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

[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

[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.

V'GER!

[TaoPhoenix]

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

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 ?

[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.

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?

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: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: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.