Voyager soldiers on, as do memories of seeing it

Thomas Belton

is a marine biologist and the author of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities' 2010 Honor Book "Protecting New Jersey's Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State"

NASA recently announced that the space probe Voyager 1, launched in 1977, left the solar system on Aug. 25, 2012, and floated out to interstellar space. Most people will read this factoid and promptly forget it, one more bit of information overload in the Internet age. Yet for some of us, this event is almost too remarkable for words.

Ed Stone, the chief scientist on the Voyager mission, said, "In leaving the heliosphere and setting sail on the cosmic seas between the stars, Voyager has joined other historic journeys of exploration: The first circumnavigation of the Earth, the first steps on the moon."

The amazing part of the story is that this bit of 20th-century technology, built at the beginning of the portable-computer age, has only 68 kilobytes of memory on board and runs on obsolete batteries barely capable of powering an electric razor. The data-recording system is an eight-track tape recorder, the apogee of technology in 1977, when I used one to listen to Queen's new song, "We Will Rock You," and Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville."

The phenomenal fact that Voyager still functions and enlightens us as to the limits of our universe is incredible. Some may understand the implications of this feat and realize that the momentous arc of our collective human intelligence was elevated in ways not known since Newton and Einstein devised mathematical thought experiments to explain momentum and interstellar reality.

Voyager also carries a time capsule aboard known as "the golden record," a 12-inch, gold-plated copper disc with images and sounds embedded on it so that, if by chance extraterrestrials are out there and pick it up, they could learn about us. The record includes 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those of surf, wind, thunder, birds, and whales, as well as musical selections and spoken greetings in 55 languages. The first greeting is in Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer nearly 5,000 years ago.

When Voyager was launched in 1977, I was studying marine biology at the University of Pennsylvania and took an astronomy course to fill in some needed credits. The professor was very formal and old school. He was long and lean, an Ichabod Crane type with a protruding Adam's apple who always wore a three-piece suit to class and spoke with a high, reedy voice in a classic Philadelphia accent - his vowels short, his consonants pronounced with a surgeon's precision.

It was a night course, so his lectures usually ended with a jaunt to the roof, where the university fathers thought to build a sky observatory in the 20th century. The telescope was three feet long and stored under a movable circular dome that retracted to open the night sky above us like a tapestry waiting to be unwound.

Of course, the night sky in Philadelphia in the 1970s was nowhere like the sky when the telescope was built in what is now the fifth-largest city in the United States, flooded with electric light pollution that turned the atmosphere above into a ghastly red aura from the thousands of streetlights that illuminated the ever-growing city.

Regardless, our professor usually found the more brilliant features from the night sky, which outshone the human-induced glow. The first night, he showed us the red supergiant Betelgeuse, near the constellation Orion, the star hovering above Philadelphia like a demon angel made of insubstantial ether. Then he adjusted the scope and turned it toward Sirius, the Dog Star, in the constellation Canis Major. Sirius is visible just above the horizon before nightfall in late summer, and the ancients believed it added to the sun's heat - thus the phrase the dog days of summer.

There's something singular about understanding the night sky as more than a black shroud filled with pretty pinpricks in the void. The gaseous nebulas are beautiful rivers of light but also glowing dust clouds around young suns and planets coalescing. There are blue giants in the night sky and exploding quasars. There are black holes acting like celestial vacuum cleaners, scooping up suns and planetary debris like dust bunnies. At the bottom of these black holes are phenomena called event horizons, where light and energy cannot escape, sucked down into a rabbit hole where time may move backward, space may pop up in two places at the same time, and Newtonian laws of physics are reduced to mythical analogies.

Voyager has moved out into that void between the galaxies now, and, like the Energizer Bunny, it will keep on marching, recording, and sending data back till its power runs out. I would never have appreciated the magnitude of this accomplishment if I hadn't taken that astronomy course in university.

The world I live in became both larger and smaller that first night I went up to the observatory. I sensed the enormous space between the stars and the infinitesimally small place man holds in all this real estate. But I also sensed the scale of humanity's capabilities as the professor turned the telescope to have us look at Voyager just leaving our planet. I could clearly see the silver spark flying toward empty space, which made me feel bigger, the disappearing probe an extension of humanity seeking the stars.