The Loneliness of Voyager 1 #space

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This sonification (the practice of turning data into sound) maps the speed of the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it moves throughout the solar system more than 40 years ago. It gained speed during encounters with Jupiter and Saturn, but then we sent on a course out of the solar system, likely to never interact with another object for billions of years. The speed ranges from about 40 km/s to 17 km/s over the 10 years period shown. Those values have been mapped to a C-Major scale and rendered as scaled notes over the keyboard range. You can hear its speed slowly decreasing as the ever present tug of gravity from the Sun tries, unsuccessfully, to pull Voyager 1 back.

In the 30+ years after the visualization ends, Voyager 1 has kept on moving away from the ever receding sun, thus the force pulling it back has also diminished. It is now around 15 billion kilometers away coasting around a constant 17 km/s with respect to the sun.

Unfortunately, understandable communications with Voyager 1 have recently been lost. It’s still transmitting, but it’s sending back incoherent data.

Simulation rendered with @OpenSpaceProj data from @NASAJPL Horizons.

Audio and plotting help from python and the py-midicsv library.

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#astronomy #voyager #dataviz #sonification #space #orbits #sciviz #scivis #python #spacetravel #history
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