The Voyagers have coded messages in case an alien race finds them. Photo: Europe Press.
The oldest and most distant spaceships in the Humanity, Voyager 1 y 2, comply 45 years of operation and exploration this August 20, 2022.
These twin probes of the NASA have become, in a way, time capsules of their time: each one carries a tape player eight tracks to record data, they have some 3 million times less memory than modern mobile phones and transmit data 38,000 times slower than a connection to Internet 5G.
However, the Voyagers remain at the forefront of the space exploration. Managed and operated by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratoryare the only probes that have explored interstellar space, the galactic ocean through which our planet travels. Sol y your planets.
The researchers, some of them younger than the two spaceships distant, are combining Voyager observations with data from missions newer to get a more complete picture of our Sun and how the heliosfera (spatial region under the influence of the solar wind) interacts with the interstellar space.
Message in a Bottle
But the Voyagers are also ambassadors; each with a Golden disc containing images of life on earth, diagrams of basic scientific principles, and audio that includes nature sounds, greetings in multiple languages, and music. The records serve as amessage in a Bottle” cosmic, for anyone who may encounter the space probes.
At the speed with which oro decomposes in space and is eroded by the cosmic radiationthe records will last longer than billion years.
