a golden record onto this little spacecraft, a phonograph album loaded with greetings in fifty five languages, whale songs, thunderclaps, laughter, snippets of Beethoven and Chuck Berry, and photographs encoded in analog form, basically an interstellar mixtape and scrapbook in case anyone or anything ever intercepted it out there in the dark. Carl Sagan chaired the committee that assembled it, and there's something delightfully hopeful about a species sending out a mixtape into the void with essentially no expectation of ever getting a reply anytime soon, maybe ever. Voyager 1 went on to give us breathtaking, close up portraits of Jupiter's swirling storms and its moon Io's volcanic eruptions, the first time active volcanoes were ever seen anywhere beyond Earth, and then it swept past Saturn's rings, revealing their braided intricacy in stunning detail. After that planetary tour, it kept climbing outward and outward, and in 2012 it officially crossed the heliopause, becoming the first human made object to enter interstellar space, sailing beyond the sun's protective bubble of solar wind and into the vast ocean between the stars. And here is the part that still gives chills, Voyager 1 is still going. As of now, decades later, it is well over fifteen billion miles from Earth, so far away that a radio signal traveling at the speed of light takes more than twenty two hours just to reach it, and its faint, aging transmissions are our most distant handshake with the universe, a little metal traveler older than most of the adults reading this, still faithfully phoning home from beyond the edge of our solar neighborhood. So happy launch anniversary to Voyager 1, the plucky overachiever who left late, arrived early, snapped some of the most iconic photographs in the history of astronomy, and then just kept walking, quite literally becoming a citizen of interstellar space while carrying Earth's mixtape with it, forever cruising, forever curious, forever ours. Some great Deals https://amzn.to/49SJ3Qs For more check out http://www.quietplease.ai
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
まだレビューはありません