Slashdot Mirror
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).
The first post is a Star Trek reference, but NOT one about V'Ger? Your nerd license is hereby revoked, pwizard2, and may the gods have mercy on your soul.
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.
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.
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
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
But probes can't give inspirational speeches to auditoriums packed with High School students.
<Complete your profile by adding a signature!>
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.
Yeah. A frictionless environment will do wonders for your MPG...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
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...
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
I think theres Another contender for that title...
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Agreed, automated probes are where it's at for long-range exploration. But imagine how much cheaper it would be to produce and send those thousands of probes if they already had orbital velocity at construction time as opposed to being launched from the Earth. We need space-based industry and infrastructure!
I wish Slashdot had a filter, like "remove all Star Trek posts"
Spock: It knows only that it needs, Commander. But, like so many of us... it does not know what.
Ilia: Vger requires more cowbell.
I travel the old-fashioned way.
Continental drift!
(stolen from The Onion)
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
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
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, but the engineer who builds it can.
Do we really need figureheads that direly? Everyone knows Gagarin, but who knows Korolyov? Everyone knows Armstrong, but who knows Webb or Paine? They could give far more interesting and insightful speeches about space programs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No matter whether we're still alive (well, humanity, not you and me), should this craft be caught by some alien it can have some serious impact for their culture.
Imagine we noticed something artificial flying by. We needn't even be able to catch and examine it, just imagine the Hubble telescope picks up some item that is without a doubt artificial. Even after millenia of interstellar travel, a probe is still not an asteroid. It will be heavily damaged and probably look barely like the probe that was launched, but it will no less be clearly evident that some intelligence shaped it.
How would we react if we found something like that? Most certainly it would be an answer to the eternal question whether we're alone in the universe. Not only statistically (with so many stars and so many planets it's near impossible that we're really alone), but we would have hard proof that there is or at least was some other civilisation that was at the very least so advanced that they could create spaceship.
I'm fairly sure that this would increase our own interest in space. It would most certainly mean better funding for space exploration, maybe it would also mean a lot of fear of an "alien invasion", as ridiculous as it may be (when Voyager reaches any other solar system, we will either already be there or no longer alive, it is likely that the same applies for other civilisations). But the impact would be there, and I'm fairly sure that it would be large. No matter if the civilisation that created the probe still exists or not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...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!