Some great minds are searching without

On this column we search within ourselves:  within our people, our culture, our history, and indeed our lands to find possible solutions to problems that we grapple with all the time. Many times solutions are not far away, but tucked away somewhere within ourselves, hence the need to do a diligent search within, to find such solutions.
I am aware, however, that there are great people out there who are conducting a different kind of search, a search conducted not anywhere in the vicinity of our mother planet earth, but in the outer regions of our solar system, and beyond.
As I am writing, there are four unmanned spacecraft that are on the fringes of the solar system or have left the solar system and have entered what is known as interstellar space (space between stars). Launched in 1972, Pioneer 10 was the first man-made object to venture beyond the orbit of the neighbouring planet Mars. It went on to “study” the Jovian environment (the environment of the giant gaseous planet, Jupiter) then proceeded to the edge of the solar system.
On January 23 2003 contact was lost with Pioneer 10 because its radio transmitter lost power. It is now on its way out of the solar system and will eventually wheeze through interstellar space indefinitely.
Pioneer 11 was launched in 1973. It flew by Jupiter in 1974 then went on to have a rendezvous with Saturn, getting its closest approach to the gaseous planet in 1979. Contact with Pioneer 11 was lost in 1995 but, like its sister Pioneer 10’s mission, it is cruising into interstellar space to effectively keep going forever.
Both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 carried a gold-plated aluminium plaque on which were depicted images of the human being and some symbols designed to indicate where in the universe, the spacecraft originated. The human being images were depicted as nude bodies of a man and a woman. If there are intelligent beings out there, and if they come across either of these spacecraft, the plaque will serve to give them information as to where the craft originated.
On August 20 1977, Voyager 2 was launched and a few weeks later, on September 5 1977, its twin craft, Voyager 1 was launched. The primary objective of both craft was to study in some detail, the Jovian (of Jupiter) and Saturnine (of Saturn) environments. This they did, and they made interesting discoveries such as intense volcanic activity on one of Jupiter’s moons, Io.
After the encounters with Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 2 went on to explore the other two outer, gaseous planets, Uranus and Neptune. It remains the only spacecraft to have visited these distant planets.
Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are now cruising much further away than Pluto in a direction away from the Sun. In August of 2012, Voyager 1 made a historic entry into interstellar space, having left the region dominated by the Sun’s gravitational and magnetic influence, known by cosmologists as the heliosphere. Voyager 1 is now a whooping 20 billion kilometres away. Light emitted from Earth would take over 18 hours to get to the Spacecraft. Voyager 2 is 16 billion kilometres away.
The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft carry a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk which has images of various earthly objects, greetings in 55 languages, various sounds from earth and earthly music by various artists and groups, including Chuck Berry’s rock-n-roll track, Johnny B. Goode (a track that Jamaican superstar, Peter Tosh, OM, reworked to a reggae beat in 1983). Should extraterrestrial, intelligent beings come across either spacecraft, they will have a very good idea of what life on earth is like.
On January 19 2006, yet another unmanned mission was launched to study Pluto and its moons. The name of the mission is New Horizons. When new Horizons was launched, Pluto was regarded as the ninth planet in the solar system. Subsequently, Pluto was reclassified to a dwarf planet following the discovery that it was just one of the many icy objects that orbit the sun in a region known as the Kuiper belt. Pluto is actually a very small body, even smaller than our moon. New Horizons, which has been in flight for nine years, will make its closest approach to Pluto this week, on July 14. We should expect many surprises from the search without. n