August 20: First space pets come home and Voyager 2 launched

William Atkins
Wednesday, 20 August 2008 21:55

Opinion and Analysis

Voyager 2

In addition, on August 20, 1977, NASA launched Voyager 2 via a Titan-IIIE Centaur rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The unmanned spacecraft had a mission to explore the outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Aboard the unmanned interplanetary spacecraft was a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph recording (“Golden Record”) that contained greetings in 55 Earth languages for any alien life that might happen upon the craft on its extended journey out there in space.

Voyager 1, its sister ship, was launched later on September 5, 1977. Still today, in 2008, the two spaceships are traveling at the end of the solar system on their way out of the solar system and into interstellar space.

Recently, Voyager 2 confirmed that our solar system has a “squashed” bubble look to it. As it entered a region called the heliosheath (the edge of our solar system where the solar wind is weakly pushing up against the interstellar gas), around August 30, 2007, it found that our solar system is dented in shape and not round.

The unusual shape is believed to be caused by the local interstellar magnetic field pushing inward on the bubble of the solar wind we call our solar system

By the year 2025 all of the power onboard Voyager 2 will depleted, and none of its instruments will work. Today, you can find the location of Voyager 2 by going to the Heaven's Above website and find NASA status reports on the spacecraft at Voyager Reports .

Carl Sagan was the chairperson on the committee that selected the recordings (such as 115 images and various sounds of birds, whales, thunder, etc.) to be placed on the Golden Record.

Dr. Sagan noted at the time of the launching of Voyager 2, “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”