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Voyager
This nOde last updated December 17th, 2004 and is permanently morphing...
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voyage

voyage (voi´îj) noun
1.A long journey, as:. a. A journey by sea to a foreign or distant land. b. A journey by land to distant parts. c. A journey through outer space.
2.Often voyages . a. The events of a journey of exploration or discovery considered as material for a narrative. b. Such a narrative.

verb
voyaged, voyaging, voyages verb, intransitive
To make a voyage.

verb, transitive
To sail across; traverse: voyaged the western ocean.

[Middle English, from Old French veyage, from Late Latin viâticum, a journey, from Latin, provisions for a journey, from neuter of viâticus, of a journey, from via, road.]
- voy´ager noun

voyager (noun)

traveler: explorer, adventurer, voyager, mariner

VOYAGER’S GREETINGS TO THE UNIVERSE

The Voyager spacecraft will be the third and fourth human artifacts to escape entirely from the solar system. Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager in outstripping the gravitational attraction of the Sun, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future.

With this example before them,  placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2-a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle.

Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per second. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music. Once the Voyager spacecraft leave the solar system (by 1990, both will be beyond the orbit of Pluto), they will find themselves in empty space.

It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, “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.”

• The total cost of the Voyager mission from May 1972 through the Neptune encounter (including launch vehicles, nuclear-power-source RTGs, and DSN tracking support) is 865 million dollars. At first, this may sound very expensive, but the fantastic returns are a bargain when we place the costs in the proper perspective. It is important to realize that:
• 1.on a per-capita basis, this is only 20 cents per U.S. resident per year, or roughly half the cost of one candy bar each year since project inception.
• 2.the daily interest on the U.S. national debt is a major fraction of the entire cost of Voyager.
• A total of 11,000 workyears will have been devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the Great Pyramid at Giza to (supposedly) King Cheops.
• A total of five trillion bits of scientific data will have been returned to Earth by both Voyager spacecraft at the completion of the Neptune encounter. This represents enough bits to encode over 6000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and is equivalent to about 1000 bits of information provided to each person on Earth.

 

• The sensitivity of our deep-space tracking antennas located around the world is truly amazing. The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a  power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level.
• Each Voyager spacecraft comprises 65,000 individual parts. Many of these parts have a large number of "equivalent" smaller parts such as transistors. One computer memory alone contains over one million equivalent electronic parts, with each spacecraft containing some five million equivalent parts. Since a color TV set contains about 2500 equivalent parts, each Voyager has the equivalent electronic circuit complexity of some 2000 color TV sets.
• Like the HAL computer aboard the ship Discovery from the famous science fiction story _2001: A Space Odyssey_, each Voyager is equipped with computer programming for autonomous fault protection. The Voyager system is one of the most sophisticated ever designed for a deep-space probe. There are seven top-level fault protection routines, each capable of covering a multitude of possible failures. The spacecraft can place itself in a safe state in a matter of only seconds or minutes, an ability that is critical for its survival when round-trip communication times for Earth stretch to several hours as the spacecraft journeys to the remote outer solar system.

• Both Voyagers were specifically designed and protected to withstand the large radiation dosage during the Jupiter swing-by. This was accomplished by  selecting radiation-hardened parts and by shielding very sensitive parts. An unprotected human passenger riding aboard Voyager 1 during its Jupiter encounter would have received a radiation dose equal to one thousand times the lethal level.

• The Voyager spacecraft can point its scientific instruments on the scan platform to an accuracy of better than one-tenth of a degree. This is comparable to bowling strike-after-strike ad infinitum, assuming that you must hit within one inch of the strike pocket every time. Such precision is necessary to properly center the narrow-angle picture whose square field-of-view would be equivalent to the width of a bowling pin.
• To avoid smearing in Voyager's television pictures, spacecraft angular rates must be extremely small to hold the cameras as steady as possible during the exposure time. Each spacecraft is so steady that angular rates are typically 15 times slower than the motion of a clock's hour hand. But even this will not be quite steady enough at Neptune, where light levels are 900 times fainter than those on Earth. Spacecraft engineers have already devised ways to make Voyager 30 times steadier than the hour hand on a clock.
• The electronics and heaters aboard each nearly one-ton Voyager spacecraft can operate on only 400 watts of power, or roughly one-fourth that used by an average residential home in the western United States.
• A set of small thrusters provides Voyager with the capability for attitude control and trajectory correction. Each of these tiny assemblies has a thrust of only three ounces. In the absence of friction, on a level road, it would take nearly six hours to accelerate a large car up to a speed of 48 km/h (30 mph) using one of the thrusters.
• The Voyager scan platform can be moved about two axes of rotation. A thumb-sized motor in the gear train drive assembly (which turns 9000 revolutions for each single revolution of the scan platform) will have rotated five million revolutions from launch through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to the number of automobile crankshaft revolutions during a trip of 2725 km (1700 mi).
• The Voyager gyroscopes can detect spacecraft angular motion as little as one ten-thousandth of a degree. The Sun's apparent motion in our sky moves over 40 times that amount in just one second.
• The tape recorder aboard each Voyager has been designed to record and playback a great deal of scientific data. The tape head should not begin to wear out until the tape has been moved back and forth through a distance comparable to that across the United States. Imagine playing a two-hour video cassette on your home VCR once a day for the next 22 years, without a failure.
• Each Voyager used the enormous gravity field of Jupiter to be hurled on to Saturn, experiencing a Sun-relative speed increase of roughly 35,700 mph. As total energy within the solar system must be conserved, Jupiter was initially slowed in its solar orbit---but by only one foot per trillion years. Additional gravity-assist swing-bys of Saturn and Uranus were necessary for Voyager 2 to complete its Grand Tour flight to Neptune, reducing the trip time by nearly twenty years when compared to the unassisted Earth-to-Neptune route.
• Voyager's fuel efficiency (in terms of mpg) is quite impressive. Even though most of the launch vehicle's 700 ton weight is due to rocket fuel, Voyager 2's great travel distance of 7.1 billion km (4.4 billion mi) from launch to Neptune results in a fuel economy of about 13,000 km per liter (30,000 mi per gallon). As Voyager 2 streaks by Neptune and coasts out of the solar system, this economy will get better and better!
• The resolution of the Voyager narrow-angle television cameras is sharp enough to read a newspaper headline at a distance of 1 km (0.62 mi).

• NASA video footage (quicktime) - Voyager    Jupiter flyby
• Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) - "V-ger"
• electro track _V-Ger_ MP3 by Il.ek.tro off of 12" on Klang Elektronik (1998)
• tech-house track _V-Ger_ MP3 by Funk d'Void off of _Technoir_ CDx2 on Soma (1997)
• 604 track _Acid Rain Over Bombay_ MP3 by V-ger and Soma

• _The Sounds Of Earth_ copper 12"
• track _Astral Voyager_ MP3 by Tangerine Dream off of _Green Desert_ 12"
• progressive trance track _Voyager_ MP3 (vK) by Arte Bionico off of _Arte Bionico ep_ 12" on Superstition (1994)
• track _Voyage To India_ MP3 (192k) by Stevie Wonder off of _A Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants_ 12" on Motown (1976)
• release _Voyager ep_ 12" by X-Funk on Soma Recordings Limited
• breaks track _Voyager (mixed)_ MP3 (192k) by Chris Carter off of _Modernizm_ MixCD mixed by B.L.I.M.
• track _Vulvic Voyager_ MP3 (320k)by Vulva off of _From The Cockpit_ CD on Rephlex (1995)
• crossover track _Voyage Into Infinity_ MP3 (192k) by Bad Brains off of _Quickness_ on Caroline (1989)
• art rock track _Fantastic Voyage_ MP3 by David Bowie off of _Lodger_ 12" (1979)
  • synthesizer & production by Brian Eno, guitar by Adrian Belew
• ambient techno track _Mothership Earth_ MP3 (160k) by Voyager 8 off of _Rings, Moons & Clouds_ 12"x2 on Synewave #013
• ambient house track _5:23 (Maiden Voyage)_ MP3 (160k) by Global Communication off of _76:14_ on Dedicated (1994)
• 604 track _Drifting On Forever Through Space_ MP3 (192k) by Psyburbia off of _Groove Invaders_ CD on Creative Vibes
• 604 track _Ulysses (Voyage 2)_ by Transwave off of _Distance To Goa 3 -  The Gates of Goa Trance_compilation CD x2 on Distance
• psychedelic track _The Trip:_The Beginning Of The Voyage (Heart Chakra)_ MP3 (192k) by Timothy Leary off of _Turn On Tune In Drop Out_ 12" on Mercury (1967)
• short story _Voyage Of The Space Beagle_ by A.E. Van Vogt.  the entire plot is identical, and precedes the plot of the film _Alien_ (vhs/ntsc) (1979) directed by Ridley Scott

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