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Alan Cummings has worked on the Voyager mission for over 50 years.
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Since their launch, the two Voyager spacecraft have made groundbreaking discoveries that will keep Cummings busy.
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Cummings thinks they will continue traveling for another billion years.
Alan Cummings, one of the scientists, told Business Insider that the twin Voyager spacecraft were launched almost fifty years ago and there’s no reason they couldn’t continue for another billion years.
Cummings began working on the Voyager mission in 1973, when he was a graduate student at Caltech, about four years before the two spacecraft were launched.
Cummings, now a senior research scientist at Caltech, has seen the program shrink from more than 300 people to fewer than a dozen people.
Voyager 1 and 2 traveled more than 10 billion miles through space, farther than any human-made object. Cummings said being a part of this historic mission for decades has been the backbone of his career.
“The Hubble Telescope is an amazing mission,” he said. “JWST is a great mission, but I think Voyager is in that kind of category as well.”
Travelers’ endurance
The Voyager mission has been collecting groundbreaking data and photographs since its inception.
For example, when Cummings first saw Jupiter’s moon Io in 1979, he thought it was a joke. “It looked like a poorly made pizza,” he said.
Its colorful, volcano-covered surface looked very different from Earth’s gray, flower-patterned moon. “This can’t be real,” he said, “and it was real.”
The Voyagers gave us a new perspective on our outer solar system, unlike anything we could have imagined.
They discovered that Saturn is not the only planet with rings, Jupiter also has rings. They revealed new moons around Jupiter and Saturn.
In total, the two spacecraft took 67,000 photographs of our solar system; The last of these was the “pale blue dot” photo made famous by Carl Sagan:
“To me, there is nothing that better illustrates the folly of human arrogance than this distant view of our tiny world.”
“He rewrote the textbooks,” Cummings said of the mission.
Both Voyagers were originally planned as five-year missions, but Cummings said from the beginning that he expected the spacecraft to last at least 30 to 40 years.
“An outstanding engineering team kept this going,” Cummings said.
Now, the two spacecraft are running low on fuel as they approach their 50th anniversaries.
Engineers had to shut down different devices to keep them running and data coming through.
Cummings said the Voyagers will continue traveling when they lose power and communications. “I think it will take another billion years,” he said. “There’s nothing to stop this.”
Join Voyager
Had it not been for an unfortunate accident, Cummings may never have joined the Voyager mission.
Before Voyager, Cummings was part of an experiment to measure cosmic rays using a balloon.
He had released the balloon from northern Manitoba, Canada, for several summers.
However, on its last flight, the balloon did not descend as expected and crashed over Russia.
The instrument had been destroyed when Cummings arrived in Russia.
“It was very lucky for me,” he said, because he was later able to join the Voyager mission.
He used his cosmic ray experience working on telescopes for the mission’s experiments.
“I have my little initials carved on one of those telescopes,” he said, “so I guess I’ll be immortal.”
interstellar space
Cummings had worked on other projects for decades, but Voyagers’ constant delivery of new data excited and involved him.
“There’s always a new phenomenon you see,” he said.
In fact, Voyager’s data has become increasingly interesting to Cummings in recent years because the two spacecraft are now in interstellar space, that region of space beyond the influence of our sun.
After passing by the four giant planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, most of the instruments were still in working order. So the spacecraft moved on to an interstellar mission.
In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made spacecraft to enter interstellar space, and Voyager 2 followed six years later.
Since cosmic rays are his specialty, and because they are in interstellar space, those rays are not interrupted by the sun, Earth and other obstacles in our solar system, “That’s actually what intrigued me the most,” Cummings said.
Voyager is “in some ways making its most interesting measurements right now,” he said.
Currently, one of Voyager 1’s onboard computers is experiencing problems that could jeopardize the mission.
Cummings hopes the Voyagers can last a little longer, especially since interstellar space is so far away from other spacecraft.
Read the original article on Business Insider