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Voyager 1 Passes 100 AU from the Sun
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday, Voyager 1 passed 100 astronomical units from the sun as it continues operating after nearly 30 years in space. That is about 15 billion kilometers or 9.3 billion miles as it travels about 1 million miles per day. Scientists still hope it will find the edge of the solar system and get into interstellar space."
http://g-fav.blogspot.com/2006/07/hey-linguists-a
(and now I must wait 49 seconds to amend it, ferfuxsake. slowdowncowboyslowdowncowboyslowdowncowboy)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Considering the original expectations of the probe, we are getting amazing data! When launched, no one expected there to be any signal at all being transmitted after this long. This is a major feat of engineering.
Technology is interesting. It has taken 30 years to move a record this far into space. Compare that to an MP3, which can be streamed that same distance in only half a day!
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Umm... Read more fellow. They use Plutonium... They are radioactive and could be used to make at least a dirty bomb if not an outright fission device.
They uses some in the old Soviet Union at some remote sites but they used Strontium 90 which while it will still kill you can not be used to make fission devices.
Not something I would want in my basment but dang handy in space and maybe some remote applications like ocean monitoring or even antarctica.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Umm, if you read the article, you'll note that it's not that the Voyagers aren't subject to the anomaly, it's that it's too difficult to measure, since you'd have to cancel out the effect of the thruster use.
Space is VERY empty.
It's only slightly less non-empty when you're real close to a star or other big mass of stuff. Right now Voyager is the farthest from a star that any man-made object has ever reached, so the chances of it hitting into stuff are nearly zero.
But to answer your original question though, no, it doesn't have any kind of stuff-avoidance ability. Even if they had designed it to have that ability, by now it wouldn't have any power left to do that.
I respond to your sigs
Damned near everything is dead, and it's sending back only the most basic scientific information to conserve energy levels that are already well beyond their expected date of exhaustion.
Umm, no.
I read an article not long ago (that I can't be bothered to find again) stating that only a small percentage of its original devices of science have worked at all since the 80s.
The Scan platform was turned off in the early 21st century. That's when cameras were turned off to save power.
See http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/science/thirty.html and scroll to the end of the page.
VOYAGER 1
1998 DOY 316 - Reduction in Scan Platform power - preserve UVS and Elevation Actuator temperature (+11.0 W)
* WA Vidicon Heater OFF (+5.5 W)
* NA Vidicon Heater OFF (+5.5 W)
2002 - Terminate UVS operations - turn-off all Scan Platform loads (43.9 W). Date expected to change.
* WA Electronics Replacement Heater OFF (+10.5 W)
* IRIS Replacement Heater OFF (+7.8 W)
* NA Electonics Replacement Heater OFF (+10.5 W)
* Azimuth Actuator Supplemental Heater OFF (+3.5 W)
* UVS Power OFF (+2.4 W)
* UVS Replacement Heater OFF (+2.4 W)
* Azimuth Coil Heater OFF (+4.4 W)
* Scan platform slewing power OFF (+2.4 W)
So, until 2002, V1 was used for searching UV sources among the stars, among other things. However, that doesn't tell much, since most of the work is done with particle, plasma and wave detectors and those will be working well into the 2020's.
Too bad the CDP1802's architect, Joe Weisbecker, didn't live to see his microprocessor become the first in interstellar space. Coincidentally, this month also marks the 30th anniversary of his Popular Electronics article on the COSMAC ELF; Nuts and Volts magazine is covering it.
Technology has improved a great deal in the last thirty years. Unfortunately, some of the constraints on deep space exploration are physical, rather than engineering problems.
.0001 G over a matter of years). You get more milage per mass of fuel as you increase the exhaust velocity (the speed of the exhaust relative to the craft), but then you're up against power requirements - it takes more and more energy to accelerate the reaction mass to higher and higher speeds. That power has to come from somewhere, and any generator system will increase the overall mass of the spacecraft, decreasing the acceleration.
The limit with any engine, high or low thrust, is fuel. Essentially, any reaction drive that carries fuel with it will eventually run out (whether it's making ten Gs of acceleration over a few seconds, or
Combining an ion drive with, say, solar panels will work wonders in the inner solar system, since you're getting your power for free, and firing off your fuel in small quantities at extremely high speed. In the outer system though, solar power isn't an option and radiothermic generators (RTGs) like those used on voyager are heavy, at least relative to their power output. Most other power technology we have available today would add fuel and/or maintainance constraints. RTGs and solar panals are used for precisely those reasons - because they have neither signifigant fuel limitations nor many moving parts to break down.
Plus, the engines themselves will undoubtably have a limited working lifetime - extending that lifetime to operate for years or decades will involved increasing the mass of the engine, which kinda puts you back at square one.
Something like a light sail would work better (over long distances the lower thrust is offset by the lack of fuel requirements), but that's still more in the realm of science fiction. Nuclear drive technology could also fill the gap, but the political constraints involved in putting anything fission based in orbit are huge, and we won't have fusion for decades at least (longer, if you factor in the need for miniaturization).
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
You've just shown that you have no understanding of this issue. For example: your 145,000 tons of uranium is an isotope with a half-life of about 4 billion years. (The small amount of U235 has a half life of 700 million years, and doesn't change the overall total much.) Thorium is similar: it has a half-life of 14 billion years.
An RTG is filled with plutonium 238, which has a half life of 88 years, so it decays about 49 million times as fast as U238. So the total radioactivity of all that coal-based uranium is similar to that of 3 kilograms of Pu238, which is only enough fuel to provide a few kilowatts of RTG power. So it's no wonder environmentalists bitch and moan about a few kilograms of material: that few kilograms is about as radioactive as the total annual emissions of the entire coal industry.
So bottom line, to provide their electrical energy from RTGs, each household would need to manage an amount of radioactivity which is a significant fraction of the grand total emitted by all US coal burning plants. Coal plant heavy metal emissions are dangerous, but mainly because heavy metals are toxic chemicals, not because of radioactivity.
A more practical problem is the fact that Pu238 is outrageously hard to collect and there are only a few kilograms in existence worldwide. Other kinds of radioactive waste isn't generally hot enough to create a useful amount of work; otherwise, they would have left it in the reactor longer to generate more power.
Voyager has travelled a lot further than 100AU over the years. It's just that now it is 100AU away from the sun in terms of radial distance.
It still kept the tangential velocity...we just added radial velocity.
Think of it traveling in a spiral, while we're going in a circle. Eventually we end up far apart.
Yup. Light takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth from the Sun, and Voyager 1 is now out 100 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, so it's an 800 minute one-way trip, or 1600 minutes round trip.
To the best of my knowledge, friend, there is more than one definition of "edge".
There's the magnetopause, where the magnetic influence of other stars predominates that of our own... to my knowledge, both Vger's are beyond this point.
There's the heliopause, where the outward flow of solar gases finally doesn't have enough pressure to overcome whatever's coming its way... to my knowledge, neither Vger has hit this point yet.
And considering that both Vgers were both launched basically along the ecliptic, neither one is likely to be headed towards the closest heliographic star, which is in the Southern hemisphere (Terran, not ecliptical; but if something's never north of one, it's probably never north of the other.) Neither is the shape of either 'pause likely to be spherical; they would depend upon the distances, relative magnetic field strength, and relative gaseous flux of every star around us.
Finding these things out, in some small way, is one reason I'm very glad the Voyager spacecraft have lasted so long beyond their design dates.
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I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.