Voyager Commemorative

"NASA's interstellar explorer Voyager 1 is finally communicating with ground control in an understandable way again. On Saturday April 20, 2024 Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status for the first time in 5 months. While the spacecraft still isn't sending valid science data back to Earth, it is now returning usable information about the health and operating status of its onboard engineering systems."

This was welcome news and prompted discussion about this patch design. 

Voyager launched twin probes on a "grand tour" of the solar system's giant planets in 1977. The two spacecraft made many discoveries in our cosmic backyard — finding intense volcanism on the Jupiter moon Io and 10 new moons of Uranus, for example — and then kept on flying, into exciting and unexplored realms.

In 2012, Voyager 1 popped free of the heliosphere, the huge bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields that the sun blows around itself, becoming the first human-made object ever to reach interstellar space. Voyager 2, which took a different path and is moving slightly more slowly than its partner, followed suit in late 2018.

This amazing program deserved to be commemorated into a patch. I depict the spacecraft approaching the Andromeda Galaxy representing interstellar space. In the patch name I depict the "gold record" attached to the spacecraft. The Voyager Golden Records are two identical "phonograph records" which were included aboard the two spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent life form who may find them. The records are a time capsule

Ed Stone, who served as the project scientist for NASA's groundbreaking Voyager mission from 1972 to 2022 and was considered to be the "Father of Voyager", died on Sunday (June 9) at the age of 88. I dedicate this patch to his memory and to the entire Voyager Team who dared the improbable and succeeded. 

-Tim Gagnon