35 Years Later, Voyager 1 Is Heading For the Stars 226
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."
You have to give it to the engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted it's built to more demanding specifications, but something lasting 35 years in deep space is quite an achievement.
Re:Always the frontrunner? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not in our lifetime. The CEOs and the politicians all need new Ferraris!
Re:Always the frontrunner? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You have to give it to the engineers (Score:5, 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.
A trail of breadcrumbs (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?
Re:They just don't build 'em like they used to. (Score:5, 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...
Re:Always the frontrunner? (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.
Re:Always the frontrunner? (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.
Re:Always the frontrunner? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You have to give it to the engineers (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.
Re:You have to give it to the engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You have to give it to the engineers (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.
Not really... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You have to give it to the engineers (Score:4, 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.