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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!
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
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.
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.