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Voyager and the Coming Great Hiatus In Deep Space
MatthewVD writes "Some time in the next decade, the Voyager probes will run out of juice and finally go silent after almost a half century of exploration. John Rennie writes that the lack of any meaningful effort to follow up with a mission to interstellar space shows the "fragile, inconsistent state of space exploration." It's particularly frustrating since the Voyagers have tantalized astronomers with a glimpse into about how the sun's magnetic field protects us from (or exposes us to) cosmic rays. Have we gone as far as we're willing to go in space?"
VEEEE GERRRRRR!
“Without it, we might as well slide back to the cave, because that’s where we’re headed right now — broke.”
It's rather pathetic that we are willing to waste untold amounts of resources on mindless violence, and yet let programs which could further our knowledge of the universe sit unused on the drawing board.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
There is virtually no interest in space among the many people I interact with, my customers, my suppliers, the other parents at school, or my neighbors. My interest in astronomy and space is regarded in the same manner as my telescopes, as a curiosity or mild eccentricity.
I can't imagine that people like these will be willing to commit money, either as tax or investment, in furthering space research, not until they see something that affects them personally and requires return to space.
On the positive side, this something can be anything, even a surprise threat from North Korean FTL probe leaving for Alpha Centauri.
I respect Mr. Rennie's effort in encouraging further efforts in deep space exploration, but I think his argument may go a little away from principle. The Voyager probes were not designed to be deep space probes. As I recall having learned, the Voyager probes were designed to photograph the planets and record relevant non-visual data, during the recent "grand conjunction" phase in the solar system.
I'm afraid I must apologize for my evident lack of citations, here. As my own specator knowledge of it holds, and anyone may wish to correct me: It's been a pleasant suprrise that the Voyager probes have continued functioningm, for so many years since after they completed their assigned missions.
Personally, I think it also may serve in making a constructive comment towards the niceties of reliable manufacturing practice in the construction of space exploration systems. "But maybe that's just me" ;}
Given the long duration to get a probe to the edge of the solar system, and the rapid advances in instrumentation, I think we should be launching a Voyager type probe every 5-10 years. They needn’t follow a single path, in fact, heading off to different parts of the heliosphere makes more sense.
Launch windows will of course determine the schedule and affect the trajectory, but I think learning about the heliopause, interstellar environment, and eventually, the Oort Cloud is vital. Given current propulsion technologies, it will take many years to reach those areas. The best way I see to deal with that is “launch early, launch often”.
And, since each probe will need monitoring for decades, it would make sense to put them into a single, ongoing program, where much of the monitoring and development could be consolidated.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
We're in good company judging by how busy the galaxy seems to be.
Yet another minor footnote of a species in the grand scheme of things that did not use their small window between having the technology to try leaving their home planet. And the next global disaster that wipes life off the planet.
Gamma ray burst, comet, meteor, supervolcano, germ, pole shift, nuclear/chemical/bio war, toxic air/earth/water/food, solar flare, global warming, ecosystem collapse, rogue black hole, particle accelerator mishap, nanotech accident, and many other things we can't even predict.
We backup our computer data. But not our species.
Unlikely? Nah. We know at least most of those WILL happen again at some point in the future.
But it would be hard, and expensive, and take a while to even attempt to create a new human location..
So lets just not do it. Lets continue keeping all our stuff in one place. Screw space! Planning ahead is for suckers.
Lets go watch tv. I've got popcorn.
Say,
1. Mass produce the science instruments. At least have common designs so that they can be quickly fabricated.
2. Common OS, instrument bus and communications sub system.
3. A common power plant and chassis design.
4. A common Earth orbit departure stage.
I know that the instrument specs for each mission is unique and the propulsion and communication requirements all depend on the probe's trajectory, but I'm thinking that they can do a lot more prefab-and-assembly than they are doing now.
In spite of this limited funding, like so many other NASA project, it met and exceeding objectives. As such it is strange that we are complaining that we have no deep space program when we really never had a deep space program. What we have had are basic program that have been extended as able. We have, for the first time, a defined boundary of the solar system. Now that we know, a formal intersteller mission can be planned. But, as mentioned this is world project, so it should be funded by others in addition to the US.
The problem with the space program is US funding. Increasingly citizens in the US want their entitlements without any strings attached. The progress we have made has been costly, and I thank past generations for shouldering the cost that has made the US a great place to live. It is sad that the current generation is so self absorbed that they cannot think of anything beyond the dollars they have to spend to keep the US great.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
before you start talking about modern consumer electronics which are the best they've ever been, think about consumer grade hardware in the 1990s.
boot times where 5+ min. never worked right. plug and play didn't work, no standards on HW.Drivers sucked.
sheet, we got it easy today.
Again, only two choices? Sensationalizing the most extreme of social contract obligations as the only reason we're not funding more deep space research? Puh-leeze. The reason more deep space probes are not being launched is because people don't give a crap. And CISPA will be passed because (IMHO) the Internet blew its collective social activism wad fighting SOPA and everyone has gone back to Minecraft, WoW and Berk memes because they think their effort as 1's and 0's superheroes for a day crushed the special interests (and at least at this point, no one is telling otherwise). The only reason Apollo made it as far as it did is because NASA hired the best and brightest on Madison Avenue to make it an all-consuming interest for Americans. Not a day would go by without something reminding you we were in a race with the Russians and we had to win. As soon as we got there, everyone lost interest. Why? Because NASA sold the first men on the moon as the goal (Kennedy was a tad short-sighted, apparently), not the continued exploration of the moon. As soon as people give a crap and fight for what they want (or what they're told what they want), and if deep space exploration is what they're told they want, then we'll have more Voyager-like probes than you can shake a stick at.
Unfortunately, while New Horizons left at the fastest speed ever, it's currently moving at 15km/s (and slowing) and Voyager 1 is cruising at a bit over 17km/s. Per Wikipedia, when NH is at the distance that V1 is now, it'll only be moving at 13km/s.
Seriously, what are you gonna do to persuade the average human of the critical importance of space exploration and colonization? They can neither see nor reason past the ends of their noses. They would rather argue about abortion and gay rights and whether so-and-so 'had work done' and what sort of debauchery they have planned for Friday night. That's on the 99-percent end of the scale; on the other end you have people who can't see nor reason past their own bloated bank accounts and genitalia.
You want the greatest specific impulse possible, so an ion engine is the best option.
I'm 46 and I grew up with Star Trek, the World Trade Center, the Concorde, and the space shuttle. How's that working out...
Your comment sums up quite a lot. The fuck-ups started with defunding of Apollo in the early 1970s, and manned spaceflight has barely progressed since then. The shuttle made for a lot of nice launches and a couple of spectacular failures, but it only went to low Earth orbit. Programs like Hubble and Voyager and so on greatly expanded our knowledge of the universe, but damned little progress was made in manned spaceflight, despite pouring fortunes into a succession of boondoggles (Shuttle, Skylab, ISS, 'nuff said). Recall that even Voyager was just a scaled-back cheaper substitute for the Grand Tour.
I'm only a few years older than you, but vividly remember the Apollo missions. As a kid in Europe, I stayed up weird hours to catch live transmissions from Apollo 8 to Apollo 17. I saw almost every single one of them, and if there had been consumer-level recording technology like today's, I and many others would have copies of those transmissions. I don't recall the Apollo 1 disaster (too young, I guess), but was riveted by the Apollo 13 near-disaster. The decision to cancel Apollo 18 to Apollo 20 was baffling to me then, and remains so today, 40 years later.
Commitment was lost or lacking at a high enough level in U.S. political circles after Apollo reached its stated objective. After that, it was just a question of how soon the money could be diverted to political pork. And that's how NASA's budgets have been allocated ever since. Pork as the real objective, more pork as the means of attaining that objective, even more pork as the main spin-off, and a bit of science or space exploration as an unavoidable but incidental side effect. The objectives (pork) were always achieved successfully, even if the cover stories (science, space) ended in failure.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The Voyager spacecraft computers are some of the last active computers in the Solar System still using hand-wrapped core memory. I think that says more about the space probe than almost anything else. There might be a couple museums which fire up a computer every now and again with such a memory module, but this is certainly the last one in a production environment. It shows how rugged that kind of design really can be.
Then again, saying it is the last one in the Solar System may not even be accurate, so it might just simply be said it is the last one currently running in the Milky Way Galaxy... unless we meet some alien races to dispute that fact.
Those things may have been true of (IBM Compatible) PCs in the early 1990s, but my Amiga would definitely beg to differ.
I'm surprised nobody else has posted this yet.
65 years
On the other hand, do you think your iPad will last 5 years?
In five years, you will be able to get a new one with a higher resolution display, a much faster processor, much more RAM and storage space, and support for the latest mobile network standards. Your current model can do more processing in an hour than the computer on the Voyager probes can do in a year.
In contrast, the Voyager probes were very expensive to produce one-off products and are in a location that is almost impossible - and totally impractical - to service or even get replacement parts to. In other words,they were both built with completely different sets of design requirements.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The reason for not building interstellar probes is that there is nothing interesting between stars. A good telescope can tell us much more than a deep space probe.
Here we go again. I remember how eagerly my church watched and prayed for the moon astronauts when they launched on their missions. Many of those astronauts were in fact Christians. This same lie appears on every single post here about any scientific topic. I for one eagerly support all exploration of the wonders that the Lord has created. The reason for the dirge of deep space exploration is simple to see and as usual it's all about the God of most people, the dollar. No one has figured a way to make money there in the short term so therefore the interest has to be carried entirely on the Governments dime. With budgets being trimmed and wars to fight that is one small dime nowadays. Personally I think it's foolish not to explore but I don't get to decide.
Did the ipad 3 cost hundreds of millions of dollars?
Yes, in all likelyhood.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It's not pessimistic. You actually don't want it going quite so fast. Voyager 2's trajectory and velocity were set - it had to be moving at a certain speed in order to meet up with Uranus and Neptune. Consequently, the gravity assists had sped up Voyager 2 so much that by the time it reached Neptune, the entire close encounter was pretty much over in a day. They had to pre-program it to take pictures and measurements and store it on tape, hope that everything worked, and wait for the data to be sent back to Earth. By the time we got it, Voyager 2 was already leaving Neptune. There were no second chances, and we were fortunate that some of the pan-slew timed exposure tricks worked perfectly.
The New Horizons flyby of Pluto is pretty much going to be the same thing. All the close-up observations of Pluto and its moons are going to happen on 14 July, 2015. One day. No second chances if it turns out someone forgot to send the command to remove the lens cap. If it had been moving at 17 km/s instead of 13 km/s, we'd have about 25% less observation time. Better to wait a few years longer for the spacecraft to get there, in order to get a few more hours and days observation time.
In the future, with an ion engine, maybe we'll be able to send probes which speed up the first half of the trip, and slow down the second half. That would allow us to extend the encounter times, or even enter into orbit around the outer planet(oid), without extending the travel time to decades.
We were so poor, we couldnt pay attention.
Our computer was a calculator and a typewriter taped to the television.
Our internet was tin cans and a wire to the outhouse.
We would decode grandmas farting in morse code bit by bit.
Some webpages would take a month of feeding Mawmaw beans and cheese to load in.
You whippersnappers and your internet, Mawmaw eats windows boxes and farts Mac chunks with her intestinal O.S. and talk about a secure connection.Whooee Peeyooo! The other day we fed her at the Pizza Hut buffet and she had the shits so bad we got to watch Netflix.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!