The model is along the route of part of the original East Coast Mainline railway line between York and Riccall.
The opening of a new large coal mine led to fears that it could cause subsidence along this stretch of railway line so it was diverted onto another route.
After a campaign the abandoned stretch of railway was converted to a cycle and walking trail in 1987. Since then cycle routes have been extended throughout the UK and this is now part of National Cycle Route 65.
In 1999, the nearby York University that has an observatory, built a scale model of the Solar System along the route as part of the celebrations for the Millennium. They named the model 'Cycle the Solar System' and it was made possible by a Millennium Award to its creators Dave Coulthard, Willy Hoedeman & Peter Thompson.
Along it you can find scale models of the sun and all the planets in our solar system as well as models of the Cassini and this Voyager 1 spacecraft.
The Original Voyager 1
Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere. Launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2, Voyager 1 has been operating for 44 years and 25 days as of September 30, 2021, and still communicates with the Deep Space Network to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth. Real-time distance and velocity data is provided by NASA and JPL. At a distance of 154.37 AU (23.093 billion km; 14.350 billion mi) from Earth as of September 26, 2021, it is the most distant artificial object from Earth.
The probe made successful flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn's largest moon, Titan. NASA had a choice of either doing a Pluto or Titan flyby, and exploration of the moon took priority because it was known to have a substantial atmosphere. Voyager 1 studied the weather, magnetic fields, and rings of the two gas giants, and was the first probe to provide detailed images of their moons.
As part of the Voyager program, and like its sister craft Voyager 2, the spacecraft's extended mission is to locate and study the regions and boundaries of the outer heliosphere, and to begin exploring the interstellar medium. Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012, making it the first spacecraft to do so. Two years later, Voyager 1 began experiencing a third "tsunami wave" of coronal mass ejections from the Sun that continued to at least December 15, 2014, further confirming that the probe is indeed in interstellar space.
In a further testament to the robustness of Voyager 1, the Voyager team tested the spacecraft's trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters in late 2017 (the first time these thrusters had been fired since 1980), a project enabling the mission to be extended by two to three years. Voyager 1's extended mission is expected to continue until about 2025, when its radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) will no longer supply enough electric power to operate its scientific instruments.
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The Model
An information panel underneath the model has the following information.
Cycle The Solar System
Voyager 1 Space Probe
One Third Model
The two space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were launched in 1977. In August 2012 Voyager 1 became the first man-made object to enter inter-stellar space. Voyager 2 was launched first to allow it to fly by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 was able to fly by only Jupiter and Saturn, where it came close to Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The real Voyager 1 weighs 773 kilograms and the main body of the space craft is about the size of a small car. The longest boom is 13 metres long. Voyager will take 40,000 years to encounter the next star! Will anyone or anything ever read the gold record! This model of the Voyager was built by Dave Coulthard, one of the scientists responsible for the solar system model. For more information about the Voyager program go tot https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov
Cycle the Solar System: www.yorksacauk/solar