The Journey of Voyager 1

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday Morning with Us is Tom Crameses and he is a Greek American scientist in space explorations. As a matter of fact, in nineteen seventy seven he launched Voyager one, and forty eight years later he still works with NASA monitoring Voyager one on his some of the missions he has launched. He has contributed to exploration missions on almost

0:32 every planet in the Solar System. Well, Tom, you’re my hero, your one big hero. Tell me about Voyager one. It’s still transmitting forty eight years later. Where the heck is we’re getting its energy from? And what was the most surprised thing that you found on all these planets.

0:58 Speaker 2 I’ll take things a time. Yeah, Voyager one is now about fifteen billion miles away from Earth roughly twenty five billion kilometers for those who don’t know about miles. And it takes a signal from Voyager at the speed of light three hundred thousand kilometers per second twenty three hours and three minutes to reach Earth. That’s how far it is.

1:36 Mind you, The light from the Sun gets who are in eight and a half minutes, So the voyagers are one hundred and sixty seven times as far from Earth as the sun is. So it’s still alive, but it does suffer from the ailements of old age. Like me who is old. He has a bit of Alzheimer’s. He

2:08 has some Arteria’s classis with narrowing of the artists and things like that. So we have to do repairs now and then. And we did that about a year ago. When we started sending us zeros and ones in random order, we could make sense out of it. We finally figured out what was wrong, and we dumped the memory of

2:44 the spacecraft to the ground. Mind you when I talk about the memory of the spacecraft talking about sixty one K, which is a million times less than your cell phone, please yes. And and and we found out that that one of the cells in the memory had gotten corrupted.

3:10 So we work with engineers and uh and we programmed the memory of the spacecraft around that. That’s what I mean by Alzheimers. So we’re back in business. We’re getting data that being And that’s my most proud moment. When I get up in the morning and I looked at night.

3:41 Speaker 1 You brought you brought you brought it back to life by uh uh, you know, going around certain circuits yes.

3:50 Speaker 2 Sir, he was. He wasn’t me, of course, he was on the whole team for these things in space. You know, you you work with a team of people who have the knowledge and the experience to do things. And one of the problems that we have with Voyager is that when we were designing it in the decade of the seventies,

4:10 you know, mid seventies, there are no laptops and now computer memory is.

4:17 Speaker 1 There was nothing.

4:19 Speaker 2 Yeah, and all our drawings go on paper and sometimes we have these meetings on Zoom and some young engineers would say, these are commedians. Remember what you guys did in nineteen seventy five for you designed the command and control system? Was it? They’s so bad? I said, you’re giving me you’re expecting me to remember from four eight

4:48 years ago. And when that mission was designed, it does go to Jupiter and Saturn, and I was going to be done in four years, and we didn’t really we kept the records of what we were doing, but you know, we weren’t thinking that we were going to need them for for it five years, for eight years. Anyway, it’s

5:11 a miracle. It’s a wonderful space because I call it the Odyssey of the twentieth century. The space odds killed the twentieth century.

5:21 Speaker 1 Well, I saw the movie, and you know, maybe I’ll come back someday.

5:29 Speaker 2 That is not possible. As you know, we have the first ever digital record of humanity, which was designed by Carl Sagan, by the way, who was a member of the Science then, and it has messages from the world because music has images of people, and it has even a message in classical Greek, which I would say, eatiness, poteste,

6:12 you’re really pos elie lithamann philly pusphilus, which means, wherever you are, greetings, we are coming to you in peace as friends to friends. That was in classical Greek. And if voyagers ever get captured by some aliens in a few million years, they were here a message in classical Greek.

6:44 Speaker 1 Understood and many other Now how long? What is the fuel? What kind of fuel does it have? Said? Nuclear? What is it?

6:54 Speaker 2 Yeah? The battery power is actually nuclear. It’s a nuclear battery and it’s fueled by plutonium to ferrate. You know, that’s what the first bomb was made of for the a bomb, and it’s radioactive and when element is radioactive, it generates heat. And what we do is we use heat, generate electricity and power the spacecraft and the instruments. But

7:30 you know, every radioactive elopment has got called a half life another word, in about a number of years, and the case of plutonium is eighty four years. In forty four years, you want to get half of the key that you expected and therefore half the power. And since the spacecraft was built for a four year mission at

8:02 that time, we had like two hundred and four hundred and sixty five. Watch now we’ve got two hundred and twenty five and the space count to get exceedingly cold. The instruments are getting very cold, and we don’t have enough power to run everything. So what we’re doing is slowly turning off the heaters from some of the instruments

8:29 and turning off instruments altogether, so we will keep the spacecraft for freezing and keeps sending us data to ER until now. So we expect that we’re actually going to run out of power by about twenty eight to thirty twenty eighty.

8:49 Speaker 1 Two, twenty eighty two or thirty now. Twenty eight. Twenty eight two.

9:02 Speaker 2 No, no to zero two eight in three years?

9:07 Speaker 1 In three years? Okay, what did you estimate when when you launched.

9:11 Speaker 2 It, Well, we used the biggest the biggest rocket that NASA had. It was a so called Titan Center at that time, back in seventy seven. But you know, once spacecraft gets very far away from the Sun, then the gravity of the Sun can never pull it back again.

9:38 So this spacecraft we keep going forever in at about sixty about forty thousand miles an hour, sixty one thousand kilometers per hour. And because you know space is pretty much empty, we keep going and going and going, and the next time got well, either get close to a solar system. Another solar system is called the Constellation of

10:12 Comical Palis in forty thousand years from an How.

10:18 Speaker 1 Well, you’re not going to be around forty thousand years from now.

10:21 Speaker 2 I don’t plan to be. I don’t know about you.

10:24 Speaker 1 Well, we’re out of time, but i’d like to continue this conversation on another day. Well sure, doctor Tim promises you’ve done phenomenal things and and we we’d love to hear more from you, and we’ll talk against.

10:43 Speaker 2 Okay, Well, thank you very much for the invitation, and have a good coming week.

10:51 Speaker 1 Okay. I look forward to seeing you in Nathens. Again.

10:55 Speaker 2 Of course I’ll be here, although in about a month I had to be back at dance Attis because we have the tenth amniversary of the flyby of the new Horizon Space Hut room Pluto, when we first saw what little looked like.

11:14 Speaker 1 So we’ll talk about you so much, and that’s