Goodbye to an American icon:
The greetings from the president (Jimmy Carter) and U.N. chief (Kurt Waldheim) are way out of date. So is the gold-plated phonograph record that carries them, along with whale songs and frog calls, for any curious aliens who happen to find the vintage spacecraft. But Voyager 1, alert and healthy more than a quarter century after it was launched on a mission to Jupiter and Saturn, is still on the cutting edge. Last week, scientists reported that the spacecraft, now twice as far from the sun as Pluto, has picked up signs of the solar system's distant boundary. It will soon be humanity's first envoy to the stars....Now so far from home that the sun is just a bright star and radio signals take 12 hours to reach antennas on Earth, Voyager has enough plutonium in its nuclear-powered electrical generator to keep sending data until 2020. That may be just enough time for it to reach pristine interstellar space and bid its final farewell.
"Launched" right around the time of Voyager, I can feel a sense of time elapse - especially recalling a conversation with my father years ago that ended with him matter-of-factly describing the space probe's fate. It will just keep drifting and drifting, he said. Absent a collision, forever. The end of an era - and to me, a milestone - this might have made me a bit sad if not for the obvious silver lining. You see, when the Borg come, they'll assimilate Jimmy Carter first.
COULDN'T RESIST:
