Thirty people attended, Friday, July 18, at the Valcourt Observatory at the conference proposed by the Astronomy Society of Haute-Marne and led by Roger Sicret on the subject of Voyager probes.
Roger Sicret returned to this ambitious space adventure started in the 70s and which is still continuing today. The NASA travel program, which was the first robotic exploration of the giant planets of the solar system, includes two identical space probes, travel 1 and travel 2, launched in 1977 and which fly over the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune planets as well as 48 of their satellites. The speaker detailed “the formidable harvest of knowledge that arose through a sample of photos among the more than 10,000 transmitted, the most famous of which is probably:” The Pale Blue Dot “or” Petit Point Bleu pale “, photo of the earth taken at six billion kilometers”. Although having fully fulfilled the mission assigned to them since it was planned over ten years and despite some damage, “these particularly robust probes, continue to send us information from the borders of the solar system”.
Far, very far …
Traveling 1 and 2 are distant today by more than 20 billion kilometers from the blue planet and communication with probes becomes more and more indistinct from background noise. “With, in addition, the inevitable weakening of energy resources, the day is close when they will have to be abandoned at their long journey,” said Roger Sicret. In 2025, traveling probes were still in working order. Several of their instruments continue to transmit information on the surrounding environment. On December 16, 2004, traveling 1 crossed the terminal shock, making it the first “human” object exploring heliogaine. In September 2013, the space probe left the heliosphere, the area under the influence of the sun. Moving at more than 17 km/s compared to the star, traveling 1, carrying a symbolic message of humanity, should be the first space probe to pass near another star, in 40,000 years. In 2019, a plan was drawn up by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in order to save as much as possible the thermoelectric generators with Radiisotopes which provide energy, extending their operational life for several years. Each of the two probes has a mass of 825.5 kg, including 104.8 kg of scientific instrumentation. At the end of the presentation, Roger Sicret became interested in the way in which the program designers imagined the probes as witnesses to our condition of humans for the attention of possible “aliens”. An observation from the sky to the telescope and a session in the planetarium extended the evening after the conference. The next event for the SAHM will be the night of the stars on August 1 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and from 8:30 p.m. to midnight.