A Signal from Voyager 1, and a Helicopter on Saturn's Moon

Happy Tuesday, everyone! This week’s newsletter is 817 words, a 6-minute read.

Table of Contents

• 1 Big Thing: Voyager 1 Phoned Home after 5 Months …

• 2. Cool Stuff You Might Have Missed

• 3. NASA is Building a Helicopter to Send to Saturn …

• 4. A Personal Book Recommendation

• 5. Upcoming Launches & Missions

1 Big Thing: Voyager 1 Phoned Home after 5 Months of Silence

NASA’s 45-year-old Spacecraft Voyager 1 sent us its first message in 5 months, after being radio silent following a corrupted code issue.

What’s Voyager 1?: Voyager 1 is one of two space probes - the other being Voyager 2 - sent in 1977 to the outer reaches of the solar system. It made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s largest moon Titan, before continuing outward.

History-Makers: Voyager 1 and 2 are the only man-made objects to ever leave the solar system and enter interstellar space. Voyager 1 is currently the furthest spacecraft from Earth at a cool 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers).

What’s the Big Deal?: The fact that we have any contact with Voyager 1 at its distance and age is incredible. The probe was built before the invention of GPS digital cameras, or portable music, and it takes over 22 hours for our signals to reach it from Earth, but it’s somehow responding.

Status Update: Voyager isn’t sending us any science data or photos (its camera was turned off years ago), but it is sending scientists at NASA valuable data about the health of its hardware.

Looking Ahead: We haven't been able to collect science data from Voyager 1 lately, but scientists are hoping they’ll be able to get the probe’s science instruments back online soon. Any data we gather at all from the far-off probe is absolutely invaluable given that Voyager is floating through completely uncharted territory and getting further from Earth every second.

2. Cool Stuff You Might Have Missed

1. A chunk of space junk discarded from the International Space Station crashed through someone’s roof in Naples, Florida. (CBS)

2. Scientists expect a far-away star to explode between now and September - it’ll be visible in the night sky. (NPR)

3. India aims to achieve ‘debris-free’ space missions by 2030. (Space)

3. NASA is Building a Helicopter to Send to Saturn’s Largest Moon, Titan

This Past Week, NASA announced that its highly-anticipated Dragonfly mission passed review and is go for development.

What is Dragonfly?: Dragonfly is a nuclear-powered rotorcraft that will land on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and explore multiple locations on the surface. The craft will be about 900 pounds and the size of an SUV.

Why Titan?: Titan is an ocean world, but its oceans are made of liquid methane rather than water. It has a denser atmosphere than Earth and 14% the gravity of Earth, making it a prime target for exploration with a rotorcraft.

Scientists See Titan as one of the most likely places in our solar system to harbor life, probably in the form of microbes near its methane lakes and oceans.

A Note on Rotorcraft: NASA’s first rotorcraft on another planet was Ingenuity, which operated for 3 years. Ingenuity was groundbreaking, and opened the doors for other rotorcraft missions to follow. Rotorcraft are a beautiful solution to exploring other planets and moons (if they have an atmosphere) because they’re light and can quickly hop between locations.

Looking Ahead: The Dragonfly mission won’t fly until 2028 at the earliest and won’t arrive at the mysterious moon until 2034. If I’m still writing this newsletter in 2028, we’ll definitely talk about it.

4. A Personal Book Recommendation

We’ve probably all heard the story of the race to the moon between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1960s. What we haven’t heard nearly as much about is the race to manned spaceflight itself - especially from the Soviet Union’s perspective.

In his book “Beyond”, Stephen Walker tells the story of Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and the mission that made him the first human being in space. The book has crazy high ratings and reads like a piece of well-written fiction, except it actually happened.

You can check it out here:

5. Upcoming Launches & Missions

SPECIAL EXCITING NEWS: If you refer just 3 friends (used to be 5, now it’s 3) to this newsletter, I’ll send you a free copy of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s A Brief Welcome to the Universe. Use the link below to share and get credit for your referrals!

Thanks as always,

-Michael