35 Years Later, Voyager 1 Is Heading For the Stars

DevotedSkeptic writes with news that today is the 35th anniversary of Voyager 1's launch. (Voyager 2 reached the same anniversary on August 20.) Voyager 1 is roughly 18 billion kilometers from the sun, slowly but steadily pushing through the heliosheath and toward interstellar space. From the article: "Perhaps no one on Earth will relish the moment more than 76-year-old Ed Stone, who has toiled on the project from the start. 'We're anxious to get outside and find what's out there,' he said. When NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 first rocketed out of Earth's grip in 1977, no one knew how long they would live. Now, they are the longest-operating spacecraft in history and the most distant, at billions of miles from Earth but in different directions. ... Voyager 1 is in uncharted celestial territory. One thing is clear: The boundary that separates the solar system and interstellar space is near, but it could take days, months or years to cross that milestone. ... These days, a handful of engineers diligently listen for the Voyagers from a satellite campus not far from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built the spacecraft. The control room, with its cubicles and carpeting, could be mistaken for an insurance office if not for a blue sign overhead that reads 'Mission Controller' and a warning on a computer: 'Voyager mission critical hardware. Please do not touch!' There are no full-time scientists left on the mission, but 20 part-timers analyze the data streamed back. Since the spacecraft are so far out, it takes 17 hours for a radio signal from Voyager 1 to travel to Earth. For Voyager 2, it takes about 13 hours."

Comments

You have to give it to the engineers

[PCK]

Granted it's built to more demanding specifications, but something lasting 35 years in deep space is quite an achievement.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[khallow]

The problem is hard and easy. It's hard in that the primary problems of deep space spacecraft are very difficult, such as maintaining electronics for decades in an environment with hard radiation. But it's easy in that the environment doesn't change.

You engineer for a fixed problem. Once you have something that works for a time in deep space, then you can tweak that solution to greatly extend the lifespan.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[DevotedSkeptic]

You are definitely correct. It is amazing to think that technology from 35 years ago is still operating and sending back data. We generally don't keep cars around for 35 years let alone computers, phones, or even kitchen appliances. Now there is a world of difference between these things i mentioned and the tight tolerances that went into Voyager, but it still absolutely amazing what we as humans have accomplished. Carl Sagan would have been excited with the current Mars Rover, along with all of the other projects that we have successfully launched, but I think he would be a bit saddened by the state of the manned programs.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[SJHillman]

Not to understate the achievement, but comparing it to consumer hardware like cars is a bit of apples and oranges. It'd be more akin to military grade hardware like ships and planes. Of course, even for some of those, 35 years is a stretch... and NASA has never had the budget that the military does.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[jellomizer]

You sound like a 70 something retired engineer. Who had technology advance beyond your comprehension. So you get old and grumpy and say how you job what that much harder then today, although you are no longer able to keep up with what today's engineers are doing.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[petteyg359]

That's why NASA gets stuff that works, and the military gets stuff that lets the contractors line their Olympic-sized pools with money.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Dr. Spork]

Let's not forget that ships and planes have regular maintenance. This is a huge portion of the DoD budget. But nobody has taken a wrench or a soldering iron to the Voyagers in 35 years. At best there have been firmware updates.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[w_dragon]

Just to be clear, that's 35 years without maintenance or refuelling. Maybe there are a couple military satellites still going that are 35 years old, but I doubt there's much else that hasn't undergone some major maintenance in that time.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, he's saying that his job was easier than what the current generation is doing with robotic devices. Look at Mars. Rocky terrain, sandy terrain, dusty terrain, soft terrain. Sometimes it's light, sometimes, it's dark. These are variations in the environment. With Voyager, they had exactly one environment to plan for. That environment had some very difficult problems to overcome but once they'd made their solution work for one environment, they were done. They didn't have to make their solution work for another environment.

In other words, congratulations on being an angry bitch who sees the worst in everyone.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

The British put up Prospero back in 1971. Does that count?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospero_%28satellite%29

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

And you should not forget the Planned Obsolescence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_Obsolescence) which plagues all consumer hardware.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[cpu6502]

>>>>>very difficult, such as maintaining electronics... with hard radiation. But it's easy in that the environment doesn't change. You engineer for a fixed problem.
>>
>>You sound like a 70 something retired engineer... you get old and grumpy and say how you job what that much harder then today

You got a 70% on your English SAT didn't you?
You're reading comprehension is zero. HE said it was "easy" because the environment is constant and known, but you somehow twisted it into "much harder". As kids today say: Fail.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[cpu6502]

>>> It'd be more akin to military grade hardware like ships and planes. Of course, even for some of those, 35 years is a stretch...

There are lots of military ships and planes with 35 year ages (aircraft carriers, bombers, Vietnam fighter jets). What they have to deal with is the constant erosion by earth's weather & hungry bacteria.

In space none of that exists so deterioration is much slower: Basically zero in human lifespans. Voyager will eventually run-out of nuclear power, but its electronics will never rust or get eaten by fungus/bacteria like an earthbound vessel will.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[wooferhound]

Actually there has been some maintenance done
they switched to the backup thruster set
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20111114.html

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[DevotedSkeptic]

i did mention that there is a "world of difference" between consumer autos/devices and voyager. One other point, the military constantly maintains the Jets, Ships, Vehicles, etc. Voyager doesn't get a lot of wrench time these days.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[MxMatrix]

Aye, just AWESOME engineering ... and truly worth every penny.
Just hope some of the data will provide us with new insights on spaceflight.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like a 70 something retired engineer.

This coming from the person making the equivalent of the claim:
"Yea opening one file, that is super duper uber hard. But writing an entire office suite, which itself can open files, is much much easier!"

Worse, you are the type of person to not realize that is the claim you are making :/

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[scuzzlebutt]

You're reading comprehension is zero.

Facepalm.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Tablizer]

But it's easy in that the environment doesn't change.

But keep in mind that instruments brake down or degrade in unexpected ways over time, presenting unique engineering challenges. The Voyager probes are not their former selves. Thus, the "engineering environment" does change.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Rich0]

True, but Voyager isn't splashed with salt water either.

Comparing anything to space probe construction is going to be of limited use in any case.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

You're reading comprehension is zero.

Said the person who, time and again, has demonstrated themselves incapable of following a conversation, including this time.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

But keep in mind that instruments brake down or degrade in unexpected ways over time, presenting unique engineering challenges.

In a near-vacuum? Something tells me you don't engineer spacecrafts for a living.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Just Some Guy]

Of course, even for some of those, 35 years is a stretch...

As an interesting counterexample, the B-52 Stratofortress seems to be immortal:

B-52s are periodically refurbished at USAF maintenance depots such as Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma. Even while the Air Force works on its Next-Generation Bomber and 2037 Bomber projects, it intends to keep the B-52H in service until 2045, nearly 90 years after the B-52 first entered service and an unprecedented length of service for a military aircraft.

Also:

At least one B-52 aviator's father and grandfather also flew the [very same] bomber.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[mcgrew]

It is amazing to think that technology from 35 years ago is still operating and sending back data. We generally don't keep cars around for 35 years let alone computers, phones, or even kitchen appliances.

Not in this century, no, but that's planned obsolescence. I own a vaccuum cleaner my dad bought in 1952, and it still works. I have a mixer my grandmother bought in 1950 and it works, as well, although the motor's brushes wore out and I had to hack it back to life with a couple of springs from ballpoint pens (they don't last nearly as long as real brushes). Telephones used to last decades, and I'd wager there are phones out there from before the dial was invented that are still functional. I bought a Panasonic portable TV in 1969, and it was still going strong in 2004 when I left it at the foreclosed house. Hell, the drive-in I worked at in 1969 had a refrigerator that was manufactured in 1922.

The only reason your new stuff only lasts a few years is greed, both the manufacturer's and the consumer's -- they make it cheap and sell it cheap. In 1976 a twenty six inch TV cost $650, these days you can get a flat screen high def four times the size for less.

What's amazing about Voyager is that it's still working IN SPACE with all that hard ionizing radiation.

I never saw where the Voyagers would eventually wind up, in orbit around a neighboring star? Travelling forever between galaxies? Crashing into the Heart of Gold and being picked up by the Enterprise?

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

There is less deterioration, but still some from various sources, and depending on the situation. Radiation damage is cumulative, temperature extremes or temperature cycle extremes, exposure to large amounts of UV, and so on. Even just being in a vacuum for a long time can be damaging for a long time. Of course NASA tries to use vacuum rated materials, although every so often you come across something that doesn't live up to its vacuum rating. To some degree though, Voyager benefits more from being far from the sun than just being in space, as other satellites still have to put up with a lot of decay issues.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Snodgrass]

I also find it neat that there is something man-made that is 17 light-hours away. That is reeeeally far.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

After all said and done, Voyager is in a class like no other we have ever built. Everything commented about so far operates in environment known relatively well. Deep space is somthing we have only come notions of but no certain information to go by or build for.

I salute all the people involved in building these marvels!

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[shutdown -p now]

The difference is that B-52 is the same design. And even the planes that are old get regular maintenance, and have faulty components replaced. Here we're talking about a thing operating without any maintenance whatsoever for 35 years.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Just Some Guy]

No argument from me. I just find it fascinating that the current plans are to have 95-year-old airplanes piloted by the great-grandsons of their original aircrews. For as much grief as government engineers get sometimes, they can make stuff really, really good when they need to.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[cusco]

They're essentially pointed towards the middle of nowhere, they won't even pass near any stars for millions of years. Even interstellar space isn't completely empty, so gradually they'll lose their forward momentum, which I believe would otherwise take them above the galactic plane. Eventually they'll just end up coasting along with the rest of our galactic arm until they collide with something, if erosion by interstellar dust grains don't wear them down to nubs first.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Tablizer]

They've had failures of various sensors. Some of it may be due to radiation exposure.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[khallow]

But keep in mind that instruments brake down or degrade in unexpected ways over time, presenting unique engineering challenges.

Hence, the need for tweaking.

Thus, the "engineering environment" does change.

I disagree because the machine is not the environment.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[khallow]

But keep in mind that instruments brake down or degrade in unexpected ways over time, presenting unique engineering challenges.

In a near-vacuum? Something tells me you don't engineer spacecrafts for a living.

No, he is quite right. Even if this spacecraft were in near vacuum with no external inputs: heat, radiation, whatever, it would slowly change over time. For example, some metal alloys can develop "whiskers". There are other sorts of migration of atoms over long enough times. Any radioactive isotopes in the craft would decay.

If the vehicle radiates heat in a way that isn't symmetric, then that can generate net forces and torque which can perturb the vehicle's trajectory or spin it.

Once one adds a constant bombardment by hard radiation and micrometeors, new and more rapid alteration processes present themselves. Microscopic structures, even mechanical ones will be corrupted by the radiation directly or by chemical processes initiated by ionization of the materials of the spacecraft. The outside shell of the spacecraft will slowly be worn away by micrometeor impacts (which can be much faster than Solar System meteors with hundreds of km/s of velocity difference possible!).

My point was not that these processes don't exist, but rather that getting the spacecraft into deep space and having it survive for a bit, is much harder than expanding that original lifespan.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[khallow]

And you sound like someone who hasn't actually given a thought to the engineering difficulties of getting something into deep space versus keeping it alive in deep space. No offense, but it should be clear to you that it is much harder to get something there that works than to extend the lifespan of something that already works.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[khallow]

That's why NASA gets stuff that works, and the military gets stuff that lets the contractors line their Olympic-sized pools with money.

Your eyesight is better than mine. I'm unable to discern the difference between the stuff that works and the pools of money.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is hard and easy. It's hard in that the primary problems of deep space spacecraft are very difficult, such as maintaining electronics for decades in an environment with hard radiation. But it's easy in that the environment doesn't change.

Violent radiation that would fry you in no time, and magnetic fields around Jupiter, the magnitude and extent of which were unknown during the engineering. Tidal forces. Engines that would be used only a few times with periods of sometimes years inbetween. The asteroid belt and ice rings. Increasing cold and lack of light as you move away from the sun. Mechanical parts like tapes that wear over time with no way of fixing them once they do.

Yeah no change at all there...this is slashdot armchair engineering at it's worst!

These probes (not just the Voyagers) are some of the finest things the human race has ever built!

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[khallow]

Violent radiation that would fry you in no time, and magnetic fields around Jupiter, the magnitude and extent of which were unknown during the engineering. Tidal forces. Engines that would be used only a few times with periods of sometimes years inbetween. The asteroid belt and ice rings. Increasing cold and lack of light as you move away from the sun.

None of which exists in generic interstellar space. Jupiter's radiation belts (or whatever they're called) only matter for the short period of time you're doing a near pass of Jupiter (plus, we now know a lot of details about those belts). Jupiter isn't following you into interstellar space. Similarly, the temperature swings only occur when you're close enough to the Sun. The Sun isn't following you out into interstellar space either. Once you're far enough away, you're pretty much in a constant very cold temperature. Near steady state.

The Asteroid Belt and ice rings? Well, there might be a lot of such things in interstellar space, but not enough to hinder our view of the universe. Which means it's not much of a problem for a spacecraft unless it gets unlucky. One can always launch multiple craft to insure greater likelihood that one craft survives.

Tidal forces? What is that spacecraft getting near that has tidal forces that would affect a small, compact object like a space probe? Neutron stars?

Anyway, the parts of this that are actual problems are all part of the "hard", initial part which I already mentioned.

Mechanical parts like tapes that wear over time with no way of fixing them once they do.

Wear and tear is part of the "easy", ongoing problem I mentioned. For example, one could make a tape drive which was more durable and lasted longer before it gave out. Or one could replace it with a device with less moving parts, say magnetic core memory, increasing its durability considerably.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[jayteedee]

how on earth was this comment "Insightful". Take a look at the financial figures. The market cap on Northrup Grumman is $16B. Raytheon is $19B. Boeing is $50B - which of course also has a commercial side. Microsoft is $262B. Apple is $630B. Amazon is $114B. Most of these companies (and others like Oracle, IBM, Target, Walmart, etc.) are bigger than ALL THE DEFENSE companies. Take a look at the history of these companies. The best ones track the DOW, Nasdaq, SP. The lesser ones don't even keep up.

I know these type of comment are popular "old wives" tales, but insightful. Give me a break.

Re:You have to give it to the engineers

[petteyg359]

What do Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, IBM, Target, and Walmart have to do with this discussion? Are you getting defensive because you're one of the contract buddies?

V'GER!

[TaoPhoenix]

You will disclose the First Post. V'GER requires the information.

Re:V'GER!

[Anonymous Coward]

You will disclose the First Post. V'GER requires the information.

V'ger failed to get first post. Danger of disclosure: averted.

Re:V'GER!

[orateam]

Tell VGER we will NOT give up the information!!! Only through direct INPUT can WE communicate with Vger! I believe your child is throwing a tantrum.

Re:V'GER!

[wooferhound]

VGER must become part of SlashDot so I can understand . . .

Has it made it ?

[mbone]

If you look at this picture, it sure does look like Voyager 1 may have left the solar system (in a plasma sense) in late August. (In other words, it is no longer seeing protons from the solar wind, which means it may be outside of the Sun's bubble of plasma, and into the interstellar medium.

If so, it has impeccable timing.

Re:Has it made it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sun's sphere of influence isn't going to be static. The sphere will adjust with effects of solar output and who knows what forces from the other side. It could very well be that it did pass the threshold at one point and the heliosphere adjusted to some conditions and caught back up to the space craft.

Re:Has it made it ?

[Immerman]

As they state, it is currently within the heliosheath - the turbulent boundary layer between Sol's plasma bubble and the interstellar medium, so it's outside the region thoroughly dominated by the sun's influence, but not yet within the interstellar medium. Quite an interesting region in it's own right, but not terribly informative of either bounding environment.

Re:Has it made it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have that backwards... if he were writing a scientific dissertation, then he should stick to the more formal, for English, Sun. All of the English language astrophysics journals I've worked with used Sun, not Sol, as the formal scientific name. The only place Sol gets regular usage is in informal discussion, particular by science fiction geeks.

Re:Has it made it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

... or it just indicates a hardware failure.... /duck

Re:Has it made it ?

[bbecker23]

...reading a libro...

Of course not! I'd say "Estoy leyendo un libro."

Re:Has it made it ?

[mbone]

I was wondering exactly that. I wonder how you would tell ?

Always the frontrunner?

[Coisiche]

It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1. I'm not that hopeful though. I think that the head start Voyager 1 has means that it always will be more remote from Earth than anything else constructed here. Excluding Pioneer 10, that is.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[MickyTheIdiot]

Not in our lifetime. The CEOs and the politicians all need new Ferraris!

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[lw7av]

We won't be able to overtake but a space probe could in the immediate future (50 yrs). Plasma/ion propulsion and solar sail technologies are being developed with deep space exploration in mind.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[mbone]

It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1. I'm not that hopeful though. I think that the head start Voyager 1 has means that it always will be more remote from Earth than anything else constructed here. Excluding Pioneer 10, that is.

Voyager 1 is currently the most distant man-made object, and is more distant than Pioneer 10.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[invid]

Voyager 1's current speed is 17.46 km/s. That's fast, but the speed of light is about 299,792 km/s. We could right now, using nuclear propulsion and spending ridiculous amounts of money, we could reach about 10000 km/s and reach Voyager.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[vlm]

It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1. I'm not that hopeful though. I think that the head start Voyager 1 has means that it always will be more remote from Earth than anything else constructed here. Excluding Pioneer 10, that is.

There's some planetary alignment issues such that it would be really hard to catch Voyager. The New Horizons probe, despite being something like the fastest probe ever launched, is moving considerably slower because it had unfavorable gravitational assists, something like 10% slower than voyager. The planets have to line up, unless you do something ridiculous like launch a tennis ball a Saturn-V

Both are practically slow crawling compared to the Helios probes from the late 70s/early 80s which were moving something like 6 times the speed, although toward the sun not away. The Helios probes are still the fastest controllable "things" produced by mankind. The "controllable" is necessary because there's a famous nuke bomb test film where analysis of adjacent frames shows a manhole cover moving about about 0.1c... at least for a little while.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Sponge Bath]

CEOs and the politicians all need new Ferraris!

Average people all need new mobile phones and x-boxes, when they could have pooled that money for space exploration. CEOs and politicians make easy targets.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

What in gods name are you blabbering about?
Do you know how slow those ancient things are going at?
A shuttle could (have) overtake(n) it.

This isn't even going in to the new engines we are developing now for the next generations of spaceships all around the world.
If those actually come out any time soon, we most likely could reach those things in our lifetimes. (from around an average of 30~ and given good-ish health)

Hell, at that point in time, who knows what we would know compared to now.
Don't even begin to think we fully understand physics, we don't. We have some basic ideas that follow some observation pretty loosely. (ESPECIALLY standard model of all things)
We are only just beginning to get a grasp on the standard model now that we may have found Higgs, keyword may. Some evidence for dark matter has also been popping up recently, but we still have no idea what it actually is and will take something stupidly more expensive than LHC in order to possibly not find it or even anything at all. (I guess they could always say "b-b-b-but high energy physics! fusion! WARP SPEED!" or something along those lines, they only need to impress some people in pololotics, not that hard)
Black holes still plague one of the only theories we have for large-scale.
Maybe in half a century from now we might have a better clue, but we are still in the toddler stage at best.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[SpaghettiPattern]

It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1. I'm not that hopeful though.

For me the Infinite Improbability Drive is a fact as we're only limited by our own imagination.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Forty Two Tenfold]

So it's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the "masses?" Fuck you.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1.

Keep in mind that with the small velocities that our probes are leaving the Earth with at the moment, a small change of initial velocity makes for a big change in asymptotic velocity as the craft flies through the shallow parts of the gravity well (i.e., when it is far away). That means that we can already do that today.

You don't even need to integrate any trajectory to find this out, that's simple physics the kind of which I was doing in high school. Just calculate the kinetic + potential energy balance of the Sun-Earth-spacecraft system. Just escaping the Sun means balancing the (negative) potential energy of the probe within Sun's gravity well. The balance is v_terminal^2*m*(1/2) = E_p + v_initial^2*m*(1/2), where E_p is negative, of course, and v_initial is the speed relative to the Sun after leaving the Earth ("leaving the Earth" meaning here "getting far away enough so that the remaining potential energy caused by the presence of Earth won't skew the results too much"). If v_initial is 42.1 kps, you'll end up with v_terminal = 0. You'll get that if you leave Earth with initial speed of 16.6 kps which you can calculate in a similar manner. Now as to the the deltas to initial velocity of 16.6 kps near Earth and respective final velocities relative to the Sun in the infinity:

extra 1 kps => 10.6

extra 2 kps => 15

extra 3 kps => 18.4

extra 4 kps => 21.2

There are diminishing returns, but you can overtake Voyager 1 by having extra 3 kps when leaving the Earth *at any time*. The reason Voyager 1 is so fast despite having left Earth at a very modest velocity are the four grav assists. Today, all you need is the same ion engine that Dawn has and you're well on the way much faster than any probe before.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell high school did you go to? The most they taught is my school is how to balance a check book and not everyone understood that...

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[JoshuaZ]

The manhole in question went 45 miles a second. That's around 70 kilometers a second whereas the speed of light is around 3*10^5 km/s. So it was going around .002 the speed of light, which is still very damn impressive but is a lot less than .1c. See http://professionalparanoid.wordpress.com/the-fastest-man-made-object-ever-a-nuclear-powered-manhole-cover-true/ for more about the manhole cover and the circumstances of its launch.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, you think a shuttle was designed & built to travel 11 billion miles into deep space?

Either you're a great troll or a complete moron.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Overtaking it's possition really isn't a problem. It's a question of why you're send the probe. These probes were sent out to explore planets. Everything the did after that, what they're doing today, is gravy. But they needed a set amount of time at each planet to do their research correctly.
 
Now if we were sending a probe to a local star we could justify the probe going faster. We would have to since the closest planet is over 4 light years away and these probes aren't even a light day away after 35 years of travel. We're talking 10s of thousands of years for them to get to a distance equal that of the closest star.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[NatasRevol]

Yeah, but that ~1kps difference needs to make up 10 billion km.

That's about 315 years. So your new probe has to last that long. At least.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[KernelMuncher]

ha ha - great story about the world's fastest manhole cover ! That should have it's own slashdot entry.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Errol backfiring]

Not likely. The voyagers have used the position of the planets (a bit like a slingshot, using those planet's gravity), which were extraordinarily good at the time of launch. It will take a few centuries or millennia before we hit such a good position again. Space travel is not a question of hitting the gas pedal as hard as possible.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[jj00]

I've often thought about this, and while I don't know much about this stuff other than from a fan's perspective, I have always been curious why we don't send another Voyager-style craft into space every 10-20 years. Each craft could take advantage of improvements in our technology, and possibly be cheaper since it would be based on the same design. Each one could communicate back to the other instead of having to reach back to Earth on its own, kind of like a repeater. Also, if anything would go wrong with one of them, there would be another one not too far behind.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes that's why the tortoise with a head start always stays ahead of the hare.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Atzanteol]

Yes - but Pioneer 10 is moving away from us faster than Voyager 1 is - so at some point it will overtake.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[spectrokid]

How about ion engines, or solar sails?

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

the money the politicians get is public, that from average people is private. That makes a hell of a distinction

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[mbone]

I have tried to get some people at NASA Advanced Concepts interested in a voyage to Sedna (now near perihelion at ~ 89 AU). Sedna is especially interesting because of its orbit - there is a chance it is an interloper from another solar system. It's so far away that a trip in a reasonable time would require a higher velocity than Voyager.

Note, by the way, that the next double Jupiter - Saturn orbital assist would require Jupiter passage ~ 2018 and Saturn passage in ~ 2019. These only repeat every 19.87 years, so we better get to it. With a double gravity assist and ion propulsion, we could get to Sedna in a reasonable time.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

The CEOs started the class warfare in 1981.

Oh, and the current velocity of Voyager 1 is only 17,060 m/s. That's 5.691 x 10^-5 of the speed of light. If we sped up just 100 fold, we'd still be at thousandths of the speed of light, but catch up in less than six months.

But thank you for again demonstrating that Republicans have no sense of proportion.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[mbone]

Sorry, but wrong. Voyager I overtook Pioneer 10 in 1998 :

Until 17 February 1998, the heliocentric radial distance of Pioneer 10 has been greater than that of any other manmade object. But late on that date Voyager 1's heliocentric radial distance, in the approximate apex direction, equaled that of Pioneer 10 at 69.419 AU. Thereafter, Voyager 1's distance will exceed that of Pioneer 10 at the approximate rate of 1.016 AU per year.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ion engines need plasma to eject - that means more mass even if it only ejects tiny, tiny, tiny amounts it will take hundreds of years to reach any speed.

solar sails quickly become useless as the solar pressure fades. I'd rather have ion engines.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[mbone]

Well,V1 had only 2 gravity assists...

And, as I posted above, the Jupiter-Saturn dual gravity assists come up every 19.87 years - the next will be at the end of the decade.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

How could Pioneer 10 have been launched first, been the most distant object in 1997, been passed by Voyager 1, and pass Voyager 1 again? There's no further acceleration, and, for any reasonable human time frame, the solar system is essentially moving in a straight line.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[InfiniteZero]

> manhole cover moving about about 0.1c

A manhole cover has a mass over 50kg. Traveling at 0.1C, it's kinetic energy would be over 2x10^18 joules, which is about half a gigaton TNT equivalent.

By comparison, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated had a yield of 50 megatons.

Moral of the story: never underestimate the venerable C (when compared to human scale objects and measurements).

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[mbone]

There was the TAU 1000 AU probe, which was to be sold on parallax measurements (i.e., astronomy). I didn't regard that as compelling.

More interesting are the suggestions of a probe to the solar gravitational lens focus, at 688.81 AU (or greater) (for light - it is less than that for gravitational waves or neutrinos, as they pass through the Sun, while light has to go around the Sun).

At that distance or greater, you could use the Sun as a telescope and greatly magnify any remote object at any frequency (and also for gravitational waves and neutrino's). Trouble is, it would be hard to point it at more than one or two targets (as you would have to move the spacecraft 11 AU / deg to do so). You could (I am sure) arrange a trajectory to get 2 or 3 or maybe even 4 objects over time, but that's not many objects for a multi-decade mission.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[C0R1D4N]

I think the pluto express would have done that, but it was canned.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[necro81]

For what it is worth: Voyager 1 travels faster than Pioneer 10, and overtook it (in terms of distance from the sun) many years ago. Pioneer 10 is 16.8 billion km from the sun, traveling at 12.0 km/sec. Voyager 1 is 20 billion km away, traveling at 17.0 km/sec. New Horizons, currently en route to Pluto, will also head out from the solar system. It also went on a very fast trajectory (e.g., it achieved sun escape velocity directly from launch, rather than through gravity assists). However, New Horizons has already slowed to a velocity less than Voyager 1 (15.2 km/sec), and won't ever overtake it.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Atzanteol]

Brain-fart - I got that completely backwards! Back to coding...

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Atzanteol]

It's always that one thing that you're pretty sure of and don't bother to fact-check before posting that bites you in the ass. I got the two missions reversed. :-\

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

he was obviously solely referring to the speed. comprehension is hard.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah the ones that did not understand our running our country

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[amRadioHed]

Shuttle speed = 7.5 km/s
Voyager 1 speed = 17 km/s

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

It always gets on my nerves when I see you Yanks (I am assuming you are one) writing about "kps" and "kph" and "kpwhatever". The correct, dimensionally explanatory writing for that is "km/s" - "km/h" - etc.

Yeah, posting anonymously. SFW!

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[NatasRevol]

No, he said the shuttle could have overtaken Voyager. Even if was actually faster, which it's not, it was not built to endure long distance space travel.

So, it couldn't have on two accounts.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[serviscope_minor]

It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1.

We've reached it.

Voyager 1 is travelling at 17km/s.

New horizons is travelling at 15km/s.

It's unlikely that a passive probe will reach Voyager 1, since it made use of a very handy planetary arrangement which won't happen again any time soon, but we can still get probes to nearly the same speed.

A new probe such as Dawn is capable of a 10km/s velocity change after launch, compared to less than 0.25 for New Horizons. With that propolusion, a new interplanetary probe could be launched which could reach 25km/s, significantly faster than Voyager, though it would take a while to catch up.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[qvatch]

wouldn't that be 0.0002c? (extra zero) https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=72.42048km+per+second+%2Fc

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Iniamyen]

The manhole in question went 45 miles a second. That's around 70 kilometers a second whereas the speed of light is around 3*10^5 km/s. So it was going around .002 the speed of light, which is still very damn impressive but is a lot less than .1c. See http://professionalparanoid.wordpress.com/the-fastest-man-made-object-ever-a-nuclear-powered-manhole-cover-true/ for more about the manhole cover and the circumstances of its launch.

So... much... awesome.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://professionalparanoid.wordpress.com/the-fastest-man-made-object-ever-a-nuclear-powered-manhole-cover-true/ for more about the manhole cover and the circumstances of its launch.

Great link, I've never even heard of this story. What I don't understand is how the velocity could be accurately calculated with the manhole cover in only a single frame. If the first frame has the manhole cover sitting, the second has it airborne, and the third shows it out of the field of view, you could calculate a minimum velocity, but there's not way of knowing specifically when the manhole cover launched or when it left the field of view of the camera. You would need two airborne frames. Or am I missing something?

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been curious about this too. Wouldn't it be pretty cheap to send a probe similar to Voyager (but maybe with better imaging and sensors, and a larger power source) into deep space? And maybe even start it on a bigger rocket so that it has a greater initial velocity and could even overtake Voyager in a relatively short amount of time? I'm sure there are good reasons, but I would love to hear the answers from someone who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[jandrese]

Not too soon, but it's not impossible to think of a RTG powered ion drive probe that could continuously accelerate out of the solar system and overtake Voyager after a few years

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you are coding, do you ever say "Shoot, I completely effed that up. Back to Slashdot!"?

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I'm European and I'm trying to localize my writing for the majority of readers here (decimal point instead of decimal comma etc.). For the local public and for myself, I use kms^-1 by default, no silly slashes. If I were writing for Reader's Digest, I'd even convert it to furlongs per fortnight, or whatever it is that the Americans use in their measurements.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Moridineas]

This is the reason I still read slashdot. Awesome link, thanks for posting.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[mbone]

NP.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[default luser]

Are we REALLY capable of speeds that fast?

My off-the-cuff calculations (assuming we take a direct path and are always at that speed) have us catching up with Voyager after just 21 days. I'm sure even with proper orbital mechanics taken into account we could do it it inside of 100 days.

I find it hard to believe we have the technology to crush 35 years of space flight into 100 days.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Oh, you're right. I got that mixed up. It seems that Voyager 1 simply ended up on a faster resulting trajectory.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[cusco]

They the data from the collimator in the shaft as to the exact moment that the blast wave hit the cover, and then one from showing how far the cover had traveled since the blast wave's arrival. Those two points should be sufficient to give a rough estimate as to its velocity. I don't agree with the author about the cover's final destination though, as it's hard to believe that atmospheric resistance could suck the momentum out of a four foot wide, four inch thick chunk of solid steel in the second and a half that it would have taken to exit the troposphere. IANARS however, so that's just my own gut feeling talking.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[cusco]

The 'why' is that war is more important than science, at least in the capital cities of Earth where budgetary decisions are being made. Apollo got the nod from the Pentagon in part because the various branches of the military recognized that they were incompetent to design a large scale ICBM on their own, and were even less prepared to work together under a single umbrella. Once the Saturn I was successful the Pentagon had no further use for the space program, and if you ever visit Kennedy Space Center, Vandenburg, or a couple of the other NASA sites you'll see the hardware for further lunar missions sitting in their museums unused because Washington canceled their funding.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[JoshuaZ]

Ugh, typo. Yes, you are correct, thanks for catching that.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

So... much... awesome.

So... much... awesome. :)

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[hackertourist]

There are a few reasons. Celestial mechanics is a big one: Voyager 2 took advantage of a rare planetary conjunction so it could visit all four of the gas giants. The next chance to do that is in something like 150 years.
Most of the time you'd be spending $$$ on a fly-by of one planet, and that money would be better spent on a mission that can orbit that planet instead. So instead of Voyager-style craft, you get missions like these:
Cassini-Huygens: Saturn and its moons
Dawn: Vesta in 2011-2012, and Ceres in 2014
Galileo: Jupiter and its moons
Juno Spacecraft Mission: Jupiter-bound for polar orbit in 2016
Magellan: Venus orbiter
Mariner program: Venus, Mars, and first to Mercury
Messenger: Mercury
New Horizons: Pluto and its moons in 2015
Curiosity et al: Mars

Having the probes act as relays won't work when you launch them at 10-year intervals. After 10 years, you need a 26-meter antenna or even larger to communicate with the probe. It would also require the probes to be sent out in the same general direction, but 10 years later the planets will be in different places. Again, no planet to visit=expensive space relay.

The Pioneers and Voyagers were hugely important as a first step, but they raised more questions than they answered. At the same time, they provided information that was necessary to design probes for the environment they'd find at each planet. The extreme radiation of Jupiter for example.
NASA is using that information and methodically answering those questions by sending probes to each individual planet for more detailed observations than a Voyager-style flyby could ever make.

Once the Voyagers are truly outside the solar system, the data they'll yield then can be used to create a new mission to follow the Voyagers out of the solar system for more detailed observation of that environment.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh.

Bronies. They happen like lice.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

A new probe such as Dawn is capable of a 10km/s velocity change after launch, compared to less than 0.25 for New Horizons. With that propolusion, a new interplanetary probe could be launched which could reach 25km/s, significantly faster than Voyager, though it would take a while to catch up.

My calculation shows that a probe launched from LEO at the speed of New Horizons with a Dawn-like 10 kms^-1 delta-V shortly after the launch will reach a terminal velocity of 30 kms^-1. But you probably wouldn't have any problem with putting more fuel on board, so I think that 35-40 kms^-1 is a reasonable short-term goal without having to develop anything new and wildly crazy. Optimization between the short initial chemical burn phase and long-term ion propulsion phase seems to be the interesting topic here.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

this needs to be modded up

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[shutdown -p now]

Keep in mind that, in space, so long as you keep accelerating, your speed keeps growing. At a constant acceleration of 1g, it would take 12 days to get you to 10 Mm/s. 36 days would get you to 0.1c.

The trick is sustaining that 1g for that long. There were some quick calculations done for Project Orion that put it at just about feasible, though requiring a massive construction and engineering project of the magnitude never seen before.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[turbidostato]

"A shuttle could (have) overtake(n) it."

No, it wouldn't. The shuttle had neither the absolute range nor the top speed (that's what limited it to low earth orbit) to overtake the Voyagers.

"This isn't even going in to the new engines we are developing now for the next generations of spaceships all around the world."

I don't think you have a clear idea how fast those probes are moving nor how much of a head start 30 years means.

I *hope* we can overtake the Voyagers in the next two centuries but I'm certainly not confident on it.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[khallow]

It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1.

We already are at such a level. Voyager 1 travels only at 0.005% of the speed of light. 0.1% or so of the speed of light is achievable with reasonable ISP electric propulsion (let's say powered by an RTG) and a modest mass fraction. That's about 20 times the speed of Voyager 1. It would take about 2 years at that speed to catch up to where Voyager 1 is now.

Now if Voyager were traveling at 1% of the speed of light, then it might well remain the most distance human device ever made. But frankly, it's not traveling anywhere near fast enough, unless humanity should choose in the not very distant future some permanent way to prevent such innovations.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[khallow]

as it's hard to believe that atmospheric resistance could suck the momentum out of a four foot wide, four inch thick chunk of solid steel in the second and a half that it would have taken to exit the troposphere.

Well, keep in mind that each square inch of surface area has to push about 6.5 kg of air. If you have a square of the alleged thickness of the cover moving face on, it is pushing along about 15,000 kg of air, but the slab itself weights about 750 kg. So the cover, if face on, collides with about 20 times its mass in air. Even if it is moving edge on, it'll still run into around 1250 kg of air. That's still 50% more mass than the cover has.

In the former case, that would mean that the cover would decelerate from its initial 45 km/s to suborbital speed (and probably vaporize in the process). Even in the edge-on case, it's going to slow down by somewhere around 40% (which drops the speed of the door to under 30 km/s, which in turn is dropped another 7km/s by exiting the Earth's gravitational field. Whether that is enough to escape the Solar System, depends on what direction the cover was heading.

Glancing around, the test seems to have been done at 22:30 utc, which puts it in the afternoon facing a little behind (and plenty to the side) of the direction of travel for Earth in orbit around the Sun. That probably means that even if the manhole cover in question survived passage through Earth's atmosphere, it probably wasn't fast enough in its direction of travel to escape the Solar System.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[cusco]

This is why I keep coming back to SlashDot all these years.

Re:Always the frontrunner?

[hobarrera]

Or it would be nice to start developing technologies for more pressing matters, like all the thousands that die of hunger/thirst daily, etc, etc.

iPod

[SJHillman]

"Each only has 68 kilobytes of computer memory. To put that in perspective, the smallest iPod — an 8-gigabyte iPod Nano — is 100,000 times more powerful."

So what you're saying is that if I upgrade my computer from a 500GB hard disk to a 2TB hard disk, it makes the entire computer 4 times more powerful?

Re:iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

The article was written by not just a journalist, but by a woman. Just be glad that the math is semi-correct.

Re:iPod

[History's Coming To]

I think they're comparing RAM with solid state storage space, so it's even more nonsensical.

Re:iPod

[twistedcubic]

This is the best analogy I've ever seen.

Re:iPod

[jkflying]

If hard drive space was your bottleneck - yes. Imagine if every time you tried to store more than 500GB you had to swap out to tape...

Re:iPod

[prefec2]

It is one of those new measurement units, like football fields or bathtubs.

Re:iPod

[necro81]

So what you're saying is that if I upgrade my computer from a 500GB hard disk to a 2TB hard disk, it makes the entire computer 4 times more powerful

According to what passes for science and technology journalism in this day and age, yes.

Re:iPod

[Rich0]

Yup, it is about 68K of RAM split across a bunch of processors, and another 68k or so of tape storage. I don't know how usable the tape drive is now.

Re:iPod

[mbone]

My understanding is that they still use the tape drive. When there is no longer enough power to do so, the ability to get data back will take a real hit.

Re:iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends if you put a racing stripe on the side of the computer, and of what colour.

For the record, my computer has 1.77 bathtubs of processing power.

Re:iPod

[Rich0]

Makes sense. It seems to me that the deep space network is remarkably limiting for what it is used for.

How much does it cost to get a probe to Pluto, vs what it costs to build an antenna to talk to it? Unless those dishes are REALLY expensive it almost seems silly to not have near-realtime communications with them (well, light delay aside).

I realize they're big dishes that cost millions to put up, but we're talking about probes that cost MANY times that much to launch and operate.

Sexy

[wonkey_monkey]

slowly but steadily pushing through the heliosheath

Phwoar!

They just don't build 'em like they used to.

[Anonymous Coward]

35 years in space is a difficult thing to achieve, not to mention hideously expensive, but would it really be so hard for regular manufacturers to learn from this and just make normal consumer devices that last a bit longer than a two year warranty, say ten years or so? Now that most tech is fine as-is do we really have to obsolete everything once the next-big-thing comes out?

Re:They just don't build 'em like they used to.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Depends on what compromises you are willing to accept, really...

One big killer in consumer electronics is that(if the state of the shelves is to be taken as indicative of what customers actually want) people apparently care more about devices being thin than about batteries being standardized, or replaceable at all... Barring a minor miracle on the Li-ion side, that provides a nice, hard, cap on the viable lifespan of most portables. It wouldn't be rocket surgery to standardize batteries(even if the AA is a bit old school, a standardized Li-ion rectangle could probably be CADed up in about 20 minutes and then entirely ignored by the industry at large); but there seems to be minimal interest in doing so.

Most of the rest would come down to either accepting component choices that are bad for BOM costs(ie. electrolytic capacitors are delightfully cheap for the performance they give; but they are born to die, doubly so in toasty environments, all solid caps is better, but costs rather more) or would constrain you to performance that is somewhat behind the curve(people run 130watt processors, with their demand for moving parts in the cooling system and tendency to cook their own smoothing caps, because they want something faster than a 1-10 watt processor can survive...)

Especially since it doesn't need to be rad-hard, you could probably build many contemporary consumer devices for a 35 year life span for not more than 2-3x the cost and a rather bulkier case; but good luck selling that...

Re:They just don't build 'em like they used to.

[ACS Solver]

You seem to know what you're talking about, so I'll ask - what's your take on supercapacitors? Are the problems with them surmountable to the point where they could be expected to replace typical consumer batteries?

Re:They just don't build 'em like they used to.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are great for power density, but still two orders of magnitude behind on energy density. In the time that it will take research to find a way to increase energy density by that much, research on battery tech may have advanced by some significant amount to. That is a long ways to look forward to make a call on what tech will be in the lead.

Re:They just don't build 'em like they used to.

[colinrichardday]

Would you still a 1992 desktop, even if the parts were fine?

Re:They just don't build 'em like they used to.

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't be rocket surgery to standardize batteries(even if the AA is a bit old school, a standardized Li-ion rectangle could probably be CADed up in about 20 minutes and then entirely ignored by the industry at large); but there seems to be minimal interest in doing so.

Usually, standardization of an expendable product happens only when military starts using it and demands multiple sources, predictable performance, high supply and low price. To achieve the latter two, industry must optimize production for high volume and offer the product to civilian market.

If Li-ion is not standardized, it probably means it is either not demanded by armed forces, or the price and logistics costs doesn't matter any more. I am more inclined to believe in that other option - military is milking cow of industry today and there is no opposition to defense spending going through the roof to assure high profits. It would require a serious, long-term conflict on WWII level to restore frugality and common sense in the business that war is.

2020?

[hamvil]

In the article they say that Voyager has fuel until 2020. What is the fuel for? Communications? Or also for maneuvering? Which orbit will it follows after there is no more fuel?

Re:2020?

[SJHillman]

It's nuclear powered, so I believe it's just enough fuel to maintain its current minimal levels of operation until 2020, after which it will be little more than a chunk of metal floating through space.

Re:2020?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Communications, I believe. It is just going where its inertia takes it at this point, and heading out of the solar system. It is obviously still under the gravitational influence of bodies in the solar system(and all the other ones, as best we can tell); but it isn't on a path that would be described as an 'orbit' in anything like the usual use of the term.

Re:2020?

[mbone]

The two Voyagers are gyroscope stabilized, so they don't need fuel for attitude control.

They are powered by Plutonium 238 RTG's, and that power is steadily declining as the Plutonium decays and the thermocouples age. I think that is what the article is referring to. I wouldn't call them fuel.

Re:2020?

[ocularsinister]

I remember reading somewhere (National Geographic?) that they need to use some energy to keep the electronics warm enough to operate. Its probably still *very* cold in there, but the few milliwatts of heat provides just enough to stop the electronics packing up.

Re:2020?

[camperdave]

The fuel they speak of is hydrazine, and it is used for maneuvering; specifically for maintaining the orientation of the craft so that the antenna is pointed Earthward, and also to spin the craft about its axis periodically to recalibrate some of the sensors. The electronics are powered by three nuclear batteries, which are also expected to "run out" at about the same time. From Wikipedia:

Both spacecraft also have adequate electrical power and attitude control propellant to continue operating until around 2025, after which there may not be available electrical power to support science instrument operation. At that time, science data return and spacecraft operations will cease.

Re:2020?

[jschen]

The power of the plutonium RTGs continually declining is one issue, as already noted. Another issue is the finite amount of hydrazine on board for what little maneuvering may need to be done. See the last paragraph of this page and this article.

Re:2020?

[Velex]

It's nuclear powered, so I believe it's just enough fuel to maintain its current minimal levels of operation until 2020, after which it will be little more than a chunk of metal floating through space.

Probably, but to karma whore a bit, as Sagan writes in Pale Blue Dot (pp 124-125):

Accordingly, as each Voyager left Earth for the planets and the stars, it carried with it a golden phonograph record encased in a golden, mirrored jacket containing, among other things: greetings in 59 human languages, and one whale language; a 12-minute sound essay including a kiss, a baby's cry, and an EEG record of the meditations of a young woman in love; 116 encoded pictures, on our science, our civilization, and ourselves; and 90 minutes of the Earth's greatest hits—Eastern and Western, classical and folk, including a Navajo night chant, a Japanese shakuhachi piece, a Pygmy girl's initiation song, a Peruvian wedding song, a 3,000-year-old composition for the ch'in called "Flowering Streams," Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Blind willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."

Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system...

But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we—otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space—perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records.

Re:2020?

[Anonymous Coward]

Im going to be very sad in 2025 when voyager finally dies :(

Re:2020?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this sucker is electrical. I just need the plutonium to get the 1.8 Jigawatts to allow timetravel.
The RTG won't produce enough power to power coms, at which point it will be a warm rock in space for the next 1000 years.

Re:2020?

[hobarrera]

I wonder if we'll ever retrieve Voyager 1 on some distant future or not. It'd sure be an interesting relic for our space-traveling descendants.

Voyager 2 launched first?

[Comboman]

So Voyager 2 was launched weeks before Voyager 1? Was the launch schedule changed at the last minute?

Re:Voyager 2 launched first?

[Jason Levine]

George Lucas is to blame. He edited the order in Voyager: Special Edition.

Re:Voyager 2 launched first?

[Daetrin]

Not only that, but...

"Since the spacecraft are so far out, it takes 17 hours for a radio signal from Voyager 1 to travel to Earth. For Voyager 2, it takes about 13 hours."

So Voyager 2 launched before Voyager 1, but despite that (fairly trivial) headstart of a couple weeks, Voyager 1 has traveled almost 30% farther than Voyager 2. Clearly there's some kind of tortoise and hare thing going on here. Perhaps it's time to start reading wikipedia :)

Re:Voyager 2 launched first?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Voyager 2 was launched weeks before Voyager 1? Was the launch schedule changed at the last minute?

No. Per this:

http://space.about.com/od/spaceexplorationhistory/p/voyager1.htm

"Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, but because of a faster route, it exited the asteroid belt earlier than its twin. It began its Jovian imaging mission in April 1978 at a range of 265 million kilometers from the planet; images sent back by January the following year indicated that Jupiter's atmosphere was more turbulent than during the Pioneer flybys in 1973 and 1974."

Re:Voyager 2 launched first?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Construct two space vehicles.
2. Number them with #1 and #2.
3. Launch #2 *before* the #1.
4. Steer the late #1 so that it overtakes #2.
5. Lean back and observe the confusion when people try to figure out which one is "first".

Re:Voyager 2 launched first?

[mbone]

You left out

7. Profit !!!!

Re:Voyager 2 launched first?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Voyager 2 was launched weeks before Voyager 1?

No. Per this:

http://space.about.com/od/spaceexplorationhistory/p/voyager1.htm

"Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, but because of a faster route, it exited the asteroid belt earlier than its twin. It began its Jovian imaging mission in April 1978 at a range of 265 million kilometers from the planet; images sent back by January the following year indicated that Jupiter's atmosphere was more turbulent than during the Pioneer flybys in 1973 and 1974."

In other words, yes.

Some kind of dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Voyager seems to be "heading for the stars" once every six months:
- http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/06/15/0115226/new-signs-voyager-is-nearing-interstellar-space
- http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/14/012219/voyager-and-the-coming-great-hiatus-in-deep-space
- http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/12/07/2127247/voyager-1-exits-our-solar-system
- http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/04/28/2314203/voyager-set-to-enter-interstellar-space
- http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/14/1451216/voyager-1-beyond-solar-wind

Re:Some kind of dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

And funnily enough it won't be before very long that it starts getting closer to another star than it is from the one it is escaping from. So saying that it is "heading for the stars" is actually a bit wrong...

Re:Some kind of dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA designed this redundancy to retransmit in case we missed one of the earlier messages.

Re:Some kind of dupe

[SJHillman]

Won't be very long? Voyager won't be near another star system for roughly 350,000 years. That's more than 30 times the length of recorded history.

Re:Some kind of dupe

[Teresita]

Voyager seems to be "heading for the stars" once every six months

The Linux Desktop is headed for the stars. You'll see!

Re:Some kind of dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't be very long? Voyager won't be near another star system for roughly 350,000 years. That's more than 30 times the length of recorded history.

That's wy the GP wrote: "it won't be before very long"...

Re:Some kind of dupe

[mat.power]

Thank you! This is something that has bothered me every time one of these news stories gets posted.

Re:Some kind of dupe

[Hentes]

Because the Solar system doesn't have a clearcut borderline, crossing the heliosphere takes time.

Re:Some kind of dupe

[clovis]

That is correct. We're all hoping it does not turn around and come back.

Re:Some kind of dupe

[mbone]

That should be good for roughly 700,000 more press releases !

(On a more serious note, they have an elastic definition of "near" - 0.8 light years, IIRC.)

Re:Some kind of dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, this time we're even more sure of it!

A trail of breadcrumbs

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1. I'm not that hopeful though. I think that the head start Voyager 1 has means that it always will be more remote from Earth than anything else constructed here. Excluding Pioneer 10, that is.

We should have had planned and launched follower communication relay spacecrafts to maintain communication with them.

But even though we didn't, I've heard that interstellar space should be a bit denser environment then interior of our Sun's heliosphere, so perhaps if they are slowed down by friction, an accelerating craft (solar sailboat or RTG powered ion rocket engine) could eventually catch up with them and keep in their radio communication range?

Re:A trail of breadcrumbs

[SJHillman]

Odds are that they'll run out of fuel long before we lose communication and/or a relay craft could catch up enough to make a difference. They estimate about eight years left.

35 years form now

[Chrisq]

35 years form now we won't have any similar legacy from what we are doing now.

Re:35 years form now

[asylumx]

Holy Trollie!

Re:35 years form now

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus the Republitards gave all the money to their buddies in banking & the military industrial complex.

Orders of magnitude more than welfare.

Re:35 years form now

[multipartmixed]

Yes, we will have the top 1% of the top 1% of 1% of income earners so far above the middle class that they will appear to have overtaken Voyager 1 by several lightyears.

Re:35 years form now

[Dragonslicer]

Because the evil democrat liberals gutted NASA and give our tax money to the welfare bums who refuse to work. Enjoy your new America all you slash fools that hate it.

6/10. I had to deduct a point for spelling "liberals" correctly.

Re:35 years form now

[Jeng]

I never have heard of a true end of life date for Curiosity, and the Cassini probe is already beyond it's initial mission and now is in an extended mission.

Also depending on the final parking position of Opportunity it may stop moving, but it could still send out useful data.

Waiting for the astounded scientists.

[Drethon]

Every time we have a new way of viewing the universe it seems like scientists get results mildly or completely different from what they expect. I'm looking forward to the possibility of the data coming back from Voyager completely conflicting with expectations and resulting in new theories.

Re:Waiting for the astounded scientists.

[bazorg]

yes, like when Truman Burbank sailed into that wall....

Re:Waiting for the astounded scientists.

[Anonymous Coward]

And then went up the steps and out the door in the freakin' sky! ...not only that, "they" had cameras recording the event. Top that, v'ger!

Re:Waiting for the astounded scientists.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder that too. It must be nice to work in a field where no one can prove your work wrong. I get the impression of a bunch of people trying to justify or find something so they can all pat each other on the back. They take 34 theories and combine them into a single theory to explain what they are looking at. I read about this star that was absorbing a planet in sector G and they know this because of a red shift or a dark spot or some type of color change seen in that area of space. In reality, no one knows what the hell is going on and what was observed could probably be explained in 20 different ways with 20 different results. Our own sun is supposed to last another 4-5 billion years. If it lasts 1 hundred or 20 billion, someone will have a reason why the 4 billion number was wrong.

Re:Waiting for the astounded scientists.

[Drethon]

Well when we have only had an excellent view of the universe (Hubble telescope) and a few centuries at most of observing a universe that is supposed to have progressed for billions of years, its no wonder. Yes we are supposed to be able to use red shift and distance to determine a picture being older and then putting all these pictures together to form a timeline... but just because one star is pictured at a time before another star was pictured doesn't mean that the star pictured at the older age is younger. We are trying to piece together a really large movie from a few frames...

Re:Waiting for the astounded scientists.

[Anonymous Coward]

points for creative thinking!

Where are they now?

[Jawnn]

I though V....ger went off-line in 1998.

Send More Chuck Berry!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah the good old days.

Re:Why are our tax dollars funding this junk?

[armanox]

Because science, that's why. Because it's useful, employs people, and leads us to a better understanding of the universe. Saying that science is wasting our money while ignoring the elephants in the room is insane.

Mod Parent Up

[sdoca]

I would if I could....

18 billion kilometers?

[Skapare]

Isn't that like 18 trillion meters or something?

Re:18 billion kilometers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh huh, although I personally prefer megameters! Now bow down and tremble before the mighty Megameters!

Re:18 billion kilometers?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's 196850000000 football fields you eurotrash gaffet.

Re:18 billion kilometers?

[Anonymous Coward]

You appear to have grasped the metric system!

Re:18 billion kilometers?

[DroolTwist]

No, it's 196850000000 football fields you eurotrash gaffet.

Which means it is roughly 23,622,000,000,000 penguins long if you stacked them end to end (using 2'6" as an average height for a penguin).

Re:18 billion kilometers?

[hobarrera]

I honestly don't know why they don't use AU for these sort of distances. It gives much more perspective than kilometers.

Correction

[InfiniteZero]

It should be 2x10^16 joules, or 5 megatons (somehow 0.1C became C in the Google equation while copy-n-pasting). A little less impressive but still highly unlikely.

Note to self: preview is your friend.

Re:Correction

[CByrd17]

Note the math correction in a previous comment that reduces the 0.1C to 0.02C.

Re:Correction

[CByrd17]

And I made an error there. .002C.

Re:Correction

[InfiniteZero]

Sounds like preview can be your friend too.

Re:Correction

[sconeu]

.0002

7e1/3e5 ~= 2e-4

Re:Correction

[Skweetis]

2 + 2 = 3.14159

(I want to join in the mistake-making, too.)

Re:Correction

[tqk]

2 + 2 = 3.14159

(I want to join in the mistake-making, too.)

It would've been easier to just mention pi ("dict pi", gcide):

2. Specifically: (Math.) The letter [pi], [Pi], as used to
                denote the number or quotient approximately expressing the
                ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter;

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. "I almost got him" means you didn't get him. :-)

As for that fastest manhole cover link, me too. Thanks.

Not really...

[xded]

Radiation damage builds up with time, see Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects. Not so easy to "tweak" silicon devices to counteract lattice displacement effects (the only real solution being not relying on the silicon lattice, i.e., working with vacuum tubes).

Re:Not really...

[tlhIngan]

Radiation damage builds up with time, see Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects. Not so easy to "tweak" silicon devices to counteract lattice displacement effects (the only real solution being not relying on the silicon lattice, i.e., working with vacuum tubes).

Well, there are other semiconductors available, and additionally, the technology Voyager was using wasn't the advanced deep-sub-micron stuff we have today where a few displaced atoms can ruin the whole thing. The old generation technology was probably using BJT transistors than NMOS (CMOS was a luxury).

As for maintenance - other than radiation and debris, there isn't much that would affect Voyager. You don't have a corrosive osxygen atmosphere like on earth causing havoc with mechanical systems. You aren't likely to have much in the way of bacteria feeding off of metal in space, either. Short of flying into a planet, even a gas cloud of oxygen won't cause many problems (the density being low).

Heck, even thermal effects are minimal at this point (most of the heat is in the nuclear RTG).

Re:Not really...

[pmc]

Why would you need vacuum tubes? You're in deep space surrounded by it - no need to keep it in tubes any more.

Re:Not really...

[tilante]

The Voyager's main ICs were custom-made, using a silicon-on-sapphire process, which helps make them radiation-resistant. From a classification point of view, it's considered a type of CMOS chip. Much of the surrounding control circuitry is, however, implemented in BJT.

One thing that almost caused problems with Voyager 2 is lubrication for the moving parts. I can't find anything about what they used for lubricant, but it would need to not boil away in vacuum, and even a very slow leak would be a problem after 35 years.

Re:Not really...

[tqk]

Why would you need vacuum tubes? You're in deep space surrounded by it - no need to keep it in tubes any more.

Just guessing, but I can think of a lot of reasons off the top of my head. Not all vacuums are equal for one thing. The glass in the tubes may be coated to make them more opaque. There's a hell of a lot of !@#$ flying around out there from inert dust through gamma ray particles and neutrinos. Or it could be as simple as minimizing heat changes. That cold, stuff gets brittle. Brittle things break more easily.

I'd also like to chime in and say I think it's seriously cool that these things are still going and communicating back. I was in my early twenties when they were launched. Bravo.

Cool stuff

[clovis]

Whatever else we may think about the USA, they have done some cool stuff from time to time.

Alpha Centauri here we come!

[Anonymous Coward]

At that speed, it will only take us 378741 years to reach Alpha Centauri! Go Team Earth!

So Amazing

[JasoninKS]

It's so amazing these two craft are still functioning at all. True, shrinking power levels and malfunctions have ended the life of some instrumentation. But 35 years alone with no chance of repairs and still pumping out valuable data! It's just incredible. I can't imagine that a 35+ year lifespan was even in anyone's wildest dreams. Hoped for, certainly...but to actually do it? Wow. So many things could've gone wrong. Hardware failure, software failure, micro-meteors, radiation, solar flare, human error in steering...any of hundreds of things. It actually makes me curious what the Voyager craft look like now. I'd imagine they look a little beat up from the dust they've run into.

162,000 mph... Re:Always the frontrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn. 45 miles/sec sounds works out to 162,000 mph (or 70km/sec at 252,000 kph). Really fast projectile weapons get up to 1.08 miles/sec ( tank guns firing kinetic energy penetrator ammunition ).

link for spaceprobe speeds

[peter303]

New Horizons had fastest Earth escape velocity. But it didnt have the gravitational slingslots of some of the other probes. Here is a list of velocities.

today was "round number" birthday: 35 years

[peter303]

The approximate age a slashdotter leaves his parents basement for an apartment :-)

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

You never heard of E = mv^2 in physics class?
Never calculated how high a ball would go when tossed in to the air at a certain speed?

This really is elementary physics.

I'm not American (Amsterdam represent!), but we learned that in first year middle school, when we were about 12 years old.

Re:What?

[Grishnakh]

We're not allowed to teach that kind of thing to 12-year-olds in schools here in America. Some of them might not understand it, and then they'll feel bad, so we have to dumb down our curriculum to improve their self-esteem.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

They covered that (well, KE = 0.5 mv^2) in the public American school I went to, quite early in the physics course... at least for the students that stayed awake.

My grandfather would be proud...

[vjl]

I wish my grandfather was still alive to see Voyager 1 still in operation. He worked on the batteries and electrical system on the Voyager probes, spending most of his adult life working at JPL. He would be thrilled to know that they were both still operating, exploring, and sending data back to earth. Impressive!

The longest operating?

[Anonymous Coward]

The longest operating spacecraft?
The radio amateur satellite AMSAT OSCAR 7 http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/satellites/satInfo.php?satID=9
has been launced in November 1974 (3 years before voyager) and it still works.

Of course it has been silent for a couple of years so the entire operating period is shorter.

Re:Why are our tax dollars funding this junk?

[Sentrion]

I think AC would prefer the government to auction off space exploration rights to the highest bidder. He probably sees scientific funding as academic welfare for PhD's who can't get jobs in industry (which is something like 80% or more of PhDs). There are plenty of Dems and Reps that hold ACs view, so we might need to put forth better arguments than "science is useful" and "understanding of the universe". At the end of the day it is a non-scientist with concerns for his own constituents that will be signing the checks to fund space exploration. In the 60's there was a wide presumption that humans would be harvesting resources or settling space colonies by the year 2000. So there was an implied return-on-investment. In a country where large numbers believe the world is 6,000 years old and originated from the spoken word of God you are going to have a hard time convincing them to pay you billions from their tax dollars to try to find a way to convince them that they are wrong.

Dems want programs to help people get out of poverty and Reps want smaller government. Where does NASA's budget or purpose fit within either of these political ideologies? Satisfying the insatiable desires of scientist for answers to the questions that drive them is not necessarily going to directly benefit the majority of voting taxpayers. If you discover that the meaning of the Universe is 42 then how does that help Joe Plumber, Barbara Bankster, or Wanda on welfare? The American public loves scientists - but only when they are coming up with solutions that directly benefit the American public, like satellite TV and spin-off technologies like Kevlar. It's the main reason funding was pulled from the Super Conducting Super Collider in Texas and now we have to rely on Europe to keep the CERN project running. In the end, there is a limited amount of funding available to science, whether from public or private sources. But regardless of the source, there are probably more people interested in finding a cure for cancer than finding answers to philosophical questions.

Re:hey!

[Tablizer]

I never noticed her head.

Re:Why are our tax dollars funding this junk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reps want smaller government.

Nobody paying attention actually believes this any more.

LP

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I had a CD pulled from CM awhile ago to rebuild a project. Turns out that the media was never refreshed and no CDROM drive could read the thing. Now about this LP they strapped to the side of Voyager.....

17 hours...

[Anonymous Coward]

Light. WHY U SO SLOW

Re:hey!

[cusco]

Speaking of that, the Bald Soprano?

Re:Why are our tax dollars funding this junk?

[cusco]

there is a limited amount of funding available to science

Unfortunately there is an unlimited amount of funding available for war. Sure, the Pentagram budget didn't increase as much this year as it did a few years ago (although it's still increasing), but just let someone return fire at an American soldier and the funding floodgates will open again.

F!rst Post

[Anonymous Coward]

F!rst Post. I hope I beat out Voyager 2, since it only takes me 12 hours.