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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).
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.
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.
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
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
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!
Spock: It knows only that it needs, Commander. But, like so many of us... it does not know what.
Ilia: Vger requires more cowbell.
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).
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.