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."

Comments

Re:Can we still ping it?

[andrewman327]

I don't know where you are getting your data, but it takes substancially longer than 29 minutes! From NASA:

So how far are the Voyager spacecraft from Earth? The answer could take the form of miles or kilometers...billions of miles or kilometers. To put this large distance into a different prospective, as of January 5, 2004, a command signal sent from one of the DSN antennas, traveling at the speed of light towards Voyager-1, takes about 12 hours and 39 minutes, to reach Voyager-1's receiver. Compare this to sending a signal to Mars, a command going to the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, in orbit around Mars would only take about 15 minutes.

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!

Re:Can we still ping it?

[Abcd1234]

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.

Re:Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators

[Waffle Iron]

well...the "Fear" of anything nuclear (it's funny how all those environmentalists bitch and moan about a few kilograms of uranium when many tons of it was released into the atmosphere due to coal power plants

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.

Re:Can we still ping it?

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

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.