What One Hit From a Grain of Sand Will Do To Voyager 1

By Insane Curiosity

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Voyager 1 is being hit by interstellar dust. At roughly 10.5 miles per second, even microscopic particles can vaporize on impact and create tiny clouds of plasma that Voyager can actually detect. Scale that impact up to a grain of sand, and the energy becomes comparable to a bullet. So why has Voyager survived for almost 50 years without a shield? And what are the chances that something larger eventually hits it? In this video we follow Voyager 1 beyond the planets and into interstellar space to calculate what a high-speed dust impact would really do, how much danger the spacecraft faces from larger objects, what happens when it eventually enters the Oort Cloud, and what is actually most likely to end the mission. But the strangest part comes after Voyager goes silent. With almost no weather, oxygen, liquid water or thermal cycling to destroy it, the spacecraft itself could remain intact for billions of years. Some estimates suggest parts of Voyager — including its Golden Record — ma

Tags: insane curiosity, space, science, astronomy, Voyager 1, Voyager 1 spacecraft, Voyager spacecraft, NASA Voyager, Voyager probe, Voyager interstellar space, Voyager 1 interstellar space, grain of sand Voyager, space dust, interstellar dust, cosmic dust, hypervelocity impact, Voyager collision, Voyager Golden Record, Golden Record, Voyager Oort Cloud