Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

63 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 khallow · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by DevotedSkeptic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Chief Thinker www.devotedskeptic.com
    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by wooferhound · · Score: 2

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

      --
      We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
    8. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by MxMatrix · · Score: 2

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

      --
      Bach says it all.
    9. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by Tablizer · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    10. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by Rich0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    11. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    12. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by Snodgrass · · Score: 2

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

    13. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by cusco · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      "Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
    14. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by khallow · · Score: 2

      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.

    15. Re:You have to give it to the engineers by jayteedee · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
  2. V'GER! by TaoPhoenix · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
    1. Re:V'GER! by orateam · · Score: 2

      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.

  3. Has it made it ? by mbone · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Has it made it ? by Immerman · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  4. Always the frontrunner? by Coisiche · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Always the frontrunner? by MickyTheIdiot · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Always the frontrunner? by lw7av · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Let me show you my thing; it's the most advanced on the planet.
    3. Re:Always the frontrunner? by mbone · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Always the frontrunner? by invid · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
    5. Re:Always the frontrunner? by vlm · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    6. 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.

    7. Re:Always the frontrunner? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    8. Re:Always the frontrunner? by Forty+Two+Tenfold · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

      --
      Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
    9. Re:Always the frontrunner? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    10. Re:Always the frontrunner? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      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...

    11. Re:Always the frontrunner? by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    12. Re:Always the frontrunner? by NatasRevol · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    13. Re:Always the frontrunner? by KernelMuncher · · Score: 2

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

    14. Re:Always the frontrunner? by jj00 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    15. Re:Always the frontrunner? by mbone · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    16. Re:Always the frontrunner? by mbone · · Score: 2

      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.

    17. Re:Always the frontrunner? by necro81 · · Score: 2

      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.

    18. Re:Always the frontrunner? by amRadioHed · · Score: 2

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

      --
      We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
    19. Re:Always the frontrunner? by hackertourist · · Score: 2

      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.

    20. Re:Always the frontrunner? by khallow · · Score: 2

      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.

    21. Re:Always the frontrunner? by cusco · · Score: 2

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

      --
      "Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
  5. iPod by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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?

    1. Re:iPod by jkflying · · Score: 2

      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...

      --
      Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
  6. 2020? by hamvil · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:2020? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:2020? by mbone · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:2020? by camperdave · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  7. Voyager 2 launched first? by Comboman · · Score: 2

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

    --
    Support Right To Repair Legislation.
    1. Re:Voyager 2 launched first? by Jason+Levine · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --
      My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
    2. Re:Voyager 2 launched first? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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."

  8. Some kind of dupe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Some kind of dupe by SJHillman · · Score: 2

      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.

    2. Re:Some kind of dupe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      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"...

    3. Re:Some kind of dupe by clovis · · Score: 2

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

  9. A trail of breadcrumbs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:A trail of breadcrumbs by SJHillman · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  10. 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...

  11. 35 years form now by Chrisq · · Score: 2

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

  12. Waiting for the astounded scientists. by Drethon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  13. Re:Why are our tax dollars funding this junk? by armanox · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  14. 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).

  15. My grandfather would be proud... by vjl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

    --
    My Daily photo website.