Slashdot Mirror
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.
Oh, I don't think you need an oath. It'll work itself out.
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
what is this i don't even?
Yeah that's just silly. The guys on the Voyager are too old and out of touch to have a twitter account.
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?
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.
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.
They know where voyager is.
They don't know where interstellar space is.
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"
But can he mind meld with it??
Not that I'd expect a fan of that soft-scifi trash to know the difference...
I love sci-fi snobs, almost as entertaining as music snobs. Were you into sci-fi before it was cool?
So you can reenact the last scene out of 2001?
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.
Q: How many hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: It's a really obscure number, you've probably never heard of it...
Please don't read my sig.
fun .
Q: why did the hipster burn his tongue?
A: because he drank his tea before it was cool