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Farthest Human-Made Object: First Quarter Century
An anonymous reader writes "The NASA Astrobiology Magazine reports today the 25th anniversary of the Voyager I launch, now the farthest human-made object at 93 Sun-Earth distances (93 AU), or 12 light-hours away. Expected battery life to 2020. The fascinating part is that gold record of civilization, which is a strange audio mix of sentimental kisses [wav file, let ET phone home that way] and perhaps the most dated picture of DNA. Some progress there. Voy 1 will likely confuse even modern earthlings-- much less ET. Case in point: In 2002, can we understand that 70's show, when the Polish greeting memorialized as "Welcome, creatures from beyond the outer world"? Unlike those ET creatures we meet daily from the inner world?"
The fact that Voyager is now 12 light *hours* away really puts things into perspective for me. I'm not much of a space nut but I know that the distance from earth to the nearest stars (apart from our sun) is measured in light *years* so it's humbling to realise that even our furthest reach is trivial in the grand scheme of things. We haven't even stepped out of the house yet, nevermind explored the neighbourhood. (That sounds a bit like a put-down but it isn't. I think Voyager is an awesome achievement.)
I wouldn't worry about ETs not understanding us, looking at the pictures from the 70's. Our world hasn't changed that much really, from an outsider point of view. If the ETs can figure out what the dna picture means, I bet it doesn't matter if it represents our knowledge from 1970's or 2020's.
Why is the probe running on batteries? Is it even possible to use solar power that far from the sun? What does it use energy for anyway? Is it transmitting something back to earth?
On August 20, 1977, the compact disk, the microwave oven, and the fax machine were communication tools that could only be glimpsed on the technological horizon.
I'm probably going to regret asking this, but how can a microwave oven be used as a communication tool?
As BBC reported yesterday, in 2012 or so, Voyager 1 is predicted to cross the heliopause, the boundry at which time it *really* will leave our solar system.
Pretty neat for a piece of 1970's technology.
Often scientists talk about how the universe is expanding. The concept of expansion itself demands that a boundary be present. And boundaries demark two regions, one within and one beyond. Yet nobody dares mention what is beyond the universe.
All these contradictions just tell us one thing. Alot has to be undone about our stake of knowledge before we can begin to truely understand.
Our current state of knowledge is similar to the days before Galeleo, when people thought the world was flat and you could reach the end of the world.
My 0.02
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
If you found this record do you think you could play it?
And extract the images from it?
I have the directions http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/messages/VgrC
and it would still be pretty tricky.
If I didnt have them I dont think I would have any chance of figuring out what this thing was.
-M
Is the Voyager really going fast enough to make it to another star, even if it was pointed at one? A lot of these posts and articles similar to this seem to imagine the thing just sailing on forever, not in a particularly long orbit around our sun.
If I'm plugging in the equation right, taking into account the 93 AU that the Voyager has already reached, and the present speed (39,000 miles an hour, assuming none of that's tangential velocity), I get a required speed of 4000 km/s, and the Voyager is going far slower.
So as far as I can tell, really the gold record, etc. on board are more of a time capsule for when the craft swings back around on its comet-like trajectory, rather than for contacting aliens. I think the nasa people and popular science writers like to preserve the more romantic notion of an unintentional first instellar voyage, though my calculations could be wrong.
"Project Thunderwell was the inspiration of astrophysicist Bob Brownlee, who in the summer of 1957 was faced with the problem of containing underground an explosion, expected to be equivalent to a few hundred tons of dynamite. Brownlee put the bomb at the bottom of a 500-foot vertical tunnel in the Nevada desert, sealing the opening with a four-inch thick steel plate weighing several hundred pounds. He knew the lid would be blown off; he didn't know exactly how fast. High-speed cameras caught the giant manhole cover as it began its unscheduled flight into history. Based upon his calculations and the evidence from the cameras, Brownlee estimated that the steel plate was traveling at a velocity six times that needed to escape Earth's gravity when it soared into the flawless blue Neavada sky. 'We never found it. It was gone,' Brownlee says, a touch of awe in his voice almost 35 years later.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/189
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Does anyone know why the diagram uses S to represent the base cytosine in the DNA diagram rather than C? Is it simply to avoid confusion with the c they use for carbon in outlining the structure of the bases, or is it part of an outdated labeling convention?
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Never. All the money that was spent on Voyager type probes would now be spent on finding a better way to kill people.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
If so, I would hope that the spacecraft would be analyzed in situ and allowed to continue rather than being returned to Earth and stuck in a museum.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?