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Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the grandpa's-space-probe-still-tellin-stories dept.

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).

21 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hmmmm... by Spudtrooper · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  2. Too bad... by Kagura · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:hmmmm... by eln · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. IMHO by StarfishOne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 ;)

  5. billions of miles/km by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:billions of miles/km by StarfishOne · · Score: 4, Informative

      (Still a great distance to travel, but should that not be 14 hours instead of 14 days?)

  6. Re:Fuel economy by StarfishOne · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not millions of miles per gallons. Launching costs quite a bit of fuel:

    "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.htm l :)

  7. The really amazing thing by edwardpickman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  8. technology from the 70s was quite good enough by swschrad · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?
    1. Re:technology from the 70s was quite good enough by jd · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  9. Still going but fading from public awareness... by KokorHekkus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  10. Billions and Billions by StikyPad · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  11. Farthest Man Made Object? I duno.... by Tmack · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    --
    Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
  12. Re:From a time when NASA actually "worked" by jdigriz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  13. Re:You are the Kirk Unit? You will assist me. by LordSnooty · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wish Slashdot had a filter, like "remove all Star Trek posts"

  14. Re:You are the Kirk Unit? You will assist me. by Dachannien · · Score: 5, Funny

    Spock: It knows only that it needs, Commander. But, like so many of us... it does not know what.

    Ilia: Vger requires more cowbell.

  15. Re:Remarkable Spacecraft by Iskender · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

  16. Re:Interstellar space by m.dillon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  17. I was 17 by p51d007 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  18. Re:I liked the part.... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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...

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  19. Re:From a time when NASA actually "worked" by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.