Voyager-1 at 100 AU!, A space milestone this month Options

[dilo]

Nobody highlighted this and I didn't find any comment from Nasa/Voyager sites.
On August,11 the intrepid Voyager-1 probe will reach 14.960 billion Km from the Sun, one hundred times the average Earth-Sun distance!
This event will be followed, after 16 days, by the 100AU from Earth reach.
From astrophysical standpoint, first event is the most important but, I think, most people will be emotionally hit from the second one.
So I would like to start a poll on this.

[Guest_Analyst_*]

The two Voyager spacecraft have always been special for me. From a scientific, a programmatic and an engineering point of view they stand out.

They explored four planets in detail for the first time (I am a little unfair to Pioneer 10 and 11), and countless moons. They discovered new moons, volcanos on Io and geysers on Triton. The Voyagers carry an almost complete suite of then state of the art instruments found rarely before and after. Today budget pressure leaves you often with only a very limited number of instruments. Look at DAWN, we built the first asteroid orbiter and cut the magnetometer and laser altermeter. Or MER without a weather station.

It has not been easy for the Voyager program in the 1970ies. There were first four much larger probes. Later it was hoped to sent one to Pluto. Not to happen, only two smaller ones, less expensive. Then politics wanted to shut them down after the Saturn encounter. Now this program has been running for 35+ years. A lot of their fathers retired or passed away, they are still working at the final frontier.

Their engineering design included some very clever things, some used for the first time. I am still impressed by the telecom system: X-band primary with 115.2 kbps from Jupiter, 21.6 kbps from Neptune. New Horizons will have 768 bps planned from Pluto, hopefully a little more (maybe twice). Onboard image compression. Important for rapid instrument pointing is the scan platform. Or look at the scheduling difficulties Cassini has between data collection and downlink becuase there is no such platform. Also for the first time: an integrated SRM and hydrazine trusters. And gyros and star trackers still working after 29 years. So they still point to earth and hopefully will for a long time to report entering true interstellar space.

I wish them a long live, always a good link margin. And may the budget last longer than the RTGs.

Analyst