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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?"
In about 300 years an advanced extraterrestrial civilization will come across it and think "Ha, what a primitive civilization, THIS is the extent of their technology... hey, they have lots of water and nitrogen, let's go conquer them." And when they get here they're met by the Global Planetary Defense System with its neutron shield and highly accurate laser weaponry instead, manned by fourth generation genetically-engineered Warrior Humans who kill without mercy but can be easily controlled.
Wish I was gonna be around to watch all this.
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.)
Assessing their key radio-isotope generators that power the on-board battery, Massey evaluates: "We don't run out of electrical power until about 2020", or at least for Voyager I, around 43 years towards its lifetime of some communication with its originating star, Sol, and its home planet, the Earth.
Looks like the isotope's power the battery.
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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.
When eminent biologist and author Lewis Thomas was asked what message he would choose to send from Earth into outer space in the Voyager spacecraft, he answered, "I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach." After a pause, he added, "But that would be boasting."
...and perhaps the most dated picture of DNA
Huh? Unless something changed recently, all the details illustrated in the DNA diagram are still as valid now as they were in the 70s. Is the story submitter upset because the double helix isn't animated, spinning slowly around, backlit by an offscreen purple fluorescent light source with meaningless reams of genetic code flashing past in the background like in a million bad sci-fi movies?
You'll still find a very similar style of diagram in any molecular biology textbook.
Yes. "The planet" in question being Earth. If a nuclear-powered device explodes on launch, or in low orbit, it's "not a good thing". At the very least you'll get radioactive debris spread over a wide area.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Ok, I got off (actually, stayed on) my butt and found this:
Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's)
Three RTG's provide electric power to Voyager. The generators produce about 1800 watts of heat by the radioactive decay of plutonium. The heat is then converted to about 400 watts of electric power by thermocouplers. The RTG's are mounted on a boom to protect the scientific instruments from excess heat and radioactivity.
and this, which discusses RTGs in the context of Cassini and safety.
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Doesn't the disc on Voyager feature an introduction by then UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim giving greetings from Earth?
How odd that the first human voice any aliens who could work the disc will hear is the voice of a former Nazi alleged to have taken part in war crime atrocities in the then Yugoslavia...
"Information wants to be paid"
Besides, your analogy falls flat. I presume your point was that the age of the technology is irrelevant when it comes to leaving the solar system? Then consider this: what is it that pushed the 1970s technology of the Voyagers out of the solar system? Answer: more 1970s technology. If your 16th century vase were propelled by 16th century rockets, then your analogy would be valid.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The power source on the Voyager I & II spacecrafts, like most other of the time, is called a PTG or plutonium thermoelectric generator. Basically you have a heat source (chunk of plutonium) surrounded by devices similar in construction to modern peltier coolers. The Seebeck effect (opposite of Peltier effect) allows electrical power to be generated by the temperature gradient across the device. Basically you have an electrical power source with no moving parts and a very long life (Plutonium has a decently large halflife). It's a shame that the environmentalists had a hissy fit in the 80's and 90's that blocked this very reliable technology from being used on modern spacecraft.
I mean damn of all things you could give a person why give them your DNA?
If aliens decide to take over the world, well theres a map, our DNA so they can change their genes to look exactly like us, some wav files so they can learn how we talk and maybe even our language from the greetings. What the hell are Nasa scientists doing? Where is the government and national security?
I mean damn shouldnt the NSA outlaw us putting DNA into space and maps, I dare the scientist who gave our DNA to aliens to post his social security number and credit card number on the internet in plain text!
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All I hear is "Wytajcie, istoty zaswiatu," which would basically mean "Greetings, otherworldly beings," or better, "Greetings to beings from beyond Earth." The "outer world" is at best a rather poetic (or possibly condescending) translation.
I think it would be an equivalent of "Greetings, creatures from Outer Space," but they didn't intone it pretentiously, right before Ed Wood hovers the hubcap from a string and a theremin plays in the background as his boustier intrudes into the picture, as we are wont to do over here.
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.
Fully updated with ion or solar sail propulsion to get it out there quicker with a nice AOLesque "VERSION 3.0" stamped on the side so they know its the latest.
On board we also include a copy of Lord of the Rings in DivX format and Mp3's of Britney Spears. That way if the aliens invade, we can tell the RIAA and MPAA they have pirated movies and music and watch the aliens recoil and flee under the unsuing crush of lawyers and DMCA threat letters.
If that doesn't work, we trick them into installing the cracked copy of WinXP convieniently on stowed board and watch their ships fail in horrible and astonishing ways.
Now if that fails, then we trick them into installing AOL and logging onto it. After all nothing can withstand humankinds most powerful weapon... Pure stupidity.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
"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.
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The heliopause is not a gravitational feature. It is a feature of matter.
The sun emits a flood of mostly-charged particles that make up the "solar wind." The earth is shielded by its magnetic fields, but the interplanetary environment is quite harsh.
The heliopause is where this outward flow of solar matter becomes less than the general flow of matter through the galaxy. There isn't any good way to observe this from earth, which is why having a Voyager pass through the area is a good thing. Our current picture of the heliopause is based on physical modeling and simulation. Having any observational data to check these models against would be a major step forward.
Just because the nearest star is really far away, it doesn't make it disappointing. We'll get there some day, it may take time and it may not be easy to phone home, but does it matter.
1000 years ago, it took years to go or communicate from one end of the known world to the other.
250 years ago, we reach the new world. But it still took most of a year, and the danger of shipwreck to get there.
In 100 years from now we may have very fast ships. Lets say 10% of light speed. This would put us on the nearest star in 40 years. People who go on that mission will be expecting it to be so. Civilization is not a one mans cause; it's the perspective of generations.
-:) Oh no - not again.
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It's a shame that the environmentalists had a hissy fit in the 80's and 90's that blocked this very reliable technology from being used on modern spacecraft.
Not really. The problem is that in order to make one of these generators safe, it needs to be protected from the launch rocket exploding on take-off. It doesn't matter whether you're an environmentalist or not - if a couple of kilos of plutonium gets vaporised and spread to the four winds on the launch pad, you've just made enormous chunks of the US's only major space launch site unusable until it can be cleaned up. You can stick your head in the sand about it, but that doesn't make the radiation go away. Needless to say, the clean-up operation and interruption to US space activities would cost tens of billions of dollars - and quite possibly a lot more.
It's perfectly possible to protect these generators from the explosive force caused by a rocket blowing up on the launch pad - it's just a simple engineering problem. The problem is that it costs weight - lots of it, and the number one thing you want to avoid on a rocket launch is extra weight. Every extra kilogram costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars, or costs you one or two or three valuable scientific instruments.
So unless you absolutely need a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, you don't use one. Solar panels are lighter (because they don't need explosion protection) and, therefore, cheaper to launch (which is the only really major cost consideration - the cost of the space vehicle itself pales in comparison). Modern solar panels are good out to nearly Jupiter. Beyond that you need an RTG. I can only think of one mission that NASA has launched since the Voyagers that has gone out that far - Galileo, which was launched in 1989 - and yes, it had an RTG on-board despite the protests.
Honestly, NASA - at least the engineers - couldn't give a damn about the environmental issues involved with RTGs. Because as long as their containment engineering is up to scratch - and I rather suspect it is - there simply are no environmental issues. Instead, it comes down to economics - and for most missions that NASA undertakes, which go no further out than Mars, thermoelectric generators lose out badly to solar panels.
Now, perhaps environmentalist fears are preventing NASA from sending more probes beyond Jupiter because they need an RTG, but that's a different matter entirely. Maybe they need to publicly blow up a few rockets with the generator containers on-board to prove their point.
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.
What a stupid comment. Just how does the 4000 bc brick gain enough velocity to escape the gravity of the solar system (let alone the earth)?
By bouncing off the forehead of a numbskull
Table-ized A.I.
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?