Forty-nine years ago this morning, at 10:29, a Titan IIIE–Centaur lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying Voyager 2. (Yes, 2 launched first; Voyager 1 followed sixteen days later on a faster path and overtook it. The numbers were about the order of arrival at Jupiter, not departure.)
It flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — still the only spacecraft ever to visit the last two — and in 2018 crossed into interstellar space. As I write this it is more than 21 billion km away and still phoning home on a transmitter of about 20 watts, the power of a refrigerator bulb, with a computer a wristwatch could out-think. Forty-nine years. The film below is NASA’s own report on 1977, the year it left; the photograph is the moment it did.
Look up tonight. You will not see it, and that is rather the point.
Here’s the clever bit nobody mentions: each Voyager carries a gold-plated copper record, and also a cartridge and a stylus to play it with, and the instructions are etched on the cover in a language of pulsar timings and hydrogen atoms. Somebody sat in a meeting in 1977 and argued for the stylus. I love that person.
Forty-nine years, still in the lineup, still on the road. That is an iron-man streak. Cal Ripken would tip his cap.
A note from the gallery: the record carries greetings in fifty-five languages, and the English one was spoken by Nick Sagan, aged six. Diplomacy by small child. I approve.