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

Decoding

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I can make it out. It says "All... your... base..."

V'ger expects an answer.

[axl917]

Don't piss it off, NASA.

v'ger

[CDS]

I thought it was Voyager VI that was supposed to come back and we couldn't understand what it was saying...

What!

[Tobor the Eighth Man]

"It has already given us remarkable views of Uranus..."

Well, I never!

Re:What!

[Lloyd_Bryant]

"It has already given us remarkable views of Uranus..."

Well, I never!

You most certainly *did*. And NASA has the pics to prove it.

Re:What!

[tom17]

Rule 34? "Any officer caught sniffing the saddle of the exercise bicycle in the women's gym will be discharged without trial?". I really don't see the relevance here.

Tom...

Re:Orly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for a chemistry department whose *nix boxes were named after elements. The back up sun server (it was previously was the primary server, but it was retired in favor of a more powerful sun box and just kept as a backup) was Uranus. Every time you said Uranus, one of the *nix admins would say "Whose anus?"

Now, what was really funny was this person had a memory issue. So EVERY TIME he thought it was the first time he had told you the "joke". It got to the point where before he could even say Uranus, every professor would say yes whose anus, and he would just sit there shocked and say "How did you know I was going to say that?"

Tried to find some more info

[Anonymous Coward]

All the news articles report pretty much the same, digested, not particularly informative stuff. The mission page hasn't been updated in a while, the NASA news item isn't any more detailed, and the last operations report was from March 12. But I did learn this from the operations report: they're running the whole mission on less than 275 Watts of power from the RTG units. Wow.

Re:Tried to find some more info

[dtmos]

Reading that operations report I was most impressed by these two lines:

There were 97.9 hours of DSN scheduled support for Voyager 1 of which 61.3 hours were large aperture coverage.

and

There were 62.3 hours of DSN scheduled support for Voyager 2 of which 39.3 hours were large aperture coverage.

Wow -- that's an incredible amount of Deep Space Network time in a week -- and, looking at earlier reports, it seems to be representative of the time used in a typical week. I had no idea that the Voyagers were consuming that much DSN time. I assume "large aperture coverage" means use of the 70m dishes -- also an impressive number.

That much DSN time must be very expensive.

event horizon?

[Anonymous Coward]

D.J.: I thought it said "liberate me" - "save me." But it's not "me." It's "liberate tutame" - "save yourself." And it gets worse.
[Plays the distress signal again]
D.J.: There - I think that says "ex inferis." "Save yourself... from hell." Look, if what Doctor Weir tells us is true, this ship has been beyond the boundaries of our universe, of known scientific reality. Who knows where it's been, what it's seen. Or what it's brought back with it.
Miller: From hell.

More Like it?

[coofercat]

I have no idea what I'm talking about here, but...

We now have much better technology, both for getting to space, and for science aboard a probe. For example, even something like the British Beagle 2 Mars mission cost a few million to make, and although it didn't end up returning much of use, it demonstrates how 'easy' such things are (or how hard things are, depending on your point of view, I suppose).

So I'm wondering, isn't it worth mankind's time to build a (say) £25M long-range probe, like the Voyagers, only designed for the purpose, and shoved into space in some get-there-fast manner?

I'm sure we can argue about the best use of a limited budget, and what constitutes the best science returned for the spend, for the rest of our lives, but a "cheap" probe sent out every few years to do something a bit random might well do wonders for us and our understanding of the Solar system, let alone the Universe as a whole. I wouldn't presume to say we should do such things at the expense of anything more major, but more to foster some 'experimentation' in space.

Just a thought... TFI Friday :-)

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:Garbled how?

[rbochan]

You hope in any future endeavor like this, if it hasn't been done already, that each batch of data it sends would start with some sort of test/reference data that they could compare against.

What year is it for Voyager 1 & 2?

[antirelic]

Being that I am not a physicist (though I am a big fan), I am asking any physicists out there if they have figured out how much time has passed for the Voyager satellites according to the laws of relativity compared to Earth. From what I understand, they are traveling around 17km/s. How does that work out over a span of 30-50 years from earthling perspective.

Thanx in advance.

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

[Meumeu]

Assuming a constant speed of 17km/s, 30 years for Voyager is 30 years and 1.5s on Earth.

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:Garbled how?

[b4dc0d3r]

They should put it on BitTorrent labeled "Assasin's Creed 3 with Ubisoft's unbreakable DRM -- REAL !!!1! 0-day warez CDC propz to Hippie!!!". It will be fixed in a week.

same age as Apple and MicroSoft

[peter303]

Imagine if you were still using version 1.0 of their hardware and softwares.

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.