Friday, November 21, 2003

WHERE NO MAN (OR NO ONE) HAS GONE BEFORE

"The furthest-flung piece of humanity — NASA's Voyager 1 space probe — may have gone where no man-made object has gone before." according to space scientists at Johns Hopkins University quoted in Nature (registration required).

"Voyager's 26-year, 13-billion-kilometre journey has put it in the region of space where theory predicts the boundary — called the termination shock — to be."

If you're my age, you may remember the Voyager probes which were the first human objects to penetrate deep space. They also contraversially carried with them some rather dumb artefacts of the human race.

It's taken them 26 years to get at or near the end of our solar system. It'll be thousands of years before they get anywhere near another solar system. Chances are that no one will pick up that golden disk (unless you believe Star Trek). Carl Sagan was a bit of a hero of mine in my teens. The disk idea was one of his less brilliant ideas.

:: Posted by pete @ 14:40