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Voyagers Legacy in Pictures
tanveer1979 writes "Space.com has an interesting photo feature from the voyager craft. For the uninformed voyager is the most distant man made object. For the first time we are recieving photos of distant parts of the solar system.
Currently voyager is about 12 light hours away. Wonder how far is that? Well Sun is 8 light minutes away from Earth. In case you are wondering what is this all about, check out the current location of voyager. The voyager spacecraft are about to cross heliopause, which is the limit of the rule of the sun, after which inter steller winds take over, and for the first time scientists can get the feel of what lies outside the solar system."
didn't we just have a story about this a few days ago?
Since when is Space.com http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov ?
Here's a picture of Uranus.
I have been pwned because my
If you wanna trade cool pics, join us on #bsdcode in EFNet, the key is 'i8thebabyjesus'.
Is it just me or does this image look photoshop'd? Is that a real image taken by voyager??
Who the fuck put Photoshop on Voyager? And who would be up there to air brush the image?
Yeesh.
The picture is genuine. The universe is a beautiful place, not in any need of graphic artist interpretation.
I wish that when Slashdotters linked file-formats beyond the basic HTML or txt, they'd at least add a little warning of some kind, eg link [pdf] so people can choose whether to mess with it. (In my case, it just starts downloading and I have to specifically cancel it.)
Come on guys. 3rd grade grammar: Voyager's Legacy in Pictures.
Man's new best friend.
Wouldn't you need... um... an ETHER for that?
It's almost like these astrophysicists (ha!) have no clue about 20th century physics, much less 21st century physics.
if all this "low-budget-space-exploration" the NASA does these days is the wrong direction.
With the old expensive programs you got huge bills but you got huge results, too.
The cheap stuff on the other hand tends to fail and doesn't has much scientific content.
Space exploration is not about driving cute robots on mars - actual scientific results are wanted. No matter if the public "loves" them or not.
Perhaps NASA is bound to degenerate to a pseudo-science space-entertaiment agency. If Disney sponsors one of their flights, then we will know it for sure.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagegallery/
It's not much, just 10 pictures. Click on "Voyager's Photo Legacy", then again for a Javascript pop-up gallery.
- More, higher resolution pictures
- Detailed timeline
- A 2 minute NPR segment
- A longer segment at the end of Science News Roundup on NPR
And a few newspaper stories:27.4 milli-Light years = 1 Light day
114 micro-Light Years = 1 Light Hour
1.9 micro-Light Years = 1 Light Minute
Mix and matching units isn't the way to go, for instance, how many times further is the Voyager from the sun than us?... (12 light hours compaired to 8 light mins, is more complecated than 15 uLightYear compaired to 1368uLightYear, where in the latter, it can be seen that it is approx 100 times further.)
Daniel
The proper distance unit in the solar system is the "astronomical unit". Voyager 1 is currently 85.601 AU from Earth. That makes it, ahem, 85.601 times further than the sun because the distance of the Sun is 1 AU.
Since a light year isn't an SI unit, I don't think it matters.
Personally, I find 8 light minutes easier to conceptualize than 1368 micro-light years. We all think of minutes as very small compared to years. I'm pretty sure that all of us, being nerds that we are, have calculated how MANY minutes there are in a year. And most of us know that it takes light just minutes to reach the inner planets. But when I think of micro-light years I have nothing to reference. Can light reach Mercury in a micro-light year? Jupiter?
It's just a matter of taste and custom. But since light-years aren't standardized, I don't see a problem with the norm.
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
Isn't the current location of Voyager now somewhere in the Alpha Quadrant??
Look, someone had to say it....
Oh yeah, in regular life I estimate how 15 * 10^-6 relates to 1368 * 10^-6 so much more than how 8 minutes relates to 12 hours.
You know, I suggest we start using SI to the point. For instance, speed should always be measured in m/s. Or, even better, it should be measured without units altogether, as a fraction of speed of light, since this is one true way to express speed.
Remember not to exceed 0.0000000926 on the road next time!
Mix and matching units isn't the way to go, for instance, how many times further is the Voyager from the sun than us?... (12 light hours compaired to 8 light mins, is more complecated than 15 uLightYear compaired to 1368uLightYear, where in the latter, it can be seen that it is approx 100 times further.)
.. well, I won't be getting my response back until this time tomorrow. Things like that.
Most people educated past grade 2 these days are taught that there are 60 minutes in an hour, and have no trouble working these sorts of figures out.
The biggest reason *I* like to see light-hours/minutes/etc is that it's actually meaningful. 871 micro-Light Years is some arbitrary figure. 11 light minutes means that light (a really, really fast thing) takes 11 minutes to travel that distance. And if I want to communicate with a spacecraft that's 12 light hours out
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The clear solution to this problem is to use metric time. I'm sure that would never happen, but we could conceivably break each day into metric units. Each Mhour would be a tenth of a day (or 2 hrs., 24 min. of the old units). Then would could make an Mminute one hundreth of an hour (or 1 min., 26.4 sec. old units), and then an Msec would be one hundredth of that (.864 old seconds). So, everything would be the same up to an order of magnitude or so. As much sense as this makes, it ain't gonna happen. Hell, in the US, we're having trouble converting to other metric units, so this won't happen.
On an even more off-topic note, this reminds me of something a long time ago. When I was in high-school, I was a waiter at this restaurant, and there was a timeclock which (as most do) actually recorded everything, not in hours and minutes, but decimal hours. For example, if you clocked in at 4:30pm, it would say 4.50pm. So, anyway, there was a couple of times that the dishwashers (who spoke only Spanish and no English) were asking me what the story was with the machine, since it always put "the wrong time".
Now, I'm pretty comfortable with changing units, so it never bothered me, but it was hard to explain. Actually, I'm thinking that to explain about breaking an hour into anything other than 60 pieces, in English, say, to my mom, would be extremely hard. Now, I had to do it in Spanish, which I had sort of learned around the house and the neighborhood, and had never had any school on. Whew. I don't think I ever explained it to these dudes... the closest I came to making them happy was that I convinced them if the timeclock was crazed out, I wouldn't use it either.
Come on, give it up, that's
Remember not to exceed 0.0000000926 on the road next time!
Well, I don't know where you live, but most local roads where I am have a legal limit of 0.0000000492! 0.0000000926 seems kinda dangerously fast.
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
As an amateur phtographer, I found this fact to be amazing...
"Like humans, the Voyagers must be steady when taking pictures. At Neptune, engineers programmed them to be 30 times steadier than the hour hand on a clock."
What I find most amazing is that the voyager is still going on a computer system that you could buy, in proccessing power terms, in kids toys but that the stability has yet to be equaled. Would love to have a look at that source code.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It makes me wonder what we could do with the even lower power and lower weight computer/sensor technologies we have available now. Looks like the Voyagers are going to last past 2020 but with even lower power one might marvel at how long newer devices could last. That is assuming, of course, that we can ever straighten out conversions between english and metric units.
They keep changing the units from KM to Mile across the article. an annoying feature, and really points out that it was rather rushed and the reporter probabbly just copied some figures and pasted them together.
sigh...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
The voyager spacecraft are about to cross heliopause,
y &u=/nm/ 20020820/ts_nm/space_voyager_dc_2
... "We don't run out of electrical power until about 2020," he said. "There's every expectation that Voyager 1 will ... at least enter the heliopause. There may be a question as to whether it will exit out the other side before we run out of power."
...
Per project manager Ed Massey in the Yahoo article, it's a long way away:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor
At 59, with only about four years with Voyager, Massey said he would be retired long before the probes hit the heliopause.
In the mid 80's I remember walking by the newstand, and suddenly seeing a picture of a big, blue/green spooky looking planet on the front page. Then right next to it was "Voyager Reaches Neptune!".
I remember the space books before that simply showed grainy star-like blob photos of neptune (assuming no guessed illustration).
Then low and behold, this big spooky ball with wispy clouds and a jupiter-like dark spot is revealed, and its a real place, waaaaaay out there at the cold edge of the solar system.
It fit well the stereotype of a distant, strange, lonely, but beautiful planet.
Thumbs up, Voy!
Table-ized A.I.
Years later we will cheer and gawk as NASA or the U.S. Air Force reports a fleet of unidentified space ships entering the atmosphere... until they pull out their laser blasters and photon torpedoes and come looking for revenge.
"For the uninformed voyager is the most distant man made object."
Correction:
The most distant object that we know about.
Aliens, Macro wormholes or Gravitionally anomalies may have caused a human manmade object to appear farter from earth than this probe.
Here is a RM stream that has a nice little highschool science class feel to it, but is still very informative.
But I don't get why we keep in contact with the Voyager satellites, everyone knows we'll just lose contact anyways ... (Ref: Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
"ISS to Houston, come in please."
"Houston, go ahead"
"Will you fix the toilet up here? It's not flushing and theres shit all over the place."
"ISS, we're trying, but 200,000 bloody people are trying to look @ pictures of Uranus right now. Will advise."
= Grow a brain...
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
;-)
I have this sudden urge to go find a bathroom to first post in.
* The sensitivity of our deep-space tracking antennas located around the world is truly amazing. The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level. >>And 25 years later my cellphone still doesn't work in the elevator...
I don't see much description of the Radioisotope Themoelectric Generators in that web page. Does anyone know how long the plutonium in the Voyager probes will last? Maybe the web site just wanted to avoid discussion of nuclear power sources.
If man does not blow-up the planet, be obliterated by any plausible environmental catastrophe. It is very likely that man will eventually travel much faster and further than Voyager ever will.
Assuming the above - Now what happens when we catch up with it? do we let it go on its merry way (dead or alive) or do we put it in a museum?
Perhaps some spacecomber will put it up on an ebay auction and NASA has to send in the FBI to get it back...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Didn't they go further? Those where launched a while before Voyagers... Is it a speed matter?
Got Pike?
Are there any predictions as to whether Voyager's
trajectory will cause her to orbit our sun? Or will she break free of our solar system's gravitational field(s)?
We all know light-seconds are a foot long (about 300 Mm) illustration.
That's just the old "a foot is a light-nanosecond" network wiring rule.
Similarly, light-minutes are almost 2 cm long (a bit less than 20 Gm),
light-hours are meters (about 1000 Gm (1 Tm)),
and light-days are inches (about 25 Tm).
So the heliosphere is coin-sized.
Light-years are centimeters (10 Pm),
and a parsec is a longish inch (30 Pm).
I find it much easier to use SI, than to constantly have to convert between units. ;)
(* It makes me wonder what we could do with the even lower power and lower weight computer/sensor technologies we have available now. Looks like the Voyagers are going to last past 2020 but with even lower power one might marvel at how long newer devices could last. *)
Too small of electronic parts cause problems near heavy radiation areas like Jupiter and other gas giant planets. Some of this can be helped with sheilding, but the sheilding increases the weight where it may be more effective to use fat electronics rather than fat shielding.
One of the reasons that a planned Europa (Jup moon) probe was postponed is that the cost of radiation sheilding was more expensive than they thought. Older probes did not have as much worries about that because their electronics were larger. Now they have to weigh more tradeoffs because of the options and problems that minituration provides WRT heavy radiation.
Plus, doesn't the power needed for radio transmission remain pretty much constant, especially in light of the fact that newer missions send more data than older ones?
The efficiency of radio transmission has not followed Moore I don't believe. It is linear I think.
Table-ized A.I.
I hate reading stories like this. Yeah, I'm a libertarian and all (at least until right this minute) but I'm sick of all this "budget" crap that NASA gets. Why don't we just give NASA the priority over *everything*, even national defense. Let them keep most of our tax dollars. I'd much rather be working as a slave for the cause of space exploration than whatever the reasons of the day are for our massive government. What we need, not in a few decades or centuries but *right now*, before I even finish this post, is a real space exploration program. Blank checks for the following programs making use of serious spacecraft perhaps powered by nuclear fission and/or fuel cells.: 1. A permanent lunar base devoted to the purpose of manufacturing spacecraft too large or fragile to be constructed and launched from earth. We could use a space station for this, but to hell with that. A lunar base is more appropriate for showing those aliens that we've got a pair. 2. Serious preparations for launching manned missions to, not just one, but all of the interesting targets in our solar system at the same time. These would include Mars, most of Jovian moons (and yes, there are many) not forgetting about Io or Europa which might even support some kind of life. 3. Immediate serious planning for high speed manned and unmanned interstellar space travel to Alpha Centauri and all other star systems less than 10 light years away making use of whatever current or near future tech we need to get us there. This may include such proposals as pulsed fission bomb propulsion such as The Orion Project. Unmanned missions might also make use of Jovian planet slingshotting to get an initial boost. 4. And obviously we're going to be needing more than just a few of those new space elevators. Time to get cracking. Those people working on medical cures can keep right on working but everyone else should start thinking about what they can contribute to the War Effort, err, I mean, Space Effort. Our entire economy should revolve around it. If the Russkies had never launched Sputnik maybe we'd all still think the moon was made of cheese. (Although didn't I read that those videos were faked?:))
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
go back to New Hampshire.
Shouldn't the referencing be AU (Astronomical Units) in this distance measurement as a variable? Astronimcal Units, or exactly 1X the Earth's distance from the Sun, is more commonly used as an internal solar system measurement.
People don't even understand the LY, let alone Light Seconds, Light Minutes, Light Days, etc.
and for the first time scientists can get the feel of what lies outside the solar system.
they probably won't be getting too much. To my understanding, Voyager is currently in a minimal power usage mode and is not able to send back much data. I also believe the nuclear generator onboard is set to run out of fuel in 2020 or some time around then.
Soon to be heard in the Voyage control room?
::studies display::
Ahhh, sir? I think there's something wrong.
Yes? What is it?
Well, as far as I can tell...
Uhhh, I mean according to the numbers here... ummm...
What happened? Spit it out already!
Uh, yeah, well, according to my display here,
uhhh... well... it says Voyager 1 bounced sir.
What do you mean BOUNCED? Did a micrometor jiggle it or something?
uhh, no, not exacly...
Well? Then WHAT exactly ?
Exactly? Ahh, well, as near as I can make out, it bounced off of the heliopause sir. It seems to be coming back this way now.
Huh? But there's nothing out there, it's pretty much just a mathematical line where the force of the solar wind balances the force of interstellar gas, right?
Uhhh, yeah, at least that's what all the scientists just sort of assumed, I guess.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of Voyager space probes?
NASA's aims in this are quite clear:
1 - Launch probes to outer space
2 - ?????
3 - Profit!
>And if I want to communicate with a spacecraft .. well, I won't be
>that's 12 light hours out
>getting my response back until this time >tomorrow.
You're a bit off there. 24 hours in a day, which means 24 light hours if you want to get the response at this time of day tommorow. At 12 light hours if the probe sends a 4:00pm one afternoon you'll get the response at 4:00am the next morning.
Isn't "cheaper and faster" a great SCAPEGOAT?
NASA can blame "accidents" on this ideology instead of blaming themselves.
NASA can "pretend" that there was an accident, with such a scapegoat in their back pocket.
NASA can utilize these "lost" spacecraft and never be accountable for reporting their findings.
Space exploration is NO LONGER about science. Why do people foolishly believe that NASA doesn't know exactly what they are doing?? NASA thanks each and every gullible sheep in this flocking nation!
What's a second? An hour? A day?
It has much more to do with
the Earth's rotation than with cesium.
It will crash into a distant planet of robots, get help, lose the 'oy', return and destroy Earth.
What happened to the Pioneer 11 spacecraft that had its 30th anniversary not so long ago? Isn't it more distant than Voyager?
Google brings up a pile of results like these
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
I don't know about anybody else, but I find it slightly annoying when you say "Not to nitpick" if that's exactly what you plan on doing. I feel... betrayed.. lied to.
Seriously. I think that people should use that phrase when what they're going to say would initally sound like nitpicking, but is actually important or relevent. Sometimes people use it that way, which I don't mind. But then sometimes people do what you did, and use it as a shield to try and prevent complaints when they know they're about to say something stupid and irrelevent (and sometimes annoying).
If you're going to say something stupid that's one thing, but then don't hide and try and pretend that it's not stupid.
No actually, he's spot on.
.. well, I won't be
>And if I want to communicate with a spacecraft
>that's 12 light hours out
>getting my response back until this time >tomorrow.
That means if he sends out a message to the probe, he won't recieve a response to his message until this time tomorrow (barring any processing time).
RobotWisdom declared:
I wish that when Slashdotters linked file-formats beyond the basic HTML or txt, they'd at least add a little warning of some kind, eg link [nasa.gov] [pdf] so people can choose whether to mess with it. (In my case, it just starts downloading and I have to specifically cancel it.)
Dude, I couldn't agree with you more. I don't know if the editors notice this thread, but if they do I replied for TWO reasons:
one, to lobby for a PDF link warning
TWO: alert the editors to MODERATOR ABUSE. Whoever moderated you as a "Troll" post clearly misused the system (if you are trolling, it's a subtle troll :-).
Offtopic, but I find it odd that I *never* am selected to moderate. Either moderation is denied when you max your karma (bug!), or the trolls themselves have reverse engineered the system to the point where they get the lion's share of moderation. Not that I get a boost from moderating or anything... just speculating the system may be broken.
Take a look at this website, it'll tell you the current locations and distances of spacecraft on solar system escape trajectories. (Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2)
http://www.heavens-above.com/solar-escape.asp
Pioneer 11 is actually the least distant of all these spacecraft - and is also essentially a manmade rock at this point - its no longer operational.
Voyager 1 owns the record for farthest out, and will for the forseeable future, as it is travelling considerably faster than the others relative to the sun.
Also interesting is that the Voyager twins will be the two farthest spacecraft out once Voyager 2 passes Pioneer 10.
This should be in late November 2021 by my admittedly crude calculations. Take Pioneer 10's 13.986 AU lead, divide it by the 0.727 AU V 2 is gaining per year on P 10, and you get approx. 19.24 years. Add that to todays date and you arrive somewhere in late Nov. 2021 - I'm not going to bother with the exact date.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Actually, if you're going SI, go all the way. Interstellar distances should be stated in petameters, exameters, or the like...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."