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?"

Comments

Perspective

[Andy Smith]

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.)

Re:Perspective

[little1973]

You are quite right. The problem is that even the speed of light is snail-pace compared to the vast distances in the universe, let alone the speed of Voyager.

This problem really annoys me, because it seems nobody gives a thought about how we will communicate or travel in space. It takes from 3 to 20 minutes for radio waves to cover the distance between the Earth and Mars depending their position around the Sun. Which means you can never phone to Mars from Earth, because you get an answer for your question in about 6-40 minutes. In our rushing world thats a lot of time.

As for travelling in space the twin paradox poses another problem. If we can reach almost the speed of light by some method we have to face this relativity problem. If you step in your space ship and after 1 hour you step out on Alpha Centauri you will have to face with the fact in the "real" world 4 years passed. Communication with Earth is quite futile also, because they get your message in 4 years.

In short, if Einstein is right we are in a dead end. So, I want to beleive there is worm hole or hyperspace or whatever which makes space travel possible otherwise humanity will stuck to this planet forever.

Or, as I hope, Einstein is not right. I hope a genius in the future will invalidate Einstein theory as Einstein invalidated Newton theory. It is interesting that nobody dares to say, but Newton theory about gravity and his equations were completely shattered by Einstein on the theoretical level. On the practical level we use them, because they are not so complex as Einstein's and provide us with the neccessary precision, but this does not do anything with the fact that Newton's theory is wrong.

2012-ish marks next 'landmark' event for Voyager..

[upstateguy]

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.

Stellar escape velocity

[lucasw]

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.

Not the furthest mad-made object?!

[clickety6]

How far would this baby be now?

"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/1892 /s putnik.html

Re:How quickly could we catch up...

[handorf]

Never. All the money that was spent on Voyager type probes would now be spent on finding a better way to kill people.

Re:What???

[vrmlguy]

IIRC, Sagan said that he believed that the Voyager records were more likely to be retrieved by humans than aliens. I don't recall any elaboration, but I got the idea that he expected them to be found by, say, a robotic Oort cloud explorer in AD 2929.

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.