PRIDE CHEKERAFirst law of motion and Voyager probe
Newton’s first law was firstly proposed by Galileo in a same
way: a body moving along an absolutely smooth horizontal
surface will do so forever. Thus also any object in rest will
remain like that provided the net force acting on it is zero.
Voyager 1 launched in 1977 is now more than 134AU from the
Sun (Note: 1AU = 93 million miles, the average distance from
the Sun to Earth), traveling at a speed of more than 3AU per
year, and gravitationally assisted by Jupiter in 1979 following
collection of data which led to the discovery some of the moons
of Jupiter, Thebe and Metis. Voyager is on its interstellar
journey, beyond the edge of our solar system which stretches to
about 160AU from the Sun. Provided there is no any impeding
force along Voyager’s trajectory, NASA is expecting it to, at
last, just go out of detection as it will traverse in space forever,
as per Newton’s first law of motion. The signals NASA is
receiving from Voyager is becoming weaker due to Doppler
shift as the distance between us and the probe is increasing.
That’s how physics seems majestic to us, it’s not just about
formulas and theories, but it’s all about the objective truth, the
universal description of a multifarious phenomenon.