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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.
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?"
Yeah that's just silly. The guys on the Voyager are too old and out of touch to have a twitter account.
The wires connect to this giant turtle...
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.
"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?
Translation:
"Interesting. Compare my [Voyager 2's] data for high-energy nucleons with Voyager 1's [data for high-energy nucleons]. That increase [that is, the increase shown in Voyager 2's high-energy nucleon data over Voyager 1's high-energy nucleon data] is attracting attention!"
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
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.
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...
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