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Voyager 1 Crosses The Termination Shock
SubstormGuy writes "In a scientific session at the AGU meeting in New Orleans this morning, Dr. Ed Stone presented clear evidence that Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock last December. The scientists in the room applauded when the announcement was made."
It absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
The wikipedia entry claims that The Voyager I spacecraft is believed to have passed termination shock in February 2003.
I'd do it, but my wiki privileges have been revoked temporarily. I can't imagine why.
What gives?
...voyager fans, unsure what "termination shock" exactly means, start raising donations "just in case".
The first link doesn't go anywhere useful. This link brings up the correct results for the session. You can also view the session details.
I am shocked I say -- SHOCKED -- to hear this news.
And excited.
The geek in me is excited about 2005. Methane oceans, rovers on Mars and private spaceflight? There's a lot that's scary going on in the world today. But when it comes to SPACEFLIGHT -- 2005 is shaping up to be a banner year!
Kudos to the Voyager team!
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
While it's there, I'll send it a message to have a look around... I think that's where I left my sunglasses.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Worlds grow old and suns grow cold
And death we never can doubt.
Time's cold wind, wailing down the past,
Reminds us that all flesh is grass
And history's lamps blow out.
But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
Cycles turn while the far stars burn,
And people and planets age.
Life's crown passes to younger lands,
Time brushes dust of hope from his hands
And turns another page.
But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
But we who feel the weight of the wheel
When winter falls over our world
Can hope for tomorrow and raise our eyes
To a silver moon in the opened skies
And a single flag unfurled.
But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
We know well what Life can tell:
If you would not perish, then grow.
And today our fragile flesh and steel
Have laid our hands on a vaster wheel
With all of the stars to know
That the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
From all who tried out of history's tide,
Salute for the team that won.
And the old Earth smiles at her children's reach,
The wave that carried us up the beach
To reach for the shining sun.
For the Eagle has landed; tell your children when.
Time won't drive us down to dust again.
(c) 1975 - Leslie Fish
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
The article on Voyager I also refers to February 2003.
Anyone care to give a better explanation of termination shock? How hot does it get there? Can the sensors onboard obtain more information of this phenomenon? The wikipedia article doesn't go into too much detail.
The link in the topic post is bunk.
Well, the barrier is ~100AU out there. An AU is about 150million km. Light travels at 299,792,458 m/s.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Yep, had no idea what it was (so much for my Space Geek Badge)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_shock
<i>In astronomy, the termination shock is theorised to be a boundary marking one of the outer limits of the sun's influence. It is where the bubble of solar wind particles slows down to below supersonic speed and heats up due to collisions with the galactic interstellar medium. It is believed to be about 100 Astronomical Units from the Sun.
The termination shock boundary fluctuates in its distance from the sun as a result of fluctuations in solar flare activity i.e. changes in the ejections of gas and dust from the sun.
The Voyager I spacecraft is believed to have passed termination shock in December 2004.</i>
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
/cygdrive/d/home>units /* there and back */
You have: 100 au
You want: light years
* 0.0015812845
/ 632.39726
You have: 0.0015812845 years * 2
You want: hours
* 27.722488
/ 0.036071799
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Are they referring to speed of sound at sea level? That seems arbitrary and very slow in space speeds for not being zero.
I have been intermittently following the voyager program with some interest. Much more detail is available at the NASA JPL website, including transcripts of communication efforts with the spacecraft, as well as info about the program and the spacecraft themselves. It's quite the interesting story, given that the program was never expected to continue as long as it has.
Thanks for playing, AC! but why not check some of the manifests for Shuttle flights; and whether the astronauts have security clearances; etc. The notion that NASA is "entirely civilian" is
Cool indeed. I can't help but wonder what Carl Sagan would think of this if he were around to see it happen....Sadly we have only his past eloquence to ponder and we are now left to our own devices in order to comprehend the magnitude of this event. We are now an interstellar species. The first ever on Earth and the only one we know of. There is no turning back now. Though perhaps it is time for Voyager to turn back, one last time to send us an image of ourselves from the incomprehensible beyond. Our planet will of course not be visible anymore, and our sun will probably appear as a mere unremarkable dot among a thousand others.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
the bbc http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4576623.stm has some more info on this. You should know that they are not 100% it has crossed the termintation shock. "Some researchers thought the probe had arrived at the shock; others thought it still had some way to go. Now, at the 2005 Joint Assembly meeting organised by the American Geophysical Union, space scientists say they are confident - and agreed - that Voyager has gone beyond the termination shock and is flirting with deep space. Predicting the location of the termination shock was hard, the researchers say, because the precise conditions in interstellar space are unknown. Also, changes in the speed and pressure of the solar wind cause the termination shock to expand, contract and ripple. The most persuasive evidence that Voyager 1 has crossed the termination shock is its measurement of a sudden increase in the strength of the magnetic field carried by the solar wind, combined with an inferred decrease in its speed. This happens whenever the solar wind slows down."
I am totally depressed by my inability to make a Star Trek: The Motion Picture joke.
Is anyone else frustrated when you hear wonderful science like this being done, yet see that probes like this are slated to have their funding cut (http://www.spacedaily.com/news/voyager1-05a.html) ? For some reason, $4.2 million / year to operate them (ie, listen) seems unbelievably cheap for such a unique resource - not only are there only TWO probes out there (voyager 1 and 2), but to get others out to replace them would cost a whole ton more. ...In addition to having to wait another 20 or so years to get there. :(
Science just doesn't work when politics gets involved...
but doesn't Voyager do so as well? Is it subsonic by now too? It's rather impossible it had its engines on all the time (or even most of the time) or that it moved faster than Solar Wind at any time.
Same laws of physics should apply I think?
Another question, "solar sail" related - it seems it's the distance where any Solar Sail based starship would slow down to subsonic speeds - and it would stop by heliopause?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
From the Wikipedia page:
It appears helioshock can also be caused by mating with fagolas.
Why do I get the queasy feeling that some GNAA asshat defaced yet another Wikipedia page? Stupid pissers.
Go ahead, mod me Flamebait. I don't care. I'm tired of these jerks.
For those who want to know what a termination shock looks like: Clicky.
..before it finds the machine planet, and begins the long journey home.
Man, from the headlines.. I can't tell the difference between NASA and Star Trek news anymore
Except the solar wind slows down due to it 'running in to' interstellar particles. Larger objects are less affected by these subatomic particles, and can keep much more of their momentum.
Likewise, a solar sail isn't like a nautical sail. Once the momentum has been imparted, you need to apply energy to SLOW it down. On a sailboat, when the wind stops, the friction with the water slows you down. In interstellar space, when you don't have any solar 'wind' to power you, you just keep going...
I also have a problem with the use of the term 'subsonic'. When there is no medium for sound waves to travel in, how do you define 'subsonic'? (I don't mean you personally, I mean the schmuck that decided to use that term in this context originally.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Remember VGER (Vee-jer)?
Yeah, that was a highly advanced AI hell-bent on destroying the Earth because it's disappointed in us as creator-figures.
So the story goes it evolved into that from Voyager 6 after we told it to gather all information in the universe.
Maybe I should be worried?
technically, no.. it cannot be supersonic. however, it can be when measured relative to the speed of sound at 1 Earth atmosphere.
What is your penile percentile?
If that's not funny, I don't know what would.
Looks like wikipedia.org has crossed the termination shock as well, provided by slashdot.org
I found a table which lists different materials: Speed of Sound in Various Bulk Media
That's nothing. Try felching, now that's really cool.
... the termination shock boundary passed by Voyager 1? This would depend on the (decrease od) speed of the solar wind and thus (decreased) solar activity some time in the past.
envious of Americans. We 'foriegners' give you guys A LOT of crap over wars, the environment, religion, guns etc (not that the British have a leg to stand on... we forget our history way too quickly), but the fact is that we don't have the balls to do anything like this anymore. Creating an object that can travel out of the Solar System is HUGE. It is an achievement that should stand out as a moment in history that we can be truely proud of: no-one got killed, you're not doing it for greed or wealth - its a pure scientific achievement.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
--> What happens when you get caught browsing slashdot.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
We'll be an interstellar species when a man crosses the termination shock boundary. For the moment, we can just label ourselves as interstellar junk makers.
From wikipedia : "In astronomy, the termination shock is theorised to be a boundary marking one of the outer limits of the sun's influence."
How many outer limits does the sun have and what are they ?
No consensus yet. Go here, search astro-ph for `Pioneer' and you'll find people still arguing about it.
It is very irritating (for us geeks!) to say that humans have started space exploration. We have been raised on Star Trek and Star Wars...we can't accept having gone a few hundred kilometers up in the sky as "space". If we could take a trip to the place Voyager now is, then we can say that we have started exploring space. Until that day, we can't say anything. Here is an analogy with sea exploration: would we say that we have explored the Atlantic ocean, if the European explorers of the 15th century have just put their feet in a local lake? we wouldn't. Then how can we talk about "space age" and "space exploration"?
Searching Google with the term '200 au in light hours' would give you the same answer. ;)
"Creating an object that can travel out of the Solar System is HUGE" What is so HUGE about it ? I'm pretty sure you can do the same easily from the shuttle or the ISS. Just walk outside and throw some object in the right direction. with some little math you should be able to send it in the right direction, then it's just a matter of time (years) before the object exists our solar system. What's the point ? Some guys get exited just by throwing things far away or blowing things up. I don't see the big deal ?
...you haven't visited Des Moines...
I have mod points, but wanted to reply to this instead. I can't believe this is modded as a troll. Insightful, maybe. When was the last time America did something truly amazing like this? A previous post highlighted that as soon as politics gets involved, science loses out. I hop America does decide to send a manned mission to Mars, but not at the expense of the valuable data that this and other probes out on the edges of the solar system provides.
welfare compared to how much we spend on NASA, not too many more.
2006 budget:
Nasa: 16.5 billion
Education: 56 billion
HHS: 68.9 billion
Social Security: 540 billion
Medicare: 340 billion
Medicaid: 199 billion
Yeah, killing NASA would make a big dent.
Clear, Dark Skies
Well, you understate the problem. We simply don't have anything accurate enough to just "throw" objects out of the Solar System. Instead, you need substantial energy to get things out of the Solar System. Sure, you can throw something in such a way that it follows a special orbit that eventually over millenia or longer transfers energy to it from various planets and eventually ejects the body from orbit, but to place such an orbit so precisely for a static object? That's near impossible. Even the perturbation of the solar wind or the deviation of planets from point masses (or even from oblate spheroids) would wreck havok on our predicted path.
Sounds like the 10k people at IBM aren't the only one that have reached the termination shock.
I think this is a conspiracy concocted by the liberal media. They filmed this probe supposedly billions of miles away in an underground lab in Area 51, where they have the advanced technology required to film tiny spots.
Is it bad that the first thing i think of when someone mentions junk is "Have you seen my chance cube?" :S
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
Especially considering the fact that the N stands for national.
Sorry for being a coward but I spend some modpoints on this subject already.
"Creating an object that can travel out of the Solar System is HUGE" What is so HUGE about it ? I'm pretty sure you can do the same easily from the shuttle or the ISS. Just walk outside and throw some object in the right direction. with some little math you should be able to send it in the right direction, then it's just a matter of time (years) before the object exists our solar system.
What about doing some math on the speed you have to throw away your object before making this comment?
The circulair speed of the ISS is:
v_c = sqrt(GM/r)
The escape velocity from ISS orbit is:
v_esc = sqrt(2GM/r)
so you are only 41% of your current speed short.
The ISS speed is about 7.7 km/s. To get to earths escape velocity you have to throw something away with 3.2 km/s (=11520 km/h = 7200 Mph).
But then you have still the sun. Speed of the earth around the sun is about 28.9 km/s, escape velocity from the sun in earth orbit is about 40.8 km/s.
Conclusion: Yes, getting something out of the solar system is quite an accomplishment. Even a powerfull gun won't do it (a high barrel exit velocity = 900 m/s). Smart people use gravity from other planets to accomplish it because you need huge amounts of energy.
Nyh
I hope NASA compresses his ashes into diamond using technology previously discussed on Slashdot and sends him off with the next probe. ... Come to think of it, Paying to have your ashes made into a diamond is much better than being kept in an urn.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
You seem confused about what the word civilian means. In the context of NASA it refers to "non-military" yes NASA is Government sponsored supported and controlled, but the pilots and astronauts are civilians ... with security clearances to be sure, but as civilians they of course can quit at any time and are not subject to military justice or discipline.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Best jargon ever! It's begging to be made an SF title.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
It can very easily be supersonic.
The solar wind is a gas with a certain density - a very low density, compared with sea level atmosphere, but it's still a gas, and molecules will still bump into each other in it. So, sound (this is, pressure waves) can travel through the solar wind. You wouldn't be able to hear it, but it'd still be there regardless.
If you are moving faster that the speed of sound in a medium, then you are supersonic.
As an aside, cerenkov radiation is when particles travel faster than the speed of light in a medium - this causes a superluminal shock wave in the medium similar to a supersonic mach cone created by a jet. This page touches on both supersonic and cerenkov radiation quite nicely.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
The solar system is enclosed in a bubble of particles emmited by the sun, in what is called "solar wind". The sun carries this bubble around it, and travels at supersonic speed relative to the particles in the interstellar medium. The termination shock is the point where the bubble of particles around the sun ends. It's where the molecules carried by solar wind cease to be carried around by the sun and start behaving similarly to other random particles in the Galaxy.
If you don't believe there are gas particles in the space "vaccum", then you should try to find an alternative explanation for this, for instance.
So you're saying National Semiconductor is a government-run operation? How about National Bank, or Nationals (the grocery store)?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I thought this meant that Star Trek: Voyager would continue in spite of the producers holding back new productions. Could also excite some scientists, I guess :-)
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
We can't even understand shocks we can create in a laboratory, why would anyone have thought that the termination shock would be anything but rediculously complicated?
I mean its 2 rarefied plasmas colliding at literaly 1 million miles an hour.
They don't really KNOW that that it crossed that TERMINATION SHOCK thingamajigger. The termination shock isn't mentioned EVEN ONCE in the bible, new OR old testament.
OMG cut NASA's funding!
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
This is truly a great achievement (as many have noted). What I give to be in that spacecraft. I wonder if it was possible for a person to be in it.
I think you mean Black Knight from the Wiki article.
"Black Buck" was the ultra long range RAF bombing raid on the Falklands from Ascension Island in 1982.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck
The Voayager program is slated to be terminated by NASA because it costs $4.2 million a year (I am not sure why). Since it cruised Neptune 16 years ago, there has only been one data point of interest- the end of the Sun's influence. This region could be as wide as ten years of travel.
The Nasa Near Earth Object site includes this unit in their online data since newspapers used to freak out on a regular basis when they were using only decimal AU for distance measurements. A lunar distance = about 384 kilometers and 1 au = 150 million kilometers.
Thus typical distances can be rendered in LD
Current Voyager 1 & 2 Data
With apologies for rounding errors
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
NASA is sugar coating this for us. They don't want to admit that the "shock" was actually Voyager bouncing off the inside of the glass bowl that is our universe. They even buried the photograps Voyager sent back of the big alien child's eye looking in from outside the bowl.
Bastards. Just admit that we're pawns in a friggin' alien aquarium. So the anarchy can begin.
IronChefMorimoto
Damn, on the days I have mod points I don't need 'em, and on the days I do I don't, erm...
Yes. Don't buy your tinfoil from Nationals. It actually enhances the reception for the government mind control satilites.
Please...
Does any one know wha type of power source this thing contains. I know Cassini has a small reactor on board and is expected to last a very long time on that strength.
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
"Creating an object that can travel out of the Solar System is HUGE" What is so HUGE about it ? I'm pretty sure you can do the same easily from the shuttle or the ISS. Just walk outside and throw some object in the right direction.
LOL! You fail physics 101.
It takes *a lot* of additional velocity to escape earth orbit. If you throw a rock, or even fire a high-powered rifle from the ISS, the bullet will still be in orbit around the Earth. Once you do actually escape earth orbit guess what, now you're in orbit around the sun. and then it take a hell of a lot of additional velocity to escape solar orbit.
stfu about things you don't understand moron.
National in a banks name means that it holds a federal charter (rather than a state charter), they aren't government run, but are federally approved.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Hold on a second. What are scientists doing in Louisiana?
What's sad is that NASA is pulling the plug on Voyager, even though it only just now entered interstellar space and we know nothing about this region. For once slashdot humor is close to the reality...
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Those things are still out there and going strong. They really knew how to build them back then.
Well Done!
"We are now an interstellar species."
Not really. Thats a bit like calling an ape who chucks a stone into the sea aquatic.
<HUMOR>
I'm not sure I'd make fun of North Dakota. I believe that if it was an independent country, they'd have something like the fifth largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
</HUMOR>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I've seen SS described as an insurance scheme, and that makes a lot of sense to me. Workers pay into the system, a sort of premium, so that if they become elderly or disabled or whatnot, it provides them with a minimum standard of living. Not particularly spectactular, but a damned sight better than having children simply to provide an inexpensive alternative to turkey at Christmastime.
The point of SS---and, really, of the straight-up welfare programs---is to provide a minimum standard of living for the poor, so they don't become an impoverished, revolutionary mass with nothing to lose and go starting revolutions. Social security and more traditional welfare programs share that same goal.
So the original poster should have thrown it all under 'social spending', and now you're just being pedantic. So there.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Stupid HTML filters. dV/dr = 4 (pi) r^2.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Wrong.
p hp
The FY2006 U.S. Military budget is projected to be 419.3 billion according to:
http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/archives/001203.
Being 120 billion LESS than the Social Security Ponzi Scheme, it is hardly "more than every other program combined"
"Give your space laser off me, you damn dirty apes!"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't think it is we who are the new interstellar species. It would be the microbes on Voyager. I mean the ones they did not exterminate before lift off.
Those beautiful NASA animations look a lot like Celestia. We paid to make them - where are the downloadable models?
--
make install -not war
Lack of sound (or echo) for that matter is very disorienting to any hearing/seeing human.
In order to provid more input, your onboard computer would provide feed back of enemey locations via a simulation of their engines in a surround sound system so you could instantly tell that the pilot is behind and to the left of you. Of course you could see that on your radar but you happen to be looking at the other pilot in your targets at the same time.
I guess it would be good for multitasking.
However I would disagree with the concept of fighter pilots in space.
In reality I forsee a great comback of large bulky ships with line of site weapons and banks of AI missles.
Truth be told space battles will be fought at ranges of millions of miles in between ships with little chance closing in on each other.
Pilots with small ships will be just targeted with intense laser fire by computers that can caculate your velocity vs the speed of light and destroy you as such and the person next to you in less than a millisecond.
I think intersteller warfare will be just lengthy and boring the more I think about it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
you seem to assume that defense technology and tactics will not advance with offensive tactics and technology.
Big Bulky ships are Big Bulky Targets.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not that I don't enjoy a good hair-splitting now and then, but the "Government sponsored supported and controlled" part pretty much sums up the argument, don't you think?
Spaceship One and the like are civilian projects. NASA is...something else.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
blame it on caffeine deficiency syndrome
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've always wondered how we get these pictures of the milky way. Anybody have a clue?
No, Spaceship One and the like are Private Commercial projects. NASA is governmental civilian. And the Various weapon programs(SR-71, B-1, B-2, F(B)-117) are Military.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
"Man apparently sent out some form of probe that gave full directions to the place... "
and
"The probe and the pictures were on a metal that was rare everywhere and worth a clanking fortune. And Intergalactic paid the Psychlo governors sixty trillion Galactic credits for the directions and the concession. One gas barrage and we were in business."
Maybe these probes aren't the best idea guys...
Frylock: "We should have cloned twenties, Jackson wouldn't have given a fuck."
Right, but in space you have an almost unlimited range of detection and line of sight. On earth even at sea you are limited ballistic weapons or missles because the sea and earth make good camoflauge.
The reason why aircraft carriers work so well is because they project military force quickly over the horizon.
In space there is no horizon. In fact you can pretty much project power as far as your missles, velocity weapons, and super-laser's can project.
The question is: Can your pilots move mentally and physically faster than a machine can adapt to track them.
Remember a machine can move faster than what a human body can tolerate in changes in velocity (in real life pilots can't out manover heat seeking missles they can only fire their chaff) and do you think a human can outmanuver a laser? Remember you might not even be able to see but they can track you from a million miles away and make a guestimate of where you will be to get that laser to hit you even though it's going ot take 8 minutes to do so.
That or hit everyone with a mine field of a chain a atomic bombs.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Maybe you should take a look at what science thought about the deep ocean before people actually put down dredges and started pulling stuff up. It, too, was supposed to be completely empty and dull -- almost beneath studying. Take a look at hydrothermal vent communities, and tell me that at least two different ways of life that don't involve photosynthesis are dull. People turned out to be very wrong about that, and they found that out when they looked.
Paraphrasing Montaigne: Ignorance and incuriosity are soft pillows, but only for the hard-headed.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Now how long will it take for the letters OYA to be lost from the name plate, and for the probe to become sentient
LOL, At least that film has one of the best film scores ever composed by the legendary, late Jerry Goldsmith to break up the tedium of all the F/X shots. Added to that, the film is the only one to justly deserve the 'Motion Picture' subtitle -- the other (currently) nine other films in the series play out like 2-hour episodes from their respective TV series of varying quality I.E.
The even numbered films are good.
The odd numbered films are bad.
You need less than 9km/s deltaV, starting from the ISS. Rather less than you need to get to the ISS in the first place.
It wouldn't be all that big a deal to have a Shuttle carry a rocket up that could manage a solar escape orbit directly. 25T payload in the shuttle means that you could toss something massing 3T to escape orbit with little difficulty.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
That was bought and paid for in the 1970s. The only thing that needs funding now is the ground monitoring. Voyager will continue on regardless of whether we pay someone to hear it.
Maybe the Chinese can invest some of their dollar denominated debt in their space program. Despite all the lip service, I don't expect the Repubicans to fund major satellite exploration.
We are the 198 proof..
...how many here still haven't gotten through the termination shock of Star Trek Voyager?
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
I sure hope NASA won't ax this project due to budget cuts. Even though Voyager I and II were never meant to go this far and have no specific tools for exploring this part of space, some science can still be gained by monitoring trajectory and velocity. For mankind to even get this far again it will take 30 to 40 years.
That's just to escape from Earth's gravity. You need considerably more to escape the Sun's gravity.
applaud for something that happened 6 months ago.
A million miles @ 186,000 miles/sec = 5.3 seconds, not 8 minutes. You're dead.
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
Earth escape speed from the ISS is barely more than 3km/s.
Solar escape speed in our vicinity is around 42Km/s. And the Earth is moving at nearly 30Km/s, thus reducing the required deltaV to ~12Km/s.
In order to have a terminal speed of 12Km/s relative to Earth, you need to leave Earth with a speed of ~16Km/s. Starting from the ground, you'd need that much deltaV, but starting from orbit (where you have an initial speed of ~7.8Km/s, you only need about 9Km/s (closer to 8750m/s, but 9Km/s will work quite nicely.
9 km/s deltaV will leave you with a terminal speed (once you have "left" the Solar gravity well - that is, you're an infinite distance from the Sun) of about 5Km/s relative to the Sun. Which won't get you anywhere very fast, but will make sure you don't come back here till you've orbitted the Galaxy a time or two.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Ok, I goofed on the math and should have known better. I had looked up these numbers, but forgot that things in orbit are moving at most of that velocity already.
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey's on the moon.
I can't pay no doctor bills but Whitey's on the moon.
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still while Whitey's on the moon.
The man just upped my rent last night cuz Whitey's on the moon.
No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey's on the moon.
I wonder why he's uppin me. Cuz Whitey's on the moon?
I was already givin' him fifty a week but now Whitey's on the moon.
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
The junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
And as if all that shit wasn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell but Whitey's on the moon.
Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon?
How come there ain't no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.
Ya know, I just about had my fill of Whitey on the moon.
I think I'll send these doctor bills
airmail special....
to Whitey on the moon.
Gil-Scott Heron, 1972