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35 Years Later, Voyager 1 Is Heading For the Stars

Posted by Soulskill on from the watch-out-for-black-holes dept.

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."

8 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. You have to give it to the engineers by PCK · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by SJHillman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by petteyg359 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    3. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:They just don't build 'em like they used to. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  3. Re:Always the frontrunner? by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Not really... by xded · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).