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New Signs Voyager Is Nearing Interstellar Space
sighted writes "Yesterday, someone tweeting for the Voyager 2 spacecraft posted: 'Interesting. Compare my data 4 high-energy nucleons w V1's That increase is attracting attention!' Today, NASA says that scientists looking at this rapid rise draw closer to an inevitable but historic conclusion — that humanity's first emissary to interstellar space is on the edge of our solar system. Project scientist Ed Stone said, 'The latest data indicate that we are clearly in a new region where things are changing more quickly. It is very exciting. We are approaching the solar system's frontier.'"
... if we don't immediately find life I will consider the mission a failure, begin binge drinking and accept drinks from any random android.
"You are the Slashdot Unit. You will listen to me. " (And, this being Slashdot: "My oath of celibacy is on record.")
The crew of Voyager had better hang onto their command posts and chairs to avoid extra jostling - the shockwave as they pass through the solar system barrier will be quite intense, as we all know.
A little part of me wants to see it hit a wall, just to keep us guessing.
Just waiting for it to go 'Clannggg' as it hits the painted wall. Shame about the lack of sound in space, but maybe George Lucas could make a movie about it.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
It will pass the boundary on December 21st, 2012. The aliens will see it, and they will contact us. Then, everything changes.
I am really hoping that once Voyager gets outside the local sun's bubble, it picks up a dial tone.
After all, what makes more sense than modulating the background, and talking only to species smart enough to pick it up, by getting outside their local bubble?
My guess is most species would have been a little slower to send a probe out that far, and grown up a bit more in the meantime.
But maybe.
"Is There an Edge to the Heavens?"
It's just going to bounce off a glass wall with leds wired into it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
To boldly probe where no man has probed before.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Is it going by the name V GER yet?
I was dumbstruck for several seconds before I realized that the headline did NOT say: "Yesterday, someone tweeting on the Voyager 2 spacecraft posted:...."
It comes back as a conscious being with all the knowledge of the universe?
I was going to post something witty, interesting, and/or informative but realized that I'd be 16 hours and 38 minutes too late.
Dr. Stone was our first-quarter Physics Profession at Caltech in the Fall of 1982, where I was at first an Astronomy Major the, when I realized what I liked about telescopes was making them rather than looking through them, I changed my major to Physics.
Things didn't work out for me in the long run at Caltech, so in the end I graduated from UC Santa Cruz. I don't have my Doctorate yet but I did well in what graduate school I did attend.
Tsutomu Shimomura, of Kevin Mitnick fame and I were close friends at Caltech. Tsutomu and I met at Frosh Camp, the Freshman Orientation carried out at a Summer Camp on Catalina Island, out in the Pacific. It was quite cool.
Did you know that Tsutomu is a nuclear weapons designer, yet never obtained any manner of college degree, let alone a PhD? The chances are pretty good he never graduated high school.
While I graduated high school, my grades were quite poor as I have totally blown off all forms of formal education I have ever had anything to do with.
Caltech doesn't care whether you so much as graduated kindergarten you see, provided you demonstrably have the insight to do original research.
Tsutomu was on the verge of flunking out of Tech as he could never be bothered to do his homework, when the nuclear weapons community got wind of his interest in Theoretical Physics, largely published in colloboration with 1965 Nobel Physics Laureate Richard Feynman. The result was that every weapons lab in the Free World started hurling job offers at him. Tsutomu figured designing Hydrogen Bombs would be quite cool, so he eventually accepted Los Alamos' offer. His first job there, which I believe was unclassified and so openly published, was designing a hardware cellular automaton that was specialized for the purpose of modeling supersonic air flow. One can use it for designing fighter planes or reentry vehicles.
"It costs about the same as a Cray," Tsutomu explained one day, "But it does just that one calculation at a thousand times the speed of a Cray."
MichaelCrawford, who can't be bothered to recover his password.
I thought it had already returned from the Delta quadrant 10 years ago?
"Interesting. Compare my data 4 high-energy nucleons w V1's That increase is attracting attention!"
I've tried four times and can't parse that string, let alone make sense of it. Can someone from the appropriate generation translate it for me, please?
Are we there yet?
Maybe the Universe, as we observe it from Earth, is a illusion produced by a vast computing machine, a Truman Show if you will, and when Voyager passes into interstellar space the computing power required to generate the extended illusion will exceed available capacity and Kansas will go bye-bye. Those Mayans were a clever bunch come to think of it.
It takes nearly 17 hours for the data to get back from Voyager 1 to us. Now here on Earth we rarely run into significant delays in communications caused by the speed of light - geostationary satellites are one example, and moonbounce is another. But even bouncing signals off of the moon only delays them by about two and a half seconds, and you need to transmit hundreds of watts into a very high gain aerial array to catch the tiny sniff of a signal that bounces back from the moon, 236000 miles away.
Okay, car analogy. On a dark night out in the country, look at a distant piece of road and watch for a car. From a mile or two off, its 21W brake light bulb seems pretty tiny and faint. Voyager 1's microwave link puts out about 20W, too.
Now I want you to imagine looking for that brake light when it is 11.3 thousand million miles away.
... that _maybe_ one day in the distance future Voyager somehow manages to crash on a planet without being completley destroyed, is discovered by some new civilisation that discovers it and wonders what the fuck.
Imagine if that had been us?
Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly is the meaning of the data linked to? I'm somewhat confused.
I remember when the Huygens probe landed on Titan (Huygens, from the Cassini/Huygens mission: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens )
I was part of the Huygens team, and I really experience a special moment as concerns time:
- building the Probe had been quite a long period in my own life (years)
- once launched, the travel from Earth to Saturn lasted *seven years* : enough for you to deeply change your business occupation, and mostly loose contact with your former team, customer team, science team
- then what was happening at that very time was, due to Earth/Saturn distance, transmitting the probe entry and descent data would last *longer than the real descent itself* : in other words, you were still waiting to see whether the thing you'd spent years in the building didn't just burn upon atmosphere entry, while you *knew* everything over there was finished already.
So believe me, this feeling of meeting back with friends lost for 10 years, to listen what your device may have sent some hours ago knowing that at present indeed all the adventure has been over for one hour... that was very special.
Also, the explanations of this to the journalists in the ground station rooms by your average public relation guy was definitely funny to watch :-D
Herve S.
Is the following really meaningful:
Compare my data 4 high-energy nucleons w V1's That increase is attracting attention
When something has to be read and re-read to try and parse any meaning, communication has failed utterly. Piss on Twitter.
Does this mean that they don't know exactly where Voyager is? Why do they need to deduce its position from the nucleons' energy?
So very, very sad.
I want to see this transmitting on my deathbed.
When I read the summary, I was a bit confused by it. It almost makes it sound like it's the Voyager 2 that is being talked about. To make things even more confusing, I had thought the Voyager 1 had done this already many years ago. I guess I somehow didn't make the distinction between the termination shock and the helopause a decade ago. The illustration in the 3rd link shows that all much better. It's also interesting to see that the heliosphere extends MUCH farther i the opposite direction. I never really thought about that, but I guess it's because the solar system is moving to the left in that illustration.
This has to at least be the third time we've hit some definition of "The edge of the solar system"
This is so exciting. We are rapidly approaching the point where the nothingness turns into an even greater void. Then perhaps another thousand years of nothingness.
Seriously. It is very cool that we have a probe so far out in the solar system/deep space, but the monthly updates in these breathless stories are redundant. We know it's WTFOT, there's no need for updates every thousand miles. 'Yep, it was way way out there, but now it's way wayer out there.'
The captcha reads "farther". How does it know?
Suck on that Buzz Aldrin.
Sounds more like Family Guy material to me.
Where does the orbit of Sedna and the other external planets lay?
Seeing the probes and how far they've gone in the image, it always makes me want to play Homeworld again, just for the interstellar travel.
Assuming the Voyager and Pioneer probes don't get flung into a star, plummet into some super gas giant, or captured into orbit by any other celestial object, these probes may be our fist step in preserving our legacy into the future. Assuming Voyager is still intact with its present trajectory, it will reach the star AC+79 3888 in about 40,000 years .
In 40,000 years, there's a good chance that humanity would have gone extinct for a plethora of reasons. It comforts me to know that we would not go the way of the dinosaurs, quietly into oblivion on a lonely corner of the Milky Way. Damn it, at least we tried.
can you imagine the consternation created if voyager hits the edge of our system, then bounced back?
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
... I guess we better start preparing for it's return.
Suburbia? I'm doubting that one. I am however surprised that him and sister-mah can afford DSL in the Swamps.
I heard it was a second communication's channel that would have allowed more frequent imaging (and other info), not necessarily a second camera. It was allegedly traced to an operational error, but I never heard the details. If anybody knows the details of that, please fill us in.
Table-ized A.I.
FTFY?
No brain, no pain.
At least we know it passed Uranus.
Anywhere i goes after that, i don't want to know about it.
...and it just now remembered it might have left the coffeemaker on back at the house.
What actually happened at the Portland Startup Weekend is that they and I got into a furious argument over my desire to rotate amoung the different teams there, a dozen or so, to help each individual team out with whatever problem they might be having. Most were developing their very first iOS App, which in my own experience was incredibly difficult - I required two solid years to develop the insight required to write Cocoa Touch Objective-C code that isn't completely riddled with bugs. Have a look at the end user reviews at the App Store, and you'll see most others have the same problem.
I regard the Startup Weekend as a criminal operation because they duped all those poor idealistic yet hopelessly naive kids into blasting ther new company's most precious trade secrets all over creation on Facebook and Twitter, where, say, Indian, Eastern European and Chinese software developers who were in need of product or service idea could readily pick up their app proposals, then get them to market far faster than any of the Startup Weekend participants could.
There was also no mention whatsoever of the fact that everyone should agree ahead of time what their equity in their new companies should be, as well as what to do were somebody to concieve of a patentable invention as a result of someone else's product proposal. Neither was their any mention of corporate financial concerns, taxation, business licensing and so on.
When I started quite bluntly and openly pointing all this out to the organizers in the plain site of all the participants, they demanded I leave and said they'd give me my seventy five bucks back. I told them they could keep my money, because I wanted to stay at the event so as to keep their participants from getting themselves completely crucified as a result of the Startup Weekend Corporations negligence.
Eventually three of the staff had me surrounded, shouting at me at the tops of their lungs. I demanded that they call the police if they wanted me to leave.
About twenty minutes later, two cops showed up to find me sitting quietly working on my website on my MacBook Pro, wearing a pinstripe business suit.
When the cops and I got outside, I pointed out to them that the Startup Weekend had earned itself a whole bunch of civil lawsuits as a result of what it had done. I asked the cops for their business cards so I could follow up with some more information.
I then walked straight to a WiFi spot and got onto the #pdxsw Twitter hash tag, and startup raking the lot of those dirty bastards over the coals.
Eventually I posted the link to Jonathan Swift Sticks it to the Man, and happened to mention that as a result of the appalling lack of scruples on the part of Bedford, Nova Scotia's TriHedral Engineering, it would be trivially easy not just for myself, but just about anyone with a basic understanding of how computers work to - I Tweeted - "Make a large industrial facility detonate like a bunker buster bomb".
The Iranian Stuxnet worm has been covered extensively by Slashdot. It exploits coding defects in the Siemens Human Machine Interface / Software Control and Data Acquision package - HMI/SCADA - that controls the Iranian Uranium Hexafluoride Gas Turbines that they're using to enrich natural uranium to the point that they could use it for nuclear weapons.
TriHedral's own product VTS is HMI/SCADA as well, but when I worked there in late 1995 and early 1996, I resigned in protest before very long at all, not so much because of their appalling cluelessness into how to write exception-safe C++ code, but because the very instant I started to instruct my far less experienced colleagues as to how to do so, TriHedral founder and president Glenn Wadden - a brilliant industrial control systems engineer, but whose insight into software engineering is far surpassed by your typical bloodletting fluke - specificallly ordered me not to do so.
The r
This comment is obviously racist and unrelated to the topic.