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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).
V'ger was the (fictional) Voyager 6, not Voyager 1 or 2. Of course, the probe the Klingons used for target practice in Star Trek V was Pioneer 10, so the OP isn't really accurate either unless I'm missing a Voyager reference in some other Star Trek.
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..."
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.
It's not millions of miles per gallons. Launching costs quite a bit of fuel:
m l :)
"Voyager's fuel efficiency (in terms of mpg) is quite impressive. Even though most of the launch vehicle's 700 ton weight is due to rocket fuel, Voyager 2's great travel distance of 7.1 billion km (4.4 billion mi) from launch to Neptune results in a fuel economy of about 13,000 km per liter (30,000 mi per gallon). As Voyager 2 streaks by Neptune and coasts out of the solar system, this economy will get better and better!"
From the page I also mentioned in an earlier reply to this news item:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/didyouknow.ht
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.
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...
Actually the rovers do have some nuclear elements in them. They have a couple of nuclear decay heaters which put out a watt or two to help keep the electronics compartment warm. Since they work off decay, they are always on.
But not for power generation. The solar cells have been a big success, now it is just a matter of how long the wheels and outside wiring will last. And some of the electronics have radiation sources for operation which decay too (but can be compensated for).
-Matt
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"