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Voyager Keeps on Trucking
spagiola writes "CNN has a brief story about Voyager I continuing on past Pluto, and about the problems of keeping in touch with it as it keeps heading further away. They've activated a spare sun sensor and star tracker. I wonder: would it make sense to send out another probe after it, to relay messages to/from it?"
Although it would be an interesting experiment to extend our communications reach with relay probes, the scientific data provided by Voyager isn't worth it when the money should go to more important things like the Pluto mission. The Voyager mission is basically down to exploring the Kuiper belt and testing the length of time the back-up systems that NASA wisely installed will last. Hopefully the extreme survivability of Voyager will encourage aerospace and spacecraft engineers to use more redundancy, as the trend lately has been towards less to cut costs.
Thanks,
Travis
forkspoon@hotmail.com
The cost of checking in with Voyager every now and again is minimal. Far, far less than the costs of building even New Horizons, let alone another Voyager-class mission. And since Voyager is heading for the the heliopause and quite probably will get through it before it dies off or we lose contact, that will be a great scientific benefit. Right now, we don't really know where the heliopause is, exactly. To miss this chance to encounter it would be foolish, especially since our next chance wouldn't come for at least 20 more years, if we launched a mission right now.
Even if it were technically feasible, it'd just add another possible point of failure. Trying to fix a problem in Voyager would be interesting if everything had to be relayed, and even more interesting if the relay itself had problems. If the information Voyager gathers is really that useful, they'll find a way to keep in contact.
Can you imagine trying to get a 35-meter dish antenna even so far as low-earth orbit, let alone on a solar-escape trajectory? Get real.
I see no such problem. Perhaps it is you who should take a little time to think before posting; The concept of a sectored parabolic dish that expands when it deploys is not a new concept. If you do that now you're down to an 18m long component. If you're willing to send it up and have a crew assemble it instead of have it self-deploy en route to its destination you can get that number down MUCH smaller.
Maybe they started building Voyager II after Voyager I, but finished Voyager II first and launched it first.
proton != antielectron
You, my friend, have a common misconception of the volume of empty space out there. We can't see shit, metaphorically speaking. Given the distances involved in comparison with (1) the size of voyager and (2) the speed of voyager I really think it would be akin to releasing a dandilion seed on the continent of africa and hoping someone on the other side sees it one day.
Check the numbers for the sizes and distances of the sun, the earth, and pluto.. then boil it down to scales we can see. If the sun was a basketball - how far away would the earth be from it, and how large would it be? What about pluto? Now, how far away from those objects is the next closest star?
Given those distances and sizes, how big would voyager be and how fast is it moving?
it boggles the mind, it does! :-)