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Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary
Raver32 writes to mention that 30 years after the original launch of Voyager 2, both Voyager spacecraft are still going strong. Flying away from us some billions of miles from our solar system's edge they continue to be a wealth of information more than 25 years after their original mission concluded. Voyager 1 currently is the farthest human-made object at a distance from the sun of about 9.7 billion miles (15.6 billion kilometers). Voyager 2 is about 7.8 billion miles (12.6 billion kilometers).
Just wait until the Klingons find them.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Only 268 or so years left until Voyager comes back. Well, I'm not sure which one it is, but one of them is coming back. But we've got some time to deal with the carbon lifeform infestation ...
A little off-topic and out of left field, but it's too bad these probes are three-axis stabilized, which means they cannot help us figure out exactly what is going on with the Pioneer anomaly. The anomaly even featured as an Unsolved Problem of Physics on Wikipedia.
Invite Fats Domino, the Mars rovers, and the Energizer Bunny to the Party!
Table-ized A.I.
I take it they haven't reached the edge of the Matrix yet?
I remember there was supposed to be some unknown force slowing one of them down near the edge at least
but I always figured it was just a floating point error, the same sort of thing you get in secondlife when going too high
Spock: Mentally, V'ger is a child...
'Bones': Spock, this "child" is about to wipe out every living thing on Earth. Now, what do you suggest we do? Spank it?
Spock: It knows only that it needs, Commander. But, like so many of us... it does not know what.
"SEND MORE CHUCK BERRY"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
We need Probes!!! Thousands of Probes, streaking across the cosmos, searching, observing, huge "shelf life". Manned space flight is nothing but an election day promise. Our standard mode of operation should be automated probes. It's cheaper, easier, and doesn't bring the whole process to a screeching halt when something blows up.
To the guy that said, "No, it wouldn't be cool to send the probes hurtling into the sun after their mission is complete." Sometimes, the party-poopers are the wisest of us all.
<Complete your profile by adding a signature!>
will Janeway give the crew the day off?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Both Voyager I & II are amazing pieces of technology. Still giving us valuable information about the universe in which we live. So, kudos NASA but particularly to the development and current project teams at JPL.
crazy dynamite monkey
...(about 2 hours and 53 minutes later) PONG! To put that into perspective, that's about how long it would take to ping Voyager 1 wirelessly. Before you factor in the slashdot effect.
we had pretty good good German rocket scientists in those days. but once they all died or retired, it was down hill for NASA.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
...it's time we send out some more.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Wwe have a very long way go to even send a probe to another star. After three decades, the farthest man made object from our little hunk of rock is less that 2 tenths of a percent of a light year away.
The Voyagers belong somewhere in the top of the list with the most amazing machines ever developed by humans.
m ll ;)
Every time I see the "Interesting Facts about the Voyager Mission" page [1] and "Fast Facts" page [2] at NASA's JPL, I am just amazed that this was achieved with technology from the early '70s!
I often find myself wishing that I was born earlier and that I was part of the team of man and women who pushed so many of our frontiers so much further then ever before.
*raises glass*
To the Voyagers! [3]
[1] http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/didyouknow.ht
[2] http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/fastfacts.htm
[3] Voyager 1 will celebrate it's 30th anniversary on september 5th, so let's celebrate both achievements
I wonder how many million miles per gallon of propellant these machines have gotten? Damn impressive engineering.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
our government, the better everything works...robots...farmers....technology...
Sigh. Generally, if you have to use a really big number to describe something, you're not using the right units. In this case, Voyager I is approximately 104.28 astronomical units from the Sun. In comparison, Pluto is about 39.5 to 49.3 AU from the Sun. Light takes about 14 days to get from Earth to the spacecraft. One day we might go out to the Solar Foci (around 550 AU) to use the Sun as a gravitational lens to image distant galaxies or the surface of exo-solar planets.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The furthest probe is about 1 billion miles from the 'edge' of the solar system (the heliosheath 8.7 billion miles from the sun). The second probe is still well short of that.
Not quite the "billions of miles from our solar system's edge" that the summary states.
Just nitpicking.
Ah, the good old misplaced decimal point. We've lost some of our best space probes that way....
:-P
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The distance actually can be measured in light hours and I'll probably live to see it go into a light day distant and some on the forum may see it hit two light days, young teens with long lives. Puts interstellar travel into perspective.
and isn't it curious how we can still find ways to play Edison cylinders, decode stone heiroglyphs, communicate at the edge of the solar wind with a handful of transistors ruggedized and wired in very conservative circuits...
and we can't find a drive to read a 5-1/4 inch floppy in? can't play a Betamax tape?
good enough is good enough, you don't have to spend a billion on a whole new infrastructure to get one project done.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
A couple of years ago we talked about portable electric power on the coffee-break at work and I mentioned that Voyager had some kind of nuclear powered source for electricity (corret term turned out ot be Radioisotope thermoelectric generator, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoel ectric_generator.
A reasonably intelligent guy turns to me and says "But you know that Voyager is all fictional?". He had no clue about the Voyager program and only thought of Star Trek Voyager...
It would be nice to see a president push the idea of having a voyager III. By using a powerful rocket (spacex's BFR or ares V) combined with electric engines AND nuclear power, it might be possible to get quite a bit further in a short time. I was thinking that while we need nukes for this, an ion engine would allow for some major speed to be built up. In addition, at this time, we would probably have a new array of instruments to put on there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"We have thousands of probe droids searching the galaxy. I want proof, not leads!"
15.6 billion kilometers is so hard to conceptualize. If only we had some measure of distance to give proper context; some sort of scale relative to the distance from the earth to another significant celestial body. A unit of measure large enough for "astronomical" purposes. Then we could say the probe is, oh, I don't know.. let's just pick a number and say the probe is 104 of these units away, instead of billions of kilometers. If only...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
'Scuse my ignorance but I thought Pioneer 10 was farthest away. Weren't the Pioneers launched launched before the Voyagers?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
"The Voyagers belong somewhere in the top of the list with the most amazing machines ever developed by humans."
Right next to the vibrator.
"I often find myself wishing that I was born earlier and that I was part of the team of man and women who pushed so many of our frontiers so much further then ever before."
Hope you enjoy slide-rules?
"*raises glass*"
Don't we have enough drunks in the space program?
I think theres Another contender for that title...
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
She didn't seem to be composed of that much Silicon. We'll have to ask Captain Janeway.
The ST-Voyager cycle is now complete we can drop it.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Well if I punched that correctly into Google, that's still only 1/1000 of a light year (0.00165008086 light years). Hopefully someday we find a faster method of travel.
t =firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aoff icial&hs=ZMa&q=9%2C700%2C000%2C000+mile+to+light+y ear&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&clien
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
about the record containing (among other things) directions to Earth. I don't guess it reads something like..."Take a left at the Crab Nebulae, and go about 2,000 light years...."
Can anyone elaborate weather or not Voyager one on two have sufficient velocity to escape the heliopause let alone the oort cloud. I would venture to guess they don't. However, their longevity is a testament to 70's electronics. If these were made with components of today, they probably would of failed decades ago.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I read that as barrio puta, ie, "neighborhood slut".
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Mr Dawkins made a statement that our society is increasing belief in superstitions, even as we make progress in science and technology. I can't help be reminded of this with the Voyager aniversary as news programs focus on the Golden Record and Chuck Berry. Sure, at first I thought it was fun, but then reality sets in when I witness so many people that fully believe aliens and or angels are watching us, and just waiting for us to contact them.
I'm sure at the time the record might of seemed harmless, except for the outcry over the naked images of a man and woman (for the sake of the children I'm sure), but today it feels like that small acquiencence was simply a foothold for drawing an ever growing shadow over... reason.
Nuclear Power ROCKS! Especially in space. Why are all the crazy people worried about what happens there? They work off the heat generated due to decay, not like a ground-based power plant. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950 DE0DD123CF935A1575BC0A96F948260 Imagine what we'd know if both mars rovers had nuclear power in addition to solar? How much longer could we expect data? 20 years? 30 years?
Does this thing have any navigation on it or anything to keep from splatting into stuff?
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Metric and English units were much simpler then. http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric. 02/
I was Mission Planning Engineer on Voyager 2, after the Saturn flyby, and in preparation for the Uranus flyby.
I mentioned this on emails that I sent to my friends today. I also mentioned it on an email that I sent to the principal of Balir IB Magnet High School in Pasadena, where in summer school earlier this month I gave a final exam question based on my Voyager 2 experience.
59. Uranus (19.6 AU from the sun), at 14 Earth masses,
is the lightest of the outer planets. Uniquely among
the planets, it orbits the Sun on its side; its axial
tilt is over ninety degrees to the ecliptic. It has a
much colder core than the other gas giants, and
radiates very little heat into space. Uranus has
twenty-seven known satellites), the largest ones being
Titania, Oberon, Umbriel, Ariel and Miranda.
I was the Mission Planning Engineer responsible
for designing how many photographs the Voyager 2
spacecraft took of Miranda, as it flew past Uranus and
its moons.
If we estimate the length of time it takes light
to travel from the Sun to the Earth as 8 minutes, how
long does it take for light to travel from the Sun to
Uranus?
I saw the Principal today. He's awaiting enrollment numbers from the school district, to determine if he'll have the budget to hire me full time as of Labor Day. If not, a rival high school's acting principal wants me immediately to teach Physics.
-- Prof. Jonathan Vos Post
and beginning my senior year of high school when those were launched. For those of you too young..........we had PONG and THAT was it! No cell phone, no internet, no video games. Telephones had these things called rotary dials. You couldn't call someone in another city, sometimes, without going through the operator. There were only THREE kinds of gasoline. Leaded (for the older cars), diesel, & unleaded. We didn't have the 5-6 types of unleaded, JUST ONE. Cars costs an average of 5-8 thousand dollars BRAND NEW. Of course, they fell apart, looked like boxes, and were noisy. For music, there were a couple of FM radio stations, most cars had AM, some had FM, and if it was REALLY fancy, it had (get this) an 8 TRACK TAPE player. Oh, we walked up hill 10 miles to school in the snow every day...both ways....LOL
FTFA:
"The records also have directions on how to find Earth if the spacecraft is recovered by something or someone."
I hope they don't show up any time soon - the way we're running things into the ground here on earth, it would be like getting hit by a bus without wearing clean underwear.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Realize that we live in a world where the first question asked is "How can we profit from it?" Back in the 60s, the reason to send probes into space was, amongst others, mostly to test the delivery technology for nukes. In fact, it often seems that the whole space programs of both sides was more or less a byproduct of that missle arms race. One could almost assume that Voyager and Pioneer just came into existance because their carrier rockets needed a test that didn't look like they're testing nuke delivery systems.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you had $4.2 million a year to find floppy drives and Betamax players, you wouldn't have any trouble at all.
The title here is about the 30th anniversy of the voyager. Therefor with VERY trivial math, you will see that they launched in 77 (in fact, 2 launched today, in 1977). It flew on the Titan III which was created in 1965, and was actively being used for 12 longs years for a number of sats as well as formed the core of our nukes. IOW, this had NOTHING to do with launching nukes (other than that the titan system allowed NASA to have cheap rockets). No tests were needed. This was a pure NASA mission to find out about what is out there. Keep in mind, that the voyagers showed us our first looks of a number of planets and produced a large amount of firsts.
If we send out a new voyager (or more), they would be designed with all new instrumentations AND propulsion. In fact, it would be useful to have the system hit a couple of planets and perhaps drop off some sub sats to explore these planets, while the new voyager uses the planets for a swing shot.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...when one of the "upcoming events" that was in FidoNet's FidoNews was "August 24 1989: Voyager 2 passes Neptune." Scary to think it was that long ago - it seems like only yesterday.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
"Do we really need figureheads that direly?"
Yup.
And the amazing thing was that Voyager was not initially supposed to go to Uranus or Neptune
IIRC, there were 2 issues that were against the outer gas giants. First, Voyager had to pass thru the inner ring gap of Saturn. Second, it would have reduced Titan photos. But Pioneer 11 tested the right path and found it safe; and second, Titan appeared to not show much photo detail for Voyager 2 (Cassinni has a special-built filter), so they decided to go ahead with the outer planet plans.
Table-ized A.I.
That's 0.00164895652 light years
Re: Titan appeared to not show much photo detail for Voyager 2
Correction: Should be Voyager 1, not 2. Titan was so bland (for existing equip.) for the pass of Voyager 1, that they decided that closer photos would be of little value from Voyager 2.
Table-ized A.I.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclea r_propulsion)
Supposedly, without the environmentalist wussies crying about any kind of progress, we could be travelling to other planets.. and even other stars.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I remember a short story from the 80s or 90s, in Asimov's Science Fiction (or Analog?), about just that.
The first manned mission to another star featured deep sleep, and they were woken up by some flashing thing; it stopped, so they went back to sleep.
When they arrived at the star, they were greeted by "humans" but were told that they smelled really funny, and they found that they were not "with it", couldn't keep up with the people they were talking to.
Turns out the flashing was another craft launched from earth with a higher velocity, overtaking them, so that when they finally arrived at the star system/planet they intended, the second craft had already been there for several hundred years.
Really neat story, showing the difference in "time travel".
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
And then you'd have those relativity and astrophysicists wussies getting in the way. What's a nu-clear nut suppose to do?
None of these will be the first of human systems to reach another star system. They are (and will) far too slow. As it is, we now have the ability to create a craft that can actually beat these sats. out of our solar systems. But these voyagers enabled a whole new generation of explorations to other planets, with a decent set of instruments to each. More importantly, these have shown us what we need to look at even as we head out of the solar system. If we continue the voyagers, it will undoubtedly have a new set of instruments and a design that perhaps allows a slow shutdown of systems. It would be nice to see a system that leaves earth and as it does it swingby of larger planets, that it drop off smaller satellites to study them again. But again, by the time that this system is slowing down on gathering infomation, a new system would no doubt come along and surpass it. At least, lets hope it would.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, 15.6 billion km are approx. 14.5 light hours.
.04 % of the distance. Well, 76000 years more to go, Voyager!
Hmmm, well, the next star (Proxima Centauri) is 4.24 light years away, so Voyager travelled around
> ...when one of the "upcoming events" that was in FidoNet's FidoNews was "August 24 1989: Voyager 2 passes Neptune." Scary to think it was that long ago - it seems like only yesterday.
:-)
:-(
I match that and raise you 12 years: I remember as a kid watching some of the TV hype *before* the launch
(I also remember watching live the launch of Apollo 11, but we were on a (TV free) holiday and missed seeing the landing
CmdrTaco getting in touch with his Latin inner child? Barrapunto is poised to become the new Soviet Rusia!
I, for one, welcome our new Barrapunto trolling overlords!
Speaking of Voyager, anyone who hasn't heard it should check out Blind Willie Johnson's recording of "Dark was the Night", which was one of the sound recordings put on board the Voyager.
In my estimation, it is one of the least heard and best treasures of American music.
Imagine that a song composed a man, blinded by his own mother and completely racially unaccepted at the time, hurtles through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. We might not have respected him while he was alive, but just maybe this is a fitting tribute.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
they take way to long to get there
...far more if you want to to slow down when it gets there
require way too much energy to go there "fast"...
and finally, if we did launch one, 30 years later we would come up with something faster that would actually pass the first one launched. 30 years after that the same thing would happen.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
and Anal, Nerdy and Living in Mom's Basement.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Voyager 1 is now about 14.4 light hours away. (That's ~0.0016 light years.)
At this rate, Voyager 1 will have traveled a whole 1 ly by the year 20150 AD (give or take a few decades; and, yeah, that's supposed to be five digits).
Voyager is fantastic, but I wish we would put our efforts towards even better deep space probes. Something traveling 100 to 1000 times as fast, with a much more powerful radioactive power source, could provide us with amazing data and views from deep space.
If we could invent something really fast, we could point it towards Proxima Centauri and eventually get some fly-by photos and data.
I know this is not easy, but there are ideas on how to do this that are worth exploring, and yet I don't think much serious effort is being made.