Wow. I did not know this, and I've kept up with Voyager a bit since I watched it launch as a child...

Voyager 1 has no engine running. The 38,000-mile-per-hour speed it has held since its Saturn flyby in 1980 is borrowed momentum from planets it grazed more than four decades ago, and that free ride carries it to one light-day from Earth this November

The probe is moving because it was launched onto a carefully chosen path and then reshaped by planetary gravity. Its present outward motion is mostly the inheritance of encounters that happened when the spacecraft was still young: Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1980, and the rare alignment of the outer planets that made the Voyager mission possible in the first place.

It should be of no surprise

that I fell asleep for awhile. Then YKWIA called and we had a great talk for over an hour. So now for a bit of blogging before bed. Here are some stories I've been following:

Standoff in Alabama Ends in Boy’s Rescue and Kidnapper’s Death
FBI: Bombs found in Alabama kidnapper's bunker

Yay! I'm so glad that he's freed. I wish him and his family well. Thank goodness he made it through this, and just in time for his sixth birthday.

Brain infection, not scarlet fever, may have caused Mary Ingalls' blindness

The Real Richard III: 3D reconstruction and linguistic research reveal English king’s face, voice

Astronomers finally crack mystery of solar system’s strange ‘ribbon of energy’

New York Times Revises Ed Koch Obit To Include AIDS

and then there's this--not news, but something that I saw on Facebook, proving the folks at BBCAmerica have a sense of humour:

Speaking of the Superbowl, did you see this?

San Francisco, Baltimore libraries place friendly wager on Super Bowl -- so I guess it'll be Poe that's recited. I do love 'The Raven'. :)

Okay, good night!

Cool--will we see VGER looking for its creator in years to come?

I couldn't resist the Star Trek: the Motion Picture reference. :)

Voyager approaches edge of solar system

I was 10 when Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched. They did an amazing job of helping us explore the solar system, and continue to do so at its outer reaches. It's absolutely wonderful that 35 years later, they're still chugging along. Although we are slated to lose contact with them sometime between 2020 and 2025, they will continue as a testament to mankind's desire to explore space.

Pictured is the Voyager Golden Record. Each of the Voyager spacecraft carry one, which was a sort of time capsule of for anyone who might encounter them. In the words of President Jimmy Carter:

'This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.'

Let us hope so....

I really debated whether or not to link to this story with this source

not because it is controversial, or because it is lacking in information (indeed, it's quite a bit ind depth over some of the others out there).

No, it was because of an ad that popped up on the screen hawking a pizza slicer in the shape of the USS Enterprise on Space.com.

Huge Asteroid Vesta Actually an Ancient Protoplanet

But I decided there were some other tacky items out there on MSNBC and other outlets, to (the New York Times had an ad for a website touting the end was near). But the pizza cutter even clicked on my geek meter--and I AM a geek, and a Trek fan and a gizmo/gadget fan--as being just too tacky for words. If it were just on the sidebar ad, it wouldn't have really caught my attention, as I'm rather ad blind. But...it popped up in the centre with a bit of script. If it had been on a sci-fi site itself I wouldn't have given it a second thought, either. It was that I was looking for space news, and it was a little unexpected, although of course they are right that people interested in science and science fiction overlap a great deal. Anyway, that was my gut reaction. I decided to include the story for its own merits. And if you cannot live without a $30 Enterprise pizza slicer, you're in luck....(they also have Han Solo in carbonite ice trays as well.)

Anyway, the article itself is interesting.

Well of course we're still evolving

but scientists are realising we're evolving much quicker than pre-agrarian humans--partly in response to diseases that hit large groups of people who are living in close quarters. But pale skin and blue eyes are relatively recent mutations, for example.

Study finds humans still evolving, and quickly

Culture Speeds Up Human Evolution

Also on the scientific front, Voyager 2 has discovered a dent in our solar system due to magnetic forces.

Voyager 2 finds solar system's shape is 'dented'

I was 10 years old when the Voyager probes were launched, along with their Golden Records. An excerpt from the Voyager 1 greeting by Jimmy Carter (given in the Wikipedia article) goes like this:

We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

The 70s were in some ways a very hopeful time, weren't they?