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Voyager 1 Sends Messages from the Edge
dalmozian writes "NASA's Latest News about the Voyager 1 is being run on Sci-Tech. The Voyager has passed into the border region at the edge of the solar system and now is sending back information about this never-before-explored area, say scientists at the University of Maryland. From the article: 'Voyager 1 and its twin spacecraft Voyager 2 are now part of a NASA Interstellar Mission to explore the outermost edge of the sun's domain and beyond. Both Voyagers are capable of returning scientific data from a full range of instruments, with adequate electrical power and attitude control propellant to keep operating until 2020.'" The proof of crossing the termination shock was covered earlier this year but now we can see the actual data.
As mentioned on Slashdot in April of this year, NASA is planning to terminate funding to the Voyager programs. SpaceDaily has an article from earlier this year that says that funding is not available for the seven older missions (Voyager, Ulysses, Polar, Wind, Geotail, FAST and TRACE) beyond the end of NASA's fiscal year, which ends in October. Given the fact that Voyager only costs $4.1M a year, hopefully someone will realize that it's not really an effective cost saving measure before they pull the plug!
Let me be the first to say, that is some excellent information, and is far more informative than the original story. Please wrangle Slashdot into posting a story if you hear any more.
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Not to hijak the thread too much, but what "mystery of the pyramids"? People built the largest stone structures they could using the most stable shape they could find. Where's the mystery? And it's not even like they got them right the first time. They had at least one pyramid colapse because the angle was too steep, hence the resulting "bent pyramid" where they changed angles half-way up. And they started with a much simpler design of a series of stepped platforms on top of each other. It's not that hard to think that an engineer looked at that and thought "Hey! I bet we could add sloped sides to that and it would look really cool!" and acted on it.
The only "mystery" is people being unwilling to understand the sheer number of men it took to build them. No one questions how the Great Wall of China was built, and it is a much more impressive engineering feat than the pyramids.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I'm not a scientist, and it seems weird to me that they would stop spending money on something that still works and gone someplace nothing else has. It just seems wasteful. And it's not like they can justify it by saying they'll have a replacement there tomorrow, either, since they won't.
:15 on the evening news, it's "not viable." Yay. Another triumph of modern civilization.
I also thought it was weird that they had to authorize more spending when the rovers were still working past their estimated useful life. You've got a remote control car on fucking Mars that still works and somebody wants to just switch it off? It reminds me of rich kids who throw out good toys simply because they're bored with them.
I guess the space program has become just like any other corporate entity -- if it can't show glossy, short-term results that look good in
Well, I can point you to the rapporteur talk when it goes up, but unfortunately, the conference was very poorly organized (it was in Pune, India - right by Mumbai, one day after the flooding - so that might explain some of it, although Pune wasn't really hit hard) and so I have no idea when it'll be up.
Also, a lot of it is very technical - although really, it's just demonstrating that we don't understand how wimpy shocks work, much less strong shocks. The anomalous cosmic rays were a good example of "who ordered these?!"
Ya gotta understand how government works. It's not that someone was actively trying to get these projects defunded - it's just that there was no money allocated for that, since no one anticipated they'd still be working. And since all government work has to be charged to specific accounts, someone would have had to redo that, or else the project would have had no way to spend any money.
In other words, this is a matter of bureaucracy, not malignance.
Where is that "+1 Funny-to-some-but- may-induce-vomiting- in-others" moderation I've always wanted?
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
The point is called 'budgeting'.
;-)
You make an educated (hopefully) guess as to how long your 'rover on fscking Mars' will be operating.
You figure how much it costs to run the rover and it's support systems for that time.
You (hopefully) add in a percentage increase in case it runs longer.
However, you don't budget double or more of educated guess on duration, just not realistic. So after the expected time frame the money is being used somewhere else and you need to apply for a reallocation to continue the misson.
Now throw politics into the equation and well, good luck
I'm definitely in the 'this is priceless data' camp and would continue funding this over almost anything, but it's just a realization that things are finite and need to be weigh against other choices.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I was not involved in the decision to cancel funding for Voyager, but I have had some involvement in the process that NASA uses to review missions and decide which spacecraft operations to keep funding. I'm relatively low on the totem pole, so don't blame me if you don't like the funding decisions NASA makes. I don't always like them either!
I suspect that some of the issues considered were the numbers of new publications from Voyager data compared to the more recent missions, the status of Voyager's instruments, and the ability of our ground stations to pick up signals from the spacecraft. These issues come up with any older NASA mission and are not unique to Voyager.
I agree that the data from Voyager about the termination shock are important - this was one of the reasons why funding to operate Voyager has continued as long as it has. However, there aren't really a whole lot of data from the termination shock, so a relatively small group of people are studying this data. This means a lower science return for the money spent, at least in terms of the numbers of papers published using new Voyager data. Some of the more recent unmanned spacecraft are also in danger of being cut, and there are still hundreds of scientists around the world working on data from these missions.
While it is true that Voyager is providing a unique data set, the data from this spacecraft are from older instruments that may not be running at their optimal capacity. We have missions with newer, far superior instruments studying other regions of our solar system right now. So which does NASA choose to keep operating - the older spacecraft with limited capabilities, or the newer missions with greater potential for science? When you look at it this way, it doesn't seem quite so bad to cut funding for Voyager, even though the recent discoveries from Voyager have been very newsworthy.
One of the other posts claimed that the termination shock is the only astrophysical shock we can study so we need to keep funding Voyager. It isn't entirely true that the termination shock between our heliosphere and the interstellar wind is the ONLY astrophysical shock we can study. A shock in a space plasma is a shock no matter where it is, and they all are pretty similar. The same physical processes happen in coronal mass ejections from the Sun, at the Earth's bow shock, at the bow shocks of Saturn and Jupiter, and near the heliosphere's termination shock. The main differences between these shocks are the magnetic field strengths and the scale sizes of the shocks. Other than that, the physics is pretty much the same. So NASA has to make a choice - spend the money to support research on all of these other things, or spend it to keep an aging spacecraft going to study just one region of space.
Don't get me wrong - I'm sad to see the Voyager mission winding down. It
would be great to see more discoveries from beyond the boundaries of our solar system. Unfortunately, we can't keep Voyager going forever. We just have to leave some discoveries for future generations.
I suspect that reversing a small fraction of the recent tax cuts for the wealthy could fund Voyager for a long, long time. Or heck, cancel the Alaska "Bridge to Nowhere". This isn't a matter of "we can't", it's a matter of "we choose not to".
To expand on this, a guy named Robert Graham has written a couple of books on the subject. He IS a crackpot with some of his theories, but, they are all based upon the pyramids being 10,000 years old and the evidence which supports this. He also mentions many of the structures in South America, interesting stories which have been passed down, etc.
Personally, I think some of these guys that preach the 10000 year age of the pyramids are crackpots due to some of the other stuff they believe. However, their evidence is quite interesting, and it's much more evidence than the Egyptologists have. The bulk of the egyptologists evidence is writing on the walls inside the pyramids, the bulk of the 10,000 year evidence is geological and also references how the pyramids are laid out according to certain constellations and only matched up in 8000 something BC.
The egyptologists are very set in what they believe and are unwilling to even consider they might have been wrong about some things.
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No. We live in a democratic society that has decided that some taxation is required in order to fund the public good. We can argue about what constitutes this public good, but we have agreed as a society that you can indeed require that all citizens pay a certain amount to a central authority. If you disagree with this, write your congress-critter, move somewhere else, or be prepared to be indicted. However, I don't think it's bitter to consider "giant space toys" a more significant use of our money than funding another failing airline, bailing out investors from a criminal corporation, or giving tax-breaks to gas companies after they've posted record profits.
No, you have to show that it matters before you disrupt the capitalistic process
The poster was suggesting that the long-term 'investment' of space-exploration would reap great future benefits and would therefore be in line with the 'capitalistic' process. It's an investment stupid, a large-scale R&D project funded by the government because no corporation would be able or willing to fund such an endeavor. And why? Because companies can be short-sighted, stock-happy idiots who can't see beyond the next five quarters, much less the next five years.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Well, I'm going to defend my self.
I'm also that that $4.5M doesn't just go on the cost of a radio telescope to pick up signals from Voyager and that the path of Voyager is not going to change by NASA intervention.
I'm also assuming that Voyager is important to more than just the US (I'm certainly interested in it), so if the US doesn't want to pay for voyager anymore why don't they open it up to the rest of the world.
Now that's a lot of assumptions but I think there more-or-less correct, and if so then it is possible to have various contries all chipping in there little bit, say two contries split the task of recovering data, a nother couple split the task of processing the data etc.... A lot of scientific studdies work that way at the moment, just look at the Human genome project.
That's the way open sources works, by distributing the load though openness.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
INTERSTELLAR. Just think about that for a minute. Ya sure, it would take a zillion years for them to actually get anywhere, but that's not the point. The Voyager probes have left the solar system and at last we have a physical presence outside of our own comfortable, little corner of the universe. It's pretty easy to take for granted, what with our volumes of inter-galactic sci-fi and Hollywood, but for once art actually mirrors reality and it blows me away, for one. This isn't meant to be a troll, but after seeing the first twenty posts joking about roaming charges and what not, it kinda saddened me that one of the first posts wasn't more reflective in nature. Oh well, that's just me.
There is simply too much glass..