Voyager II is now interstellar

I probably have the same ritual as everyone else. As I get ready to start my day, I check the news feed on my phone. Today was like most others; what did the President do or not do today, blah blah blah. But, a story that cheered me up was the fact that Voyager II has now finally broken through the heliosphere  (the sphere of influence our sun has on an object by its gravity and or energy) and is now in interstellar space. 

NASA beautifully presents what you need to know about Voyager II:

• She follows her sister ship Voyager I in its journey away from the sun.
• She has been in space now for 41 years!!
• There is a Golden Record onboard Voyager II that can illustrate Earth in the 70s for anyone who comes across it.
• She is traveling at 34,191 MPH relative to the Sun
• It would take a beam of light 16 hours and 10 minutes to reach the Earth from Voyager II
• She is now 11 billion miles from the Sun
• Voyager II travels 290 million miles every year and18.5+ billion total miles
• We owe Voyager II for the beautiful photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune

Voyager II has officially left our solar system and is headed out to the unknown. While out of the solar system, the starship is still in the Milky Way Galaxy.

It will take another 30,000 years  for Voyager II to enter a new galaxy. Sadly, there is only enough juice to get 10 more years of data before systems have to be shut down to get the ship 50 years outside our galaxy. What if people from other worlds come across, our Golden Record, what do you think they would think of us if they chose to come to Earth? Would they show up in Bell Bottoms and wondering about Vietnam?  What’s on the Golden Record Anyway?

Based on info from the source, here is what the Golden Record is all about:

“The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how pictures are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of a picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to ordinary television (in which the picture is a series of horizontal lines). Picture lines 1, 2 and 3 are noted in binary numbers, and the duration of one of the “picture lines,” about 8 milliseconds, is noted. The drawing immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered “interlace” to give the correct picture rendition. Immediately below this is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 512 vertical lines in a complete picture. Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction.”