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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."
Is it just me or does this image look photoshop'd? Is that a real image taken by voyager??
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.
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it's a matter of speed. Pioneer 10 was for a long time the furtherest man-made object, but Voyager 2 passed it about 10 years ago or so. The Pioneer's were launched with less powerful rockets and didn't use as much gravitational slingshot. Voyager 1 and 2 are simply faster.
(* 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.
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.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
No, No Watch Star Trek The Motion Picture. It will find a bunch of super-intelligent aliens, get data on the entire universe, then fly back to earth as the center of some nebula looking for the creator and wanting to destroy all humans.
Simple (:
Indeed - quite a telling indictment of capitalism, no?
It doesn't make rational sense that we should have to keep on growing the world economy beyond the capacity of the earth to bear it, just to feed everyone. It's only a system built on greed and selfishness that makes things this way.
Female Prison Rape in NY
It doesn't make rational sense that we should have to keep on growing the world economy beyond the capacity of the earth to bear it, just to feed everyone. It's only a system built on greed and selfishness that makes things this way.
No, Mr. Luddite. Individuals want to continually improve their own lives, and each generation wants the next generation to be better off than they were. I certainly want my kids to live better that I am.
If you want to see stability (stagnation, no progress or improvement) look at the life of the average person in the year 500AD, then the life of the average person in the year 1500AD.
Software Wars
Google brings up a pile of results like these
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
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.
true, but it wouldn't be like flinging a plate on it's lonesome through the atmosphere, it would have been surrounded by a mass of plasma for a long ways out.
be interesting to see the effect that'd have.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'