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Alan Cummings has been working on the Voyager mission for over 50 years.
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Since their launch, the two Voyager spacecraft that keep Cummings engaged have made breakthrough discoveries.
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Cummings thinks they will continue to travel for a billion years.
The twin Voyager spacecraft launched nearly five decades ago, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t continue for a billion years, one of its scientists, Alan Cummings told Business Insider.
Cummings began working on the Voyager mission when he was a graduate student at Caltech in 1973, about four years before the two spacecraft were launched.
Now a senior research scientist at Caltech, Cummings has seen the program shrink from more than 300 people to fewer than a dozen.
Voyagers 1 and 2 have traveled over 10 billion miles into space, further than any man-made object. Cummings said being a part of this historic mission for decades has been the backbone of his career.
“The Hubble Telescope is an amazing mission,” he said. “JWST is a great mission, but I think Voyager is in that category.”
Endurance voyagers
The Voyager mission has been collecting brand new data and photos since its inception.
The first time Cummings saw Jupiter’s moon Io in 1979, for example, he thought it was a joke. “It looked like a badly made pizza,” he said.
Its colorful surface covered with a volcano and a gray moon, marked by Earth, looked so different. “This can’t be true,” he said, “and it was true.”
The Voyagers offered us a new perspective on our outer solar system, unlike anything we could have imagined.
They discovered that Saturn is not the only planet with rings – Jupiter has them too. They revealed new moons around Jupiter and Saturn.
In total, the two spacecraft took 67,000 images of our solar system, the last of which was the famous “pale blue dot” photograph by Carl Sagan who said:
“To my mind, perhaps there is no better illustration of the folly of human considerations than this distant image of our little world.”
“He rewrote the textbooks,” Cummings said of the mission.
Both Voyagers were originally planned as five-year missions, but Cummings said, from the start, he expected the spacecraft to last at least 30 to 40 years.
“A great engineering team has kept this thing going,” Cummings said.
Now, as both spacecraft approach their 50th anniversary, they are running low on fuel.
Engineers had to shut down various instruments to keep them going and the data coming in.
Cummings said that when the Voyagers lose power and communications, they will continue to travel. “I think it’s going to go for a billion years,” he said. “There is nothing to stop it.”
Entering Voyager
If not for an unfortunate accident, Cummings may never have joined the Voyager mission.
Before Voyager, Cummings was part of an experiment to measure cosmic rays using a balloon.
For several summers, he had released the balloon from northern Manitoba, Canada.
But during its final flight, the balloon did not come down as expected and ended up over Russia, instead.
By the time Cummings got to Russia, the instrument was destroyed.
“I was very lucky,” he said, because he was able to join the Voyager mission there.
He put his cosmic ray experience to use, working on telescopes for the mission’s experiments.
“My little initials are scratched on one of those telescopes” he said, “so I think I’m going to die.”
Interstellar space
Cummings has worked on other projects for years, but the ongoing transmission of Voyagers has excited and involved new data.
“There is some new phenomenon that you always see,” he said.
In fact, Voyager data has become increasingly interesting to Cummings in recent years because both spacecraft are now in interstellar space, the region of space beyond the influence of our sun.
After the passage of the four giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, many of the tools were still in working order. Therefore, the spacecraft switched to an interstellar mission.
In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made spacecraft to enter interstellar space and Voyager 2 followed six years later.
“That’s what I was most interested in anyway,” said Cummings, since cosmic rays are his area of expertise and in interstellar space, the sun, Earth, and other obstacles do not in our solar system into those rays.
Voyager is “in some ways making its most interesting measurements right now,” he said.
Voyager 1 is currently experiencing problems with one of its onboard computers that could jeopardize the mission.
Cummings hopes the Voyagers can stay a little longer, especially since interstellar space is far away for any other spacecraft.
Read the original article on Business Insider
