Will we ever overtake voyager 1? In the entire history of humanity, only five
spacecraft have had the correct trajectory needed to exit the solar system. The first to leave our
solar system was the Voyager 1 spacecraft which already has a head start over others.
Will any spacecraft ever overtake Voyager 1? Let’s talk about that and more in this video.
If you want to escape the solar system
you need much more than a normal spacecraft and you must escape the combined gravitational pull
of the Sun and the Earth. Although the Earth has a significant gravitational force,
forcing an item at the surface to move at 11 km/s to escape our planet's gravitational attraction,
the Sun's gravitational impact dominates the Solar System. To depart the Solar System fully,
an object would need to travel at a speed of 42 km/s from Earth's orbit.
Only five (six if you're charitable) spacecraft in human history have satisfied those requirements.
These five spacecraft are- the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, New Horizons and finally the
two Voyager probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The first Pioneer 10 was launched about half a century
ago from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral Florida on March 2, 1972. About the size
of a car, the quarter ton Pioneer 10 spacecraft was planned to investigate the entire solar
system environment beyond Mars for the first time, including the never crossed before asteroid belt.
Pioneer 10 would travel towards the outer solar system after passing Jupiter, eventually leaving
the SUn’s domain forever. NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft assisted in discovering the
furthest reaches of our solar system. Though the missions launched about a year apart and
traveled on different paths, they accomplished a number of historical feats together: Pioneer 10
provided unprecedented insight into the asteroid belt and performed the first flyby of Jupiter,
while Pioneer 11 was the first spacecraft to flyby Saturn. NASA has lost touch with both spacecraft,
but both have continued to travel farther into space. Both Pioneer 10 and 11 are on
paths that will ultimately lead them out of the solar system, each bringing a map back to Earth
in the event that any intelligent life intercepts them. Pioneer 10 was ​​Humanity’s first spacecraft
to encounter Jupiter; that gravitational assist accelerated it beyond escape velocity.
The most amazing aspect of Pioneer 10's journey is that it obtained virtually the
maximum conceivable velocity from a gravitational collision with Jupiter. After becoming the first
spacecraft to reach Jupiter in late 1973, it went on to become the first spacecraft
in the Solar System to attain escape velocity. It was our most distant spacecraft until 1998,
when Voyager 1 surpassed it, and it will slip to third place in 2023, when Voyager 2 catches up
with it. Pioneer 11 which was launched in 1973, is also leaving the Solar System. Pioneer 11,
like Pioneer 10, passed through Jupiter's lunar system before utilizing Jupiter's gravity as an
aid maneuver to reach Saturn. It detected and almost crashed with Saturn's moon Epimetheus
while investigating the Saturnian system, missing it by an estimated 4000 km.
Despite encountering Saturn and Jupiter, it is our slowest outgoing spacecraft.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, nearly two weeks after Voyager 2. The two
probes completed a historic "grand tour" of the outer planets, providing scientists with some
of their first close-up views of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and their moons. The spacecraft
is already 135 times further away from the Sun than we are, and it will travel another 100 miles
in the time it takes you to read this line. Its most recent observations raise concerns about
the real extent of our solar system. Even though Pluto is considered as the outermost planet in our
solar system, Voyager 1 is about 3 times further away from that and yet is inside the Sun's domain.
Our powerful Sun is presently shining brighter than 10 full moons on the spacecraft.
The reason this is happening is because the sun extends its sphere of influence beyond the visible
spectrum of light by ejecting a wind of particles which envelops the planets in a protective bubble
known as the heliosphere. Noone knows how big this bubble is, which explains the excitement with the
voyagers probe. Back in 2004, Voyager 1 began to detect hints that the end of the solar system was
approaching, causing scientists to infer that the “edge of the solar system” is approaching.
The solar wind should drastically slow when it presses against the universe beyond, and Voyager
saw precisely that. In 2007, Voyager’s twin probe, Voyager 2, observed the same phenomenon.
Another sign of departure was observed by Voyager 1 back in 2012. The amount of interstellar cosmic
rays has increased, possibly because the Sun’s magnetic field can no longer deflect large amounts
of high-speed charged particles. Astronomers were able to know that Voyager had left the heliosphere
when the magnetic field lines flipped. In 2012, Voyager 1 breached the heliosphere's barrier;
in 2018, Voyager 2 accomplished the same. The asymmetric nature and extent of the bubble
have not been fully measured, particularly in the directions opposite the Voyager probes.
It has been receding 17 kilometers per second since entering interstellar space in 2012.
Before running out of fuel in 2025, the spacecraft will investigate the Local Cloud, a wisp of
cosmic flotsam that absorbs traces of light from neighboring stars. The cloud is a cosmic wanderer,
not a permanent feature, but it has an effect on the size of the heliosphere: it compresses it,
but only little because the cloud is dispersed. In the past, thick clouds might have compressed
the heliosphere so much that Earth was exposed to cosmic radiation that could have aided or
hampered the genesis of life. Our home planet is unquestionably a component of the solar system,
hence any limit that excludes Earth cannot be considered the system's outer limits.
Voyager 2 notably performed a "grand tour" of the Solar System,
traveling near to each of the four gas giants and photographing their planetary, lunar,
and ringed systems. To do this, Voyager 2 was launched on a slower trajectory than Voyager 1.
Despite being the first to be launched, it is less far and faster than its sibling. And the
latest in our list of interstellar probes is the New Horizons spacecraft which was launched back
in 2006 and is our fastest spacecraft ever. In July 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft
became the first to visit the minor planet Pluto(opens in new tab). New Horizons continues
to explore our solar system(opens in new tab), and on April 17, 2021, the spacecraft will have
traveled 50 astronomical units (AU) from the sun (opens in new tab). (One AU is the
typical Earth-Sun distance, which is around 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).)
New Horizons observations continue to redefine our knowledge of solar system objects circling
distant from the sun (opens in new tab). Because of its tremendous distance from Earth,
the spacecraft is just the seventh to journey so far from home. But will the fastest spacecraft,
New Horizon ever catch or overtake Voyager 1? The short answer is no. Despite getting
a boost/redirect by Jupiter during its journey to Pluto, it won’t be able to catch Voyager 1.
The New Horizons spacecraft was somewhat accelerated but primarily diverted into a
trajectory that would lead to a close fly-by encounter with Pluto. Because it lacks a
significant gravity assist, its speed will never allow it to catch up to Voyager 1 or 2.
This 1997 artwork
[https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*FIal8-c2uW3Gb9-y.jpg] depicts the planets of the Solar System
as well as the respective paths of the Solar System's first four spacecraft.
Voyager 1 passed Pioneer 10 in 1998, and it passed the heliopause and reached interstellar space
in 2012. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in 2018 and will not pass Pioneer 10 until 2023;
so, we have a strong suspicion that Pioneer 10 is also in interstellar space
but is no longer operational. New Horizons, which was just 20 AU away from the Sun at the time,
is now more than 150 percent further away (over 50 AU). It will eventually pass both Pioneers,
but never either Voyager. Although Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft launched in 1972
on a course that would take it outside the Solar System, it was exceeded in 1998 by
Voyager 1 and will be surpassed again in 2023 by Voyager 2 and New Horizons in the late 2100s.
The Ulysses spacecraft, launched in 1990, was planned to circle the Sun
and study it from various latitudes and distances. A gravitational collision with Jupiter in 2098
will give a gravitational push strong enough to propel Ulysses out of the Solar System. No
other mission will be able to surpass Voyager 1. Also there is simply no reason to ‘overtake
the Voyagers’. NASA plans their missions meticulously without wasting taxpayer dollars,
so they wouldn't plan a mission just to ‘overtake the Voyager 1’. We have and will have spacecrafts
faster than the Voyagers but there might be simply no reason to just launch them in a race. Apart
from this, There is also another ignored reason. Space is enormously large and three-dimensional.
Many of us are accustomed to seeing the familiar Solar System diagram, with its dots for planets in
near-circular orbits neatly arranged around the central circle representing the Sun:
we forget that none of those elliptical orbits are actually coplanar with the ecliptic,
and that the majority of interplanetary probe orbits are well outside the ecliptic plane
(Pioneer 11 was the first of these, and Voyager 1 & 2, and New Horizons have followed suit).
Each of the five vessels departing our Solar System is traveling in a different direction
and at a different angle to the ecliptic. So there’s no reason to compare these spacecraft
as a one-directional linear race! In the coming future even if we have very fast spacecrafts,
they wouldn't be sent on a mission to overtake the voyagers. So we can comfortably say that
Voyager 1 would always be the farthest man-made object out in interstellar space.
So what do you think about Voyager 1? Will we ever overtake it? Let us know your thoughts in the
comment section below. And don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to our channel. And press
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