This Week's Sci-light

On June 28, 2013 I wrote a Sci-light on the Voyager I--a spacecraft launched in 1977 the same year Star Wars was released.  This amazing spacecraft seems to share a common ancestor with the Energizer bunny. 

Image obtained from NASA 2002 shows one of twin Voyager spacecrafts, launched in 1977.

It's still going!  Where do you end up when you just keep going?  Apparently, "where no machine has gone before!"  Ok...I'm done.

But truly, Voyager has now gone where no machine has gone before.  In a news conference on Thursday, NASA scientists announced that on August 25, 2012 the month NASA's rover, Curiosity, landed on Mars, Voyager slipped out of the Sun's empire, the heliosphere, and passed into interstellar space.

While the New York Times article, "In a Breathtaking First, NASA's Voyager 1 Exits the Solar System" by Brooks Barnes introduces you to the Voyager 1, the NASA team, and what's next for the spacecraft, the stark comparison between the past and the present caught my attention.  In this story, a spacecraft with 8 track tapes, transmitters with the power of a refrigerator light bulb, and computers with a fraction of the memory in a low-end iPhone took us to where we have only imagined, and Lawrence J. Zottarelli, a 77 year old retired NASA engineer, wrote precise and expert computer coding to increase the amount of data we received at the boundary.

Sometimes it's easy in the search for the new and better technology to forget the steps taken before and disregard them as outdated.  But just as we would not be without our ancestors, so the technology of today would not exist with out the innovations from before. 

So my hat's off to the "imagineers" of yesterday who remind us of the ever circling spiral of time that brings the past to the present and into the future!