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Voyager Set To Enter Interstellar Space
Phoghat writes "More than 30 years after they were launched, NASA's two Voyager probes have traveled to the edge of the solar system and are on the doorstep of interstellar space. Today, April 28, 2011, NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished — and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of the Milky Way itself."
Congratulations to the engineers working on the original project all those years ago. I couldn't fathom designing something like this with the toolset they had 30+ years ago. Props to them for creating a set of probes that are still relevant 30 years after their launch.
I saw it on Star Trek, TMP!
I for one look forward to meeting our new Whale Loving overlords.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
I bet Voyagers won't fly forever. When space travel become cheap and safe enough, they will be seen as collectible items, and will be recovered. The two golden records will probably become the most expensive records money can buy.
They have a long way to go until they leave the Kuiper Belt and really reach the edge of our solar system, but impressive none the less.
The real challenge will be dealing with the alien race of machines who interface with it and set out on a destructive journey toward Earth in order to contact its creator.
Radio Lab has a great episode interviewing Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, regarding her part in developing the sound recordings for the voyager mission. She beautifully captures the art and love inherent in such an awesome act of science and exploration. If you have a free few minutes, you won't be sorry you listened.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Funny you would use a vacuum tube in ... a nearly perfect vacuum....
Best part is that if the tube cracks because of some thermal stress from years of heat cycles... Still in a vacuum! bonus
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
According to "The Return" by William Shatner, yes...
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/V'Ger#Background_information
Makes more sense anyways than when they tried to explain why Klingons looked different in the train-wreck that was ST:Enterprise...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
The Voyager probes are approximately three months younger than me. All my life, I have followed the magical images and data these probes have been sending back to earth. In fact, it was the first images of saturn and jupiter that inspired me to be a scientist. It wasn't the pharma industry in which I work now. It wasn't the lure (lie?) of riches received for making the next big discovery. It was those probes, hurling through space sending back the most fascinating shit my young mind had ever witnessed. I spent almost my entire youth with my head buried in encyclopedias and books about astronomy, all made possible by Voyager 1 and 2. In the end I chose a different science path, but who knows...I could have ended up being a financial analyst (**shudders**)
Forever is a pretty long time, If something is physically possible, eventually it will happen.
I know of several supermodels that will disagree.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm glad they didn't decide to record the brain waves of a young *man* in love... those would certainly make the aliens skeptical about ever visiting us.
"What did we learn from this Golden Record?"
"From what we can tell, we're dealing with a race that can't concentrate, constantly listens to The Smiths, worries about its hair looking right, broods pensively throughout the day, and fears never knowing the right things to say."
"On second thought, let's head out to Ursa Minor and see if we can find any intelligent life over there."
Dictionaries are for loosers.
It's not aimed at any other solar system, and the times involved are such that we can't predict what's going to happen very well.
In places like Wikipedia you will read things like
"in about 40,000 years [Voyager 1] will pass within 1.6 light years of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Camelopardalis."
but this is highly misleading. 1.6 light years is almost 1000 times further away from that star than either Voyager is from the Sun right now, so it won't in any sense be "in" that stellar system.
Worse, stars travel (relative to each other) at ~ 0.001 c, so even in 40,000 years all the nearby stars will move around by 10's of light years. We can estimate stellar velocities reasonably well, but their accelerations are very poorly measured, and so, after a few million years at most, we really don't know which star will go where.
The bottom line is, it will be millions of years before any of these spacecraft get as close to another star as they are now, and we have no idea which star that will be... ... unless, of course, our descendants pick them up and put them in a museum somewhere, which is what I would predict.
When I was a Boy by Frank Hayes:
Videos:
Faster Paced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnUFfy9ZhoE
Really Slow Paced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1fBd7UbQPA
Lyrics:
http://www.stevemacdonald.org/lyrics/wiwab.html
When I was a boy our Nintendo
Was carved from an old Apple tree
And we used garden hose to connect it
To our steam-powered color tv.
But it still beat that ancient Atari
'Cuz I almost went blind, don'tcha know,
Playing Breakout and Pong on a video game
Hooked up to the radio.
And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse
Barefoot, uphill both ways,
Through blizzards in summer and winter
Back in the good old days.
Back when Fortran was not even Three-tran
And the PC was only a toy
And we did our computing by gaslight
When I was a boy.
When I was a boy all our networks
Were for hauling in fish from the sea--
Our bawd rate was eight bits an hour (and she was worth it!),
And our IP address was just 3.
And you kids who complain that the World Wide Web
Is too slow oughtta cut out your bitchin',
'Cuz when I was a boy every packet
Was delivered by carrier pigeon
And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse
Barefoot, uphill both ways,
Through blizzards in summer and winter
Back in the good old days.
Back when Fortran was not even Two-tran
And the mainframe was only a toy
And we did our computing by torchlight
When I was a boy.
When I was a boy our IS shop
Built relational tables from wood,
And we wrappered our data in oilcloth
To preserve it the best that we could.
And we carried our bits in a bucket,
And our mainframe weighed 900 tons,
And we programmed in ones and in zeros
And sometimes we ran out of ones.
And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse
Barefoot, uphill both ways,
Through blizzards in summer and winter
Back in the good old days.
Back when Fortran was not even One-tran
And the abacus? Only a toy!
And we did our computing in primordial darkness
When I was a boy.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Wow, 275 watts of power FOR THIRTY YEARS (actually I think it was substantially higher at the beginning, exponential decay and everything).
This is in a device with no moving parts, about the size of a microwave oven (I think, but maybe that's just one of them), able to operate in interstellar cold and Jupiter's radiation belts, not to mention the vibration and acceleration of liftoff. Oh, and it has to survive an explosion on the pad or accidental re-entry!
If these things were cheap enough, we could use them to power our cars! (fat chance, the plutonium in them makes them highly appealing to all sorts of bad people)
Hate to break this to you, but almost all high-power RF transmitters at these sorts of frequencies use vacuum tubes, space or otherwise.