Today we are looking at two new journeys that have push the limits of mankind’s knowledge and capabilities: One in unchartered territories of outer space and one that is the coldest journey on earth.
First up: Humans have recently, for the first time, created something that has journeyed into interstellar space.
Image: Courtesy of NASA. Voyager 1.
Voyager 1, was launched over 36 years ago to probe our our surrounding cosmos. Now, it is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun. And it is here that the space related to our sun meets the space related to another star. It is here, in this in-between space, filled with plasma, or ionized gas, that our spacecraft sails.
The news was just published this fall, in the journal Science, by Dan Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa. It is believed that the probe first entered interstellar space officially on August 25, 2012.
Voyager 1 first probed the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles that surrounds the sun, in 2004, when it first detected the increased pressure of interstellar space. But it took 8 more years for the probe to physically get there.
Image: Courtesy of NASA. Coronal Mass Ejection.
A coronal mass ejection that erupted from the sun in March 2012 took 13 months to reach Voyager 1 and when it did, the probe’s plasma wave sensor detected movement—the surrounding plasma vibrated “like a violin string.” The pitch of the oscillations indicated the density of the plasma—more than 40 times denser than the outer layer of the heliosphere—the levels of interstellar space.
Image: Courtesy of NASA. Voyager 2.
"We literally jumped out of our seats when we saw these oscillations in our data—they showed us the spacecraft was in an entirely new region, comparable to what was expected in interstellar space, and totally different than in the solar bubble," Gurnett reported.
"Clearly we had passed through the heliopause, which is the long-hypothesized boundary between the solar plasma and the interstellar plasma.
Photo: Courtesy of NASA. Jupiter captured by Voyager 1 1979.
JPL built and operates the twin Voyager spacecraft as part of NASA's Heliophysics System Observatory and NASA's Deep Space Network. The Voyagers are expected to continue sending data at least until 2020.
Photo: Courtesy of NASA. Voyager 2 photo of Neptune. 1989.
Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched 16 days apart in 1977. They are the longest continuously operated spacecraft. They communicate with the ground team daily by emitting signals from the equivalent of a refrigerator light bulb which, by the time they reach the earth, are only a fraction of a billion-billionth of a watt. Data transmits at 160 BPS.
Photo: Courtesy of NASA. Lightyear-long cloud of dust and gas in interstellar space.
Along its journey, Voyager 1 has taken some incredibly beautiful photos of our solar system. And now it is headed into more exotic locations under a different sun. We can’t wait to see what it looks like there!
Photo: Courtesy of the Coldest Journey. The expeditions machinery in transit.
The longest journey ever, deep into Antarctica, in the middle of polar winter, dubbed “The Coldest Journey,” covered over 300 kilometers and climbed from sea level to almost 3,000 meters up to the polar plateau. The five man team, who set out this past March, has just stopped and set up research encampment.
They had hoped to be the first to completely transverse the continent in winter, but we halted when they came upon an enormous crevasse that had never been spotted on the ground or by satellite. They simply couldn’t navigate it.
The physical journey may have stopped for now, the the knowledge journey continues, as the team will look into the unique weather and lifeforms, as well as snow dynamics.
Alex Kumar, a medical doctor, scientific explorer, photographer and writer, was invited to help set up and organise a substantial Human Sciences research project for The Coldest Journey, called the White Mars Project.
The initiative will analyze these extreme winter conditions in comparison to those found in space. It will look at how human physiology and psychology are affected by exposure to not only extreme cold, with temperatures as low as -70⁰C, but also to the loss of the day/night cycle, low oxygen levels of the Polar plateau, and stresses of living and working in confined spaces in a hostile, threatening setting.
