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).

Comments

Too bad...

[Kagura]

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.

IMHO

[StarfishOne]

The Voyagers belong somewhere in the top of the list with the most amazing machines ever developed by humans.

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.htm l
[2] http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/fastfacts.html
[3] Voyager 1 will celebrate it's 30th anniversary on september 5th, so let's celebrate both achievements ;)

The really amazing thing

[edwardpickman]

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.

technology from the 70s was quite good enough

[swschrad]

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.

Re:technology from the 70s was quite good enough

[jd]

Well, some hieroglyphs. There are a good few hundred languages from the days of writing on stone or in clay that cannot be deciphered and quite likely never will be. I find the study of ancient languages fascinating, as they were never intended to be DRMed - uhh, unreadable, but they have become so. At the present time, nobody has successfully used computers to assist in decoding such languages except in the limited sense of counting sign combinations. This seems like a superb application, but it is also an unsolved application. Nobody, nobody at all, knows how.

When it comes to old technologies, some things are superb and some things have proven a disaster. Floppies didn't start with the 5.25" - the 8" was older and is even less readable. Long before floppies, you had core memory. Good for 100+ years! But in less than half that time, I doubt there are many systems that could actually read the damn thing without wiping it. (Core was destructive on read, so you had to perform a write for every read into the correct address space.)

On ancient technology, more than one archaeological site has been utterly destroyed - partially or totally unmapped and unstudied - because some country or other wanted to build a dam. Water is important, sure, but you can collect water in any number of ways, and even if the dam is imperative, it'll take years to decades to build. Allowing scientists a few months to collect irreplaceable data isn't going to kill anyone or anything. Denying them does kill our chances of understanding the past. We only have one history, once it's gone, it's gone. It is, sadly, very easy to destroy and politicians have done much to destroy it.

Farthest Man Made Object? I duno....

[Tmack]

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).

I think theres Another contender for that title...

Tm

Re:Remarkable Spacecraft

[Iskender]

Let's not forget what makes these probes possible: nuclear power, more specifically RTGs. No, I'm not trying to glorify nuclear, but we simply don't have the technology to make something equally robust at anything approaching a reasonable price and launch weight. So for the moment, RTGs it is for outer solar system probes, and nuclear reactors should be given consideration if they make more valuable science possible (remember, the Russians already used some of those in space AND had them fail, so they won't be the end of us).

Re:Interstellar space

[m.dillon]

Its always possible to spec very reliable parts, as well as over-engineer equipment to handle degredation. It just costs a lot more for those sorts components verses the mass-produced junk you see in most consumer electronics. The market is there, its just a lot smaller.

There's still computing equipment out in the field going strong that I designed 20 years ago. They were 68000 based computers with dynamic ram, with everything overengineered by 2x (including running the cpu at 1/2 the clock frequency in production that it was tested at during burn-in, specing resistors for far more current then they were expected to handle, refreshing the ram at 2x the required rate, specing capacitors for almost 2x the voltage they were expected to handle, and throwing a dozen zeners all over the motherboard to protect all the regulated voltage busses). Virtually unbreakable. One even operated for over two weeks completely submerged when a station got flooded before corrosion shorted it out. Some scraping and A good washing in a washing machine (no heat), and after careful drying and replacing a fuse it was ready to go again!

-Matt

I was 17

[p51d007]

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

Re:I liked the part....

[TheRaven64]

It has so far travelled around 0.001 light years. At its current rate, it will have to travel for a at least sixty millennia before it's closer to any other start than ours (assuming one was launched in the direction of Proxima). It would have to go near another star and sling-shot off in a different direction before there could be any doubt as to which solar system launched it. Once you know that, you just need to pick the planet with all of the crap in orbit.

If we discover some form of faster than light (or even near-C) travel in the next 120 millennia, then we will get to the nearest stars long before it does. If we don't, then either we've wiped ourselves out or such a form of travel isn't possible at all (120,000 years is a really long time for technology; it only took 4,000 to go from horse taming to mobile phones and space shuttles). If we've wiped ourselves out without developing interstellar travel, then it will probably be tens of millions of years before the probe goes anywhere near an inhabited system (if it ever does), by which time there is unlikely much evidence that we ever inhabited this planet. In this case, it's quite possible that the probes to be our last memorial. I wonder if anyone will ever see them...