Also, we have added a new science brief regarding the recently discovered "Void" in the universe. See below.

NASA Marks Voyager 30th Anniversary

Three decades ago, two robotic space probes were launched which opened up the outer solar system to human eyes in unprecedented fashion. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 left Earth in 1977 for their historic information gathering mission, and they are still trekking along and sending back data as they speed toward interstellar space, the first manmade objects to do so.

Voyager 2 was actually the first to launch, on August 20, 1977. Voyager 1, set for a faster and shorter trajectory and thus first to reach its destination, took off on September 5. Both probes explored Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 went on to visit Uranus and Neptune. With each flyby, they sent back extraordinary pictures of these gas giants and their moons, which proved to be more numerous than thought.

The intrepid robots have continued on into the Sun's outer heliosphere, the zone outside the planetary disc where the solar wind borders interstellar gas. And they carry with them the famous "Golden Record" designed to let any alien explorers who happen across the objects in the distant future know from whence they came. That record, designed by a team led by Carl Sagan, contains images and sounds frmo Earth, including classical music and greetings in several languages, and directions to said planet.

That "Golden Record" has been often used as a basis for science fiction stories, from "Starman" to The X-Files. The first version of the plaque was mounted on the Pioneer 10 probe, launched five years before Voyager, which we saw in "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" before it was destroyed by a Klingon with an itchy trigger finger.

It was also behind the premise of the epic "created-seeks-creator" concept of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," made shortly after the Voyager missions launched. The story conjectured that the Voyager program would continue with at least four more similar probes, and the sixth would fall through a black hole and emerge near a machine planet, getting augmented to an enormous degree and sent back to Earth, its name misread as "V'Ger." NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory lent the blueprints for the real Voyagers to Paramount so that the set piece of the center of V'Ger would be accurate.

While it hasn't encountered any black holes yet, Voyager 1 has just passed an auspicious new milestone: on August 15 it reached 100 astronomical units (AUs). That means Voyager 1 is now more than 9.3 billion miles from the sun, a hundred times the 93 million-mile distance between Earth and the Sun (the definition of an AU), and three times the distance of Pluto. Traveling at a speed of about a million miles a day, Voyager 1 could cross into interstellar space within the next 10 years. (Voyager 2 is about 7.8 billion miles out.) Assuming the probe's radioisotope thermoelectric generator holds out a little longer (it's already far exceeded its intended lifespan, but could last until 2020), it will gather unparalleled data about the nature of the universe, and transmit it back to scientists on Earth (with a time lag of more than 14 hours).

"The Voyager mission is a legend in the annals of space exploration. It opened our eyes to the scientific richness of the outer solar system, and it has pioneered the deepest exploration of the Sun's domain ever conducted," said Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "It's a testament to Voyager's designers, builders and operators that both spacecraft continue to deliver important findings more than 25 years after their primary mission to Jupiter and Saturn concluded."

To learn more about the Voyager program, visit this NASA Missions page and this press release at SpaceRef.com.

The Mathematics of the Redshirt Phenomenon

We all know the joke: If you wear a red shirt on the Enterprise and you beam down with Captain Kirk to a planet, you ain't coming back. But statistically speaking, is that "Redshirt Phenomenon" really a factor? What about the Blueshirts and the Yellowshirts? What are the actual numbers? Well, one statistician has run an analysis of the data and has the answer: If you are a red-shirted crewmember and you get called for an away mission, chances are 53% that you're screwed.

But there are caveats to the conclusion. For instance, if Captain Kirk meets an alien woman and gets it on with her, your chances of survival rise dramatically. And if you're a first-season redshirt, you actually have a better shot at living than a yellowshirt or a blueshirt (woe be to the third-season redshirts, who were the only crewmen to die that year). Overall in three seasons of the Original Series, redshirts accounted for 73% of all deaths in either on-board incidents or planetside missions.

Matt Bailey of SiteLogic web marketing consultants published the article titled "Analytics According to Captain Kirk" as a lesson in how to find effective and memorable methods of presenting data analysis. But for a Star Trek fan, it's an entertaining and enlightening read that confirms some of our suspicions.

In reporting his data, before he gets into his treatise on presentation, Bailey reaches this conclusion: "We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included)."

See the whole article at this SiteLogicMarketing.com link, and be sure to click on the graphics.

NEW: "Void" in Universe Discovered

Starships in the Star Trek universe have often encountered mysterious "voids" in space where the stars seem to disappear entirely for one reason or another. It happened at least twice to the U.S.S. Voyager, in "Night" and "The Void." Well, an actual "hole" in the universe recently discovered by astronomers puts those inconvenient localized anomalies to shame.

In the space between galaxies and galaxy clusters, there is a huge expanse nearly a billion light-years across that is almost entirely devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter. Scientists can also tell it is strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.

This void was found in the constellation Eridanus by radio telescopes, confirming the existence of a "cold spot" in a map of Cosmis Microwave Background radiation.

Cosmologists are surprised by the discovery and are at a loss to explain it. "What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe," said Liliya R. Williams of the University of Minnesota.

A really, really, really ginormous amoeba, perhaps?

Learn more from this Space.com article and this AP article.