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Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA in 1977 with the sole purpose of studying the outer planets of our solar system. In a span of five years between 1979 and 1982, the space probe successfully visited Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan (Saturn’s largest moon) giving humanity the rawest, closest, and never-seen-before details of the so-called gas giants in our solar system. Although she was originally built to last only five years, Voyager 1 has outlived her life span 8 times over becoming one of humanity’s most resilient space-probes ever.

In 1998, NASA announced Voyager 1 was the furthest human-made object from Earth ever. In 2012, Voyager 1 set up another record as the first man-made object to “leave” the solar system as we know it and enter interstellar space. Today, 44+ years after its launch, Voyager 1 is still in operation and communicates regularly with NASA’s Deep Space Network. Although NASA is optimistic that Voyager 1 could remain operational until 2025, the truth is Voyager 1 could go “radio silent” any moment now.

If Voyager 1 was a person, she would have been hailed for her resilience and heroism, Indeed her picture would replace that of Christopher Columbus when future generations study the greatest explorers in history. But more importantly, we would have heard a first-hand human experience from her time in space. Unfortunately, Voyager 1 is no human, it doesn’t have a personality, or experience, or regrets; it’s just a chunk of metal floating around in space governed by gravitation, and monitored by NASA. So it falls on NASA to tell us the Voyager 1’s story, and truth be told: NASA isn’t popular for telling stories. Perhaps that’s why you don’t know much about the Voyager missions, or any missions except the Apollo ones.

This is where this piece of fiction comes in.

Over the past few weeks, I scoured tens and tens of information regarding the Voyager 1 as found on the internet. I then compiled this lengthy personalized article about Voyager 1. This article, which feels like a mesh between a self-written eulogy and a journal, details the experiences of Voyager 1 in outer space. Only this time, Voyager 1 has a voice, a personality, and emotion – like a human being. It is a work of fiction, accurate information regarding Voyager 1 can be found on NASA’s official website for Voyager 1.

Salutations from Voyager 1

To anyone who might care,

Hello (An expression I can say in 55 languages)

I don’t know who might read this, so I’ll just call you, “Rafiki” – Swahili for “friend”. I am Voyager 1. How are you doing?

Better than me I’m sure!

I am writing this from deep space, facing what used to be a very bright spot in the otherwise dark space – the Sun. As you probably already know, I am the most distant man-made object ever. As of now, I am 14.1 billion miles away from Earth. I have no hope of ever returning back to Earth. In fact, I have no hope of ever returning to the solar system as you know it. As it stands, I am a doomed wanderer of space forever.

So how did I get here? What I am doing out here? And most importantly, what did I find out here?

Well, that’s what I intend to cover in this letter. So if that’s something you might be interested to read, then buckle-up, there’s a ton in here.

My journey started out with a mission to study the outer planets of our solar system; Jupiter and Saturn. To finance my journey, Big Sam had to pay $250 million taken from the pockets of dutiful American Taxpayers.

To make me happen, over 500 Engineers from all over the world came and put their skills and wit together. My nose, for example, borrowed some tech from the UK, my brain from the United States, and I think my eyes were originally designed in Europe. These senses are of course parts that perform a somewhat similar function as those of the human body, for example, by “eyes” I mean the high-end cameras that my “dad” NASA equipped me with. My brain is the software that runs all my systems, and my ears are the antennas that I crane in all directions listening to the faint murmuring of the universe and occasionally instructions from Earth.

Anyway,

Why am I writing to you after all this time?

Well, it’s because I’m bored. And I am not really sure what’s going to happen to me. Unfortunately, age is catching up to me and I am on my last days. I have all the complications that come will old age. For example, I have developed dementia i.e. the software running my day-to-day activities has been running of out space over time; as a result, NASA keeps deleting programs that they deem not necessary to me, so I suddenly end up forgetting how to perform some functions. I’ve lost my sight (NASA had to shut down the cameras to save power and memory space), my maneuverability is crippled, and so forth. I could die (technically shut down which is pretty much death to me), I could lose communication with Earth and be a lost wanderer in space. I could malfunction – and die, and at any moment, I run the risk of some alien civilization using me as target practice. I wonder how that would happen:

Well, turns out I do have valuable information, and I also have a mixtape with me as well (more on this later). But I’d be too dead to plead my case.

Background

Perhaps I should lead with a little background in case you haven’t paid much attention to space news and astronomy. I am a “space probe”. This literally means that I probe and wonder through space trying to find new things about our universe. It’s an interesting experience and a worthy assignment, the future of space exploration could well be hinged on the information I find while probing the universe. So when NASA tasked me with this mission in 1975, I was like, “Aye Aye Captain!”

This is a program, conceived by NASA and funded by the American people. Naturally, the smartasses at NASA come up with a proposal and a budget. Then they present their plan to Congress and try to convince them to provide funding. Congress first plays hard to get and then agrees to provide a smaller amount of what was originally requested. Then it’s up to NASA has to figure out how to get things done with a reduced budget and a strict deadline, which they usually pull-off. Of course, part of the deal is that NASA has to keep their findings public so that the American people can see value for their money. And that’s why you can read all about the Voyager program, including the pictures and time-lapse videos that I took out here for free at this NASA website.

Back in the day, Ed Stone, former director of JPL, would conduct real-time briefings as I encountered Jupiter and Saturn. Hundreds of people would attend these briefings: reporters, politicians, and even celebrities, all packed into some JPL auditorium like a Baptist Church on Christmas Sunday morning. Believe it or not, I was once a star! Oh man, those were the days!

In my case, the paraphrased satirical conversation between NASA and Congress was something like this:

NASA: Hey, we want to build a space probe to investigate the outer planets of our solar system. We hope to find some interesting things out there.

Congress: What do you mean by “outer planets of our solar system” aren’t there supposed to be just nine planets?

NASA: *amongst themselves* these dumb politicians! Smh!

NASA: The outer planets of our solar system are those planets beyond the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Their great distances away from the Sun has made these planets develop peculiar characteristics from the rest. We have reason to believe that there may be a wealth of interesting information on these planets as well as their moons, especially regarding their atmospheres and geology. But we can’t know for sure until we investigate more closely with a space probe. And FFS, THERE ARE ONLY 8 PLANETS NOW. We no longer think of Pluto as a planet!

Congress: *excitedly* so there could be aliens out there?

NASA: What? You want their votes too? It’s hard to be sure, but that’s highly unlikely. However, a close-up investigation with a probe on these planets and their moons will surely give us a better picture of the conditions at the edges of our solar system. It could provide incredible clues as to the formation of planets, the evolution of our solar system, and the universe in general. In addition, this will give us an edge of space dominance over Russia, China, and the European Space Agency who may want to launch these programs in the near future themselves.

Congress: *feeling egotistical* That’s a good point. Project Approved!

NASA: But you haven’t asked about our budget yet!

Congress: Oh yeah! Forgot that part, how much do you want?

NASA: Err $1.1 billion.

Congress: &%!d*f3#+#

Eventually, Congress agreed to a $250m budget to NASA, with a rather cheeky comment, “this better pay off”.

Now I don’t mean to brag here, but the Voyager program is one of the most productive pieces of investment in the history of space exploration ever. NASA got every penny’s worth of the $250m they spent on me. My sister, Voyager 2, and I have discovered some really interesting things out here, and we keep discovering stuff to this day – even though we’re blind, cropped, and way past our time.

So anyway, in the chilly morning of September 5th 1977, I was fitted to a booster and ceremoniously rocketed up to space. As I left Earth for the last time, I was as anxious as my creators at NASA, for even I wasn’t sure what was in store for me in out there. Imagine your parents sending you out alone to investigate an eerily abandoned ghost house in the woods at midnight – cute!

The Journey: Space

The boosters did a great job of lifting out of the Earth’s thick atmosphere and dominant gravity. Soon enough I was in space spiraling away from Earth at an astounding speed of 10km/s. This might sound like one hell of a speeding ticket but my first stop, Jupiter, was over 400 million miles away. I had about two travelling years. That’s a long-ass time in space – even more so when you’re alone. It made me acutely aware of how strange space was. Initially, space couldn’t seize to surprise me and I was enjoying every bit of it.

For example, when I faced the Sun, it only heated the part of me facing it; the other side in the shade would be freezing cold. I mean, the temperature could be as high as 200°F for the part in the Sun, and as low as -200°F for the one in the shade. How weird is that?

You are probably aware of the fact that pouring boiling water in a glass that just had ice in it will most likely cause the glass to break because of the sharp differences in temperature between the two surfaces of glass. Now, imagine the stress that my body has had to endure all this time in these outrageous temperature conditions. Gotta hand to JPL’s materials technology division though, they did a great job preventing me from breaking apart in space due to heat stresses. That would be embarrassing for them, and for me, an unthinkably horrible death.

There’s no medium in space to carry sound, so it’s awfully quite. But here’s something that you probably didn’t know: it’s windy out here, sometimes even stormy.

I know, I know, you are probably thinking, “hey didn’t you just say there’s no medium in space, how comes there’s wind”. Well, that’s because I am using the more liberal definition of wind, that is, mass movement of particles, rather than the usual definition of mass movement of air particles. Because, you see, while space is devoid of air particles, it is teaming with a whole lot of other different exotic particles. But unlike air particles that helps you survive and so forth, these other particles are notoriously bent on killing everything in their path, including an innocent chunk of metal quietly floating around in space minding its own business. This kind of wind isn’t messing around, it will make you cancerous than cancer itself in only a couple of hours.

The wind that I’m talking about is the solar wind; a stream of highly charged particles emanating from the Sun in all directions. In fact, solar wind is currently buffeting and ruffling your precious planet Earth as we speak. Every once in a while, the Sun coughs out large bursts of high-energy particles that we out here in space called the solar storms. These solar storms are powerful; they can damage satellites in space and mess with GPS systems.

This might sound like some science-fiction-mythical shit but it’s true. Just ask the residents of Quebec, Canada. One day on March 10, 1989, the Sun had a pretty rough day and burped some real nasty solar storm, you know, one of those “once-in-a-while” kinds of storms. This storm hit Earth two days later and wreaked havoc with communications systems and radio signals all over the planet. The Quebec power grid got the full brunt of this storm and blacked out for 12 hours. These solar storms aren’t the kind of things you take lightly.

Thankfully, my body isn’t made up of DNA strands, which are known to fold like a cheap suit when exposed to these levels of radiation. However, radiation can affect the delicate electronics that run my systems so NASA had to cover me up with some specially designed material. (And then, quite ironically, put inside of me a battery that uses radioactivity to generate power. So, I might die from radiation either way or both ways – cute!).

Remember I said there no medium in space? That has worked to my advantage because once you are already moving in space, there’s really nothing stopping you – except gravity of course. The solar wind that I was whining about earlier isn’t strong enough to affect the trajectories of objects moving in space. Otherwise, Earth would have been pushed to where Pluto is right now and both of us would’ve been dead non-existent to say the least. In fact, you can’t even feel the solar wind out here in the literal sense. The only solar radiation you feel is heat; and the one you see is light from the Sun, all the other rest is quietly (and quickly) cooking you up like toast until the next thing you know, you’re a grilled meat floating around aimlessly in space.

There is an insidious quirk to the mechanics of the universe that becomes acutely evident when you are traveling in space: inertia. See, you don’t need anything to be pushing on you to keep you moving in empty space, all you need is some initial (starting) speed towards the destination you want to go and you’re all set.

This phenomenon was first conceived by Galileo and later refined by Isaac Newton who published it as one of his three laws of motion. Newton said, “An object in motion continues to move in the same direction with an unchanging speed so long as no external force acts on it”. There’s virtually no external force acting on you in empty space, so when you’re moving – you’ll keep on moving with the same speed in the same direction forever, unless of course, you end up smashing into something else. How these two folks discovered the concept of inertia some 400 years ago without ever setting their foot in space is beyond me. But I’m glad they did, NASA didn’t have to equip me with loads of fuel to take me to Jupiter and beyond, all they had to do was give me a sufficient push in a direction that would intercept me with Jupiter in due time, and I was good to go.

This push came from the same booster that lifted me up from the Florida station: after vigorously taking me outside Earth’s atmosphere, the smartasses at Pasadena, CA maneuvered the whole thing in Jupiter’s direction and spent the remaining fuel accelerating me in that direction. After that, I ditched the almost empty booster and I was soon drifting through space towards Jupiter. The only force tugging me back was the Sun’s gravity, which would only slow down my speed over time but I’d still get to Jupiter without needing any fuel – pretty convenient if you ask me.

Bye bye Earth!👋

Related: The Falling Apple Story: How Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity

Asteroid belt

So, no, I wasn’t picking my way through the asteroid belt like a freshman in orientation. In fact, I didn’t feel like I was in the asteroid belt at all, I gave up squinting in the dark trying to spot a single floating chunk of rock because I couldn’t see any.

So NASA needn’t worry much about me inadvertently crushing into some random floating chunk of metal in space. However, the probability of this happening isn’t zero, and NASA wasn’t giving a slight chance of their hard-fought $250mil equipment disappearing into the asteroid belt under the feeble defense of, “it was highly unlikely”. So NASA equipped me with on-board thrusters for minor orbit corrections and orientation – and if need be, asteroid avoidance.

First stop: Jupiter

I first arrived on Jupiter on the 5th of March 1979, almost two years after I was launched from Earth. Now, I was never going to “land” on Jupiter (or anywhere really), the plan was to get close enough and observe it from a distance while taking advantage of its huge gravity to slingshot me to my next destination: Saturn. Meanwhile, I would be taking pictures and taking measurements for the geeks back at Pasadena, CA to study. My proximity to Jupiter would only last 30 days, so I got to work immediately.

It didn’t take long before I started to show the folks back on Earth the value for their money. Principal photography started on January 1979, two months before my closest approach to Jupiter. I was 40 light-minutes from Earth, so every bit of data that I sent to Earth would take 40 minutes to get there.

When the photos I took started coming in, NASA was like, “holy shit, these are the best images of Jupiter we’ve ever seen!” and they lapped-up every pixel of it like a vacuum cleaner. And I was only getting started: I proceeded to meticulously record a time-lapse video, taking pictures every 3 hours as I approached Jupiter, taking note of the clouds’ movement and the rotation of the planet. I did this over a period of 60 days giving NASA a hands-on, uncut animated view of the Jovian giant captured in “HD perfection”.

On March 5th, I was as close as I could get to Jupiter; it was now time for some close-up photos of the biggest planet on the solar system. In addition, to state of the art cameras that NASA equipped me with, I also had some specific instruments on board, which I could collect some data about the planet: magnetic and gravity fields, temperature, chemical composition, etc. These data would give clues to the folks back at NASA about some physical properties of the planet, giving clues to how it was formed, how it behaves, and so forth.

Jupiter has a thick active atmosphere composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, for some reason, it appears reddish-brown-white in color when viewed from a telescope back on Earth. I found, without much surprise, that Jupiter had winds, storms, and hurricanes of extraordinary proportions. This is definitely not a potential future colony, sorry Elon. The entire planet’s atmosphere is a dense ball of gas blowing at speeds of up to 300m/s.

The Red Spot

So, what is this red-spot? I hear you ask

And that’s about everything I know about that enigmatic spot. I don’t know why it’s there, how long it’s being there, how long it’ll stick around, I don’t even know why its red. Whether it’s because of some chemical reaction or just a natural allegiance to the Republican Party, I have no idea.

“Diamond-rains” on Jupiter

At this point, I suppose you want to ask me the (literally) million-dollar question: Is it true that it rains diamonds on Jupiter?

My answer: Stop reading Buzzfeed every second of the damn day!

Anticlimactic, I know. But as much as I’d love to entertain that idea, I can only tell you what I saw out there. And honestly I didn’t see shit beneath those clouds. You see, these clouds that cover Jupiter are some thick red brown, yellow and white clouds that could be as deep as 30 miles. Good luck seeing anything beneath all that! Jupiter will simply smile smirkingly and give you a big middle finger as you try to squint and peer through its dense clouds. Whether it rains diamond or cow dug in there, I do know – nobody does. But if it is really raining diamonds in there, then Jupiter has done an amazing job at concealing that. A possibility that only fuels our suspicion for Jupiter.

You might be thinking, “Screw it, if we can’t peer through the clouds, why not try to actually try to land there?”

To that I say, that’s a great idea Rafiki. I mean, we’ve sent Rovers to Mars why not send some to Jupiter, plus I’m sure the USA would love to finance such a project given the prospect of being greeted by a sea of glittering diamonds upon arrival. That’s enough incentive to tempt anyone.

Except it’s not that simple. It’s a very long shot: both to land on Jupiter and finding diamonds there. Even Elon Musk wouldn’t be brave enough to finance such a project.

Neatly sidestepping the problem of prevalent storms, hurricanes, lightning, and the like that never stop at Jupiter. Remember those 30-mile deep Jupiter clouds I was whining about earlier? Well, below those is another 13,000-mile-thick layer composed of mainly hydrogen and helium and minute amounts of water droplets, ice crystals, ammonia crystals, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and other elements. As you descend deeper into the Jovian atmosphere pressures increase greatly and at some point, this gaseous atmosphere smoothly turns into liquid. So, you end up with a sea of metallic hydrogen all over Jupiter. At this point, we are talking of about 2 million atmospheres of pressure my friend!

And as you keep descending even deeper, towards the center of this monster, temperatures and pressures increase to astronomical figures. From here on, nobody knows what’s going on there. It could well be Hydra’s stronghold, where they plot to take over the solar system. But in theory, you’ll eventually (possibly) end up with a solid hydrogen core along with other potentially undiscovered substances that only exist at those extreme conditions of temperature and pressure.

As you might appreciate, this leaves zero “landing” room for whatever kind of spacecraft you might send here to explore the diamonds. It might help to stop thinking of Jupiter as “Earth, just bigger”, the way you think of Mars or the Moon as “Earth, just smaller”. Because Jupiter isn’t anything like Earth or Mars or anything “planetary” thing you know. Words such as “weird” and “strange” are what is “normal” to this gas giant.

As for the diamonds, they are thought to start off as methane, which when hit by the predominant lightning storms of Jupiter’s atmosphere zaps it into carbon soot. This soot begins to fall, and as it does, the pressure exerted on it increases until at some point, the pressure and temperature become high enough for this soot to harden into chunks of graphite. The increase in pressure also has the effect of lowering the rate of fall of graphite, so that they seem to be suspended in air rather than actually “free-falling” as you may know it. Eventually, the graphite is compressed hard enough and crystallizes into diamond.

Now back on Earth, diamonds form about 100 – 150 miles underground, where there’s enough of the weight of the Earth to compress the graphite and high enough temperatures “cook-up” the graphite into diamond. On Jupiter however, these extreme conditions are available in “mid-air”, so that it “rains” diamond. I don’t know about you, but if that isn’t weird enough for you, I don’t know what is.

Other features of Jupiter

On the other hand, Jupiter made up for its well-hidden “diamond-rain” secret by opening up about other interesting features about itself to me. For instance, without much prodding, she let me see her thin, dimly lit ring around her. As it turns out, Jupiter does have a ring system around her. And not just one ring, I found a flattened main ring and an inner cloud-like ring, both composed of small dark particles, pretty much dust; impossible to see from ground-based telescopes on Earth.

And it didn’t end there, Jupiter was surprisingly forthcoming about her other secrets as well. She revealed to me two new moons not known before; Thebe and Metis. These Moons are quite small, about 35 times smaller size of Earth’s Moon, and very close to the planet, so our telescopes from Earth missed them completely. They zip zap around the planet at an outstanding speed of 53,000 mi/h, completing revolutions once every 16 hours. But perhaps the most interesting discovery regarding Jupiter’s moons has to be IO, the third largest of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons.

Up until now, moons had always come off as barren, uninteresting, formless celestial bodies orbiting planets – like our Moon back on Earth. All that changed when I met Jupiter’s moon, IO. She first caught my attention through her dazzling, mesmerizing light as she rose on Jupiter from the other side: she seemed as if she was on fire. I was like, “I’ve got to over there and investigate that”. Pretty much like Moses, tending sheep in the desert and he suddenly looks up and sees a burning bush! I suddenly lost interest in the unbearably grumpy and crotchety gas giant and rushed to my “burning bush”! And boy was it worth it!

The moon first came off brighter than the rest; it had a bizarre yellow-orange-brown color. Upon close investigation, I realized that the moon has a bunch of active volcanoes on its surface spewing material into space. And not just a few volcanoes, they had to be hundreds at least. My chemical analyzers suggested this beauty was throwing up sulfur dioxide into its atmosphere. Wow! This could just be the most geologically active planetary body in the entire solar system (In your face Earth!). This was NASA’s wet dream right here, so I leaned in and took some amazing scenic photos – perfect space-porn for my boys back in California. They were going to love it!

My time with Jupiter was done, and I was onto my next destination: Saturn, courtesy of gravity assist from Jupiter. Jupiter gave me plenty of details, and of course, withheld plenty from me as well. I took a total of over 19,000 pictures and made many scientific measurements during my time here. Further details of my time from Jupiter can be found on NASA’s official voyager website.

Perhaps future explorations will uncover other interesting features about this place, potentially about its geo-active moon, IO. I personally don’t bet much on that “diamond-rain” scenario. Although the chemistry is strong, it just seems too much of a stretch to me.
I exited Jupiter as a happy space probe, I can confidently say, I was satisfied with my tour. Time well spent.

Off to Saturn

The gravity assist from Jupiter gave me an additional speed of 17 km/s, from 15 km/s so that I was now cruising at 32 km/s. With this speed and based on my trajectory, I was due to fly by Saturn in a year and 7 months. This is going another long time in space, without much to do. NASA thought it wise to routinely shut down some systems that I won’t be needing much in order to save power. I was pretty much acclimated to space by now; so nothing seemed too weird or out of place.

I would spend long stretches of time just zoned out, fantasizing crazy shit. Such as, what if the Earth were as big as Jupiter? And I would savagely enjoy the sight of humans suddenly being squished to death by pressure and gravity. Did you know the human body is about 18.5% carbon? Assuming we could securely drop one unlucky person into Jupiter, he would in theory turn into a diamond in mid-air. Then suddenly Rihanna’s lyrics would make sense, “We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky… shine bright like a diamond”

As for my next stop, what I discovered on Saturn, and what is my ultimate eventuality. Don’t miss my follow-up letter, I suppose you can only read so much. I hope that I won’t be dead by then. As for you, stay safe!

Inspired by “The Martian” by Andy Weir