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Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Aug 20, 2007 04:45 PM
from the grandpa's-space-probe-still-tellin-stories dept.
from the grandpa's-space-probe-still-tellin-stories dept.
Raver32 writes to mention that 30 years after the original launch of Voyager 2, both Voyager spacecraft are still going strong. Flying away from us some billions of miles from our solar system's edge they continue to be a wealth of information more than 25 years after their original mission concluded. Voyager 1 currently is the farthest human-made object at a distance from the sun of about 9.7 billion miles (15.6 billion kilometers). Voyager 2 is about 7.8 billion miles (12.6 billion kilometers).
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hmmmm... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:hmmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:hmmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
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I was 17 (Score:4, Interesting)
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Only 268 years left ... (Score:2, Funny)
Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Our current model for how the universe works is way off ( >90% of the universe are dark matter and dark energy) and any clues on when and how reality deviates from theory should be quite interesting.
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You are the Kirk Unit? You will assist me. (Score:2, Informative)
'Bones': Spock, this "child" is about to wipe out every living thing on Earth. Now, what do you suggest we do? Spank it?
Spock: It knows only that it needs, Commander. But, like so many of us... it does not know what.
"SEND MORE CHUCK BERRY" [wikipedia.org]
Re:You are the Kirk Unit? You will assist me. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:You are the Kirk Unit? You will assist me. (Score:5, Funny)
Ilia: Vger requires more cowbell.
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From a time when NASA actually "worked" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:From a time when NASA actually "worked" (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we really need figureheads that direly? Everyone knows Gagarin, but who knows Korolyov? Everyone knows Armstrong, but who knows Webb or Paine? They could give far more interesting and insightful speeches about space programs.
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Re:From a time when NASA actually "worked" (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:From a time when NASA actually "worked" (Score:5, Insightful)
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But... (Score:3, Funny)
Remarkable Spacecraft (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Remarkable Spacecraft (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Remarkable Spacecraft (Score:4, Interesting)
A quick footnote: Voyager 1, thanks to the particular trajectory chosen for it, is a bit further away than the other three probes, around 100 AUs away from the Sun.
Now here's the clincher: Voyagers' batteries are supposed to last another 15-20 years at most. As for the Pioneers, the last signal from Pioneer 10 was registered in 2003, from Pioneer 11 in 2005. On blueprint, they still have a bit of juice left, but their distances from Earth are so great that there's no current instrument that can pick up their incredibly weak signal.
Anyhow, by the time the Voyagers and Pioneers reach the Oort Cloud, they'll have been stone cold dead for centuries.
These spacecraft fascinate me more today than back in their prime-time heyday. Most people think that when Voyager 2 flew by Neptune, the planetary team moved out of JPL and that was that. Yet the current team moved in and the really hardcore adventure really kicked into gear. These things just kept going and sailed right off the edge!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I once read that the strength of this incredibly weak signal was not the problem. After doing a search, I discovered that it is indeed the decaying (pun intended) power supply and not the communication signal that will become the problem when it comes to communicating with those probes in decades/centuries to come:
"* Barring any serious spacecraft subsystem failures, the Voyagers may survive until the early twenty-first century (~ 2020), when diminishing power and hydrazine levels will prevent further opera
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Pioneer 11, for example, had a constant power supply of 144W upon arrival to Jupiter, but by the time it got to Saturn, that figure had decreased to 100W. By the time they lost contact with it, the figure must have been much lower, and still they lost the signal only because its' antenna's alignment with Earth had been lost. BTW, there's a typo in my original post, as last contact with Pionee
Re:Remarkable Spacecraft (Score:4, Interesting)
"After launch, Pioneer 10 was capable of transmitting data at a maximum data rate of 2408 bits per second. Now the data rate is 16 bits per second. Reducing the bit rate compensates for the reduced signal strength; it is like speaking more slowly to enunciate more clearly. The signal strength from the craft's main transmitter is now about 7.8 watts; by the time it reaches the DSN antennas, the signal has diminished to less than a billionth of a trillionth (10-21) of a watt."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13318105.50
Deep space tracking station - http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/D.Jeffer
"Successfully sending a DSN signal into Voyager-2's receiver is like throwing a baseball across thousands of miles of ocean into a porthole of a moving cruise ship."
http://www.spacetoday.org/SolSys/DeepSpaceNetwork
I just cannot praise the people who made and make this project possible enough. The facts are jaw dropping!
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IMHO (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time I see the "Interesting Facts about the Voyager Mission" page [1] and "Fast Facts" page [2] at NASA's JPL, I am just amazed that this was achieved with technology from the early '70s!
I often find myself wishing that I was born earlier and that I was part of the team of man and women who pushed so many of our frontiers so much further then ever before.
*raises glass*
To the Voyagers! [3]
[1] http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/didyouknow.ht
[2] http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/fastfacts.htm
[3] Voyager 1 will celebrate it's 30th anniversary on september 5th, so let's celebrate both achievements
technology from the 70s was quite good enough (Score:5, Interesting)
and we can't find a drive to read a 5-1/4 inch floppy in? can't play a Betamax tape?
good enough is good enough, you don't have to spend a billion on a whole new infrastructure to get one project done.
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Re:technology from the 70s was quite good enough (Score:5, Interesting)
When it comes to old technologies, some things are superb and some things have proven a disaster. Floppies didn't start with the 5.25" - the 8" was older and is even less readable. Long before floppies, you had core memory. Good for 100+ years! But in less than half that time, I doubt there are many systems that could actually read the damn thing without wiping it. (Core was destructive on read, so you had to perform a write for every read into the correct address space.)
On ancient technology, more than one archaeological site has been utterly destroyed - partially or totally unmapped and unstudied - because some country or other wanted to build a dam. Water is important, sure, but you can collect water in any number of ways, and even if the dam is imperative, it'll take years to decades to build. Allowing scientists a few months to collect irreplaceable data isn't going to kill anyone or anything. Denying them does kill our chances of understanding the past. We only have one history, once it's gone, it's gone. It is, sadly, very easy to destroy and politicians have done much to destroy it.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If the dam tak
Re:IMHO (Score:4, Interesting)
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Jsut shows you teh further away from (Score:3, Insightful)
billions of miles/km (Score:5, Informative)
Re:billions of miles/km (Score:5, Informative)
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Factual misrepresentation. (Score:4, Informative)
Not quite the "billions of miles from our solar system's edge" that the summary states.
Just nitpicking.
The really amazing thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The really amazing thing (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say it puts our lifespans into perspective. We really don't live long enough to play in this game.
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Still going but fading from public awareness... (Score:5, Informative)
A reasonably intelligent guy turns to me and says "But you know that Voyager is all fictional?". He had no clue about the Voyager program and only thought of Star Trek Voyager...
Re:Still going but fading from public awareness... (Score:4, Funny)
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Billions and Billions (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Farthest Man Made Object? I duno.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think theres Another contender [nuclearweaponarchive.org] for that title...
Tm
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
tm
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And I can remember... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Floating point error? (Score:3, Funny)
Ah, the good old misplaced decimal point. We've lost some of our best space probes that way....
:-P
HAL.
Re:Fuel economy (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Fuel economy (Score:5, Informative)
"Voyager's fuel efficiency (in terms of mpg) is quite impressive. Even though most of the launch vehicle's 700 ton weight is due to rocket fuel, Voyager 2's great travel distance of 7.1 billion km (4.4 billion mi) from launch to Neptune results in a fuel economy of about 13,000 km per liter (30,000 mi per gallon). As Voyager 2 streaks by Neptune and coasts out of the solar system, this economy will get better and better!"
From the page I also mentioned in an earlier reply to this news item:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/didyouknow.ht
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Continental drift!
(stolen from The Onion)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But not for power generation. The solar cells have been a big success, now it is just a matter of how long the wheels and outside wiring will last. And some of the electronics have radiation sources for operation which decay too (but can be compensated for).
-Matt
Re:Interstellar space (Score:5, Interesting)
There's still computing equipment out in the field going strong that I designed 20 years ago. They were 68000 based computers with dynamic ram, with everything overengineered by 2x (including running the cpu at 1/2 the clock frequency in production that it was tested at during burn-in, specing resistors for far more current then they were expected to handle, refreshing the ram at 2x the required rate, specing capacitors for almost 2x the voltage they were expected to handle, and throwing a dozen zeners all over the motherboard to protect all the regulated voltage busses). Virtually unbreakable. One even operated for over two weeks completely submerged when a station got flooded before corrosion shorted it out. Some scraping and A good washing in a washing machine (no heat), and after careful drying and replacing a fuse it was ready to go again!
-Matt
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Re:I liked the part.... (Score:5, Interesting)
If we discover some form of faster than light (or even near-C) travel in the next 120 millennia, then we will get to the nearest stars long before it does. If we don't, then either we've wiped ourselves out or such a form of travel isn't possible at all (120,000 years is a really long time for technology; it only took 4,000 to go from horse taming to mobile phones and space shuttles). If we've wiped ourselves out without developing interstellar travel, then it will probably be tens of millions of years before the probe goes anywhere near an inhabited system (if it ever does), by which time there is unlikely much evidence that we ever inhabited this planet. In this case, it's quite possible that the probes to be our last memorial. I wonder if anyone will ever see them...
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Re:I liked the part.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine we noticed something artificial flying by. We needn't even be able to catch and examine it, just imagine the Hubble telescope picks up some item that is without a doubt artificial. Even after millenia of interstellar travel, a probe is still not an asteroid. It will be heavily damaged and probably look barely like the probe that was launched, but it will no less be clearly evident that some intelligence shaped it.
How would we react if we found something like that? Most certainly it would be an answer to the eternal question whether we're alone in the universe. Not only statistically (with so many stars and so many planets it's near impossible that we're really alone), but we would have hard proof that there is or at least was some other civilisation that was at the very least so advanced that they could create spaceship.
I'm fairly sure that this would increase our own interest in space. It would most certainly mean better funding for space exploration, maybe it would also mean a lot of fear of an "alien invasion", as ridiculous as it may be (when Voyager reaches any other solar system, we will either already be there or no longer alive, it is likely that the same applies for other civilisations). But the impact would be there, and I'm fairly sure that it would be large. No matter if the civilisation that created the probe still exists or not.
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