Voyager 2 Speaking In Tongues

dangle sends in an update from the borderland of Sol. "Voyager 2's flight data system, which formats information before beaming it back to Earth, has experienced a hiccup that has altered the pattern in which it sends updates home, preventing mission managers from decoding the science data beamed to Earth from Voyager 2. The spacecraft, which is currently 8.6 billion miles (13.8 billion km) from Earth, is apparently still in overall good health, according to the latest engineering data received on May 1. 'Voyager 2's initial mission was a four-year journey to Saturn, but it is still returning data 33 years later,' said Voyager project scientist Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. 'It has already given us remarkable views of Uranus and Neptune, planets we had never seen close-up before. We will know soon what it will take for it to continue its epic journey of discovery.' The space probe and its twin Voyager 1 are flying through the bubble-like heliosphere, created by the sun, which surrounds our solar system."

Comments

Re:More Like it?

[Burdell]

It would probably cost a good bit more than that to build a long-range probe that has to work for many years before reaching its target. Also, you have to pay for ground stations and personnel to monitor it for the years it takes to get somewhere. We have no magic "get-there-fast manner" today; in fact, the Voyagers were able to do so much because of a once-in-our-lifetime planetary alignment (the Grand Tour). The NASA New Horizons probe is going to Pluto (and beyond), and it will take 9.5 years to get there (and if the launch had been delayed by another few weeks, it would have taken several years longer because there wouldn't have been a Jupiter slingshot fly-by).

Re:What year is it for Voyager 1 & 2?

[profBill]

The relativity calculator at http://www.1728.com/reltivty.htm gives a relativity factor of 1.0000000016077795 for a speed of 17km/sec. If you multiply that all out for the approximate 33 years of travel (back of the envelope style, 33*525600*60), you get about a 1.67 second difference.

Of course, with the aliens towing in the spaceship, that might be off a bit :-)

>>>bill

Re:33 years old = bit rot and other SS parts going

[budgenator]

Pissaw, young'uns don't know anything anymore; more likely a fried 1452 core sense amplifier. That bad-boy left Earth back when a 1024 Bit, 500 mS static ram was exotic, and yes that is bits not bytes and milliseconds not nanoseconds. Ferrite Core memory was the state of the art back in 1977, when hard-disk drives were the size of washing machines and I was a young'un myself punching Fortran code on to cards.