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Space Science

Voyagers Legacy in Pictures 118

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-see dept.
tanveer1979 writes "Space.com has an interesting photo feature from the voyager craft. For the uninformed voyager is the most distant man made object. For the first time we are recieving photos of distant parts of the solar system. Currently voyager is about 12 light hours away. Wonder how far is that? Well Sun is 8 light minutes away from Earth. In case you are wondering what is this all about, check out the current location of voyager. The voyager spacecraft are about to cross heliopause, which is the limit of the rule of the sun, after which inter steller winds take over, and for the first time scientists can get the feel of what lies outside the solar system."
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Voyagers Legacy in Pictures More

Voyagers Legacy in Pictures

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  • Lovely (Score:1, Funny)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 )
    Here's a picture of Uranus [nasa.gov].
  • I wish that when Slashdotters linked file-formats beyond the basic HTML or txt, they'd at least add a little warning of some kind, eg link [nasa.gov] [pdf] so people can choose whether to mess with it. (In my case, it just starts downloading and I have to specifically cancel it.)

    • Gee, thanks for whining. Apparently they heard you and changed permissions on it. Now it's denied.

    • From the PDF file, here [heavens-above.com] is a link to a webpage showing the graphical locations and current stats on Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, and Pioneer 11.

    • RobotWisdom declared:
      I wish that when Slashdotters linked file-formats beyond the basic HTML or txt, they'd at least add a little warning of some kind, eg link [nasa.gov] [pdf] so people can choose whether to mess with it. (In my case, it just starts downloading and I have to specifically cancel it.)

      Dude, I couldn't agree with you more. I don't know if the editors notice this thread, but if they do I replied for TWO reasons:

      one, to lobby for a PDF link warning

      TWO: alert the editors to MODERATOR ABUSE. Whoever moderated you as a "Troll" post clearly misused the system (if you are trolling, it's a subtle troll :-).

      Offtopic, but I find it odd that I *never* am selected to moderate. Either moderation is denied when you max your karma (bug!), or the trolls themselves have reverse engineered the system to the point where they get the lion's share of moderation. Not that I get a boost from moderating or anything... just speculating the system may be broken.

  • Voyager makes me wonder (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Krapangor ( 533950 ) on Sunday August 25, 2002 @10:43AM (#4136643) Homepage
    if all this "low-budget-space-exploration" the NASA does these days is the wrong direction.
    With the old expensive programs you got huge bills but you got huge results, too.
    The cheap stuff on the other hand tends to fail and doesn't has much scientific content.
    Space exploration is not about driving cute robots on mars - actual scientific results are wanted. No matter if the public "loves" them or not.
    Perhaps NASA is bound to degenerate to a pseudo-science space-entertaiment agency. If Disney sponsors one of their flights, then we will know it for sure.

    • Re:Voyager makes me wonder (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday August 25, 2002 @12:32PM (#4136902) Journal
      (* if all this "low-budget-space-exploration" the NASA does these days is the wrong direction.
      With the old expensive programs you got huge bills but you got huge results, too. *)

      I don't know about that. Would you rather have 3 missions to different places or one mission to the same place.

      Voyager 2 took a unique and limited opportunity of the fact that the outer planets were in the right position to use as a "slingshot" to the next target. I don't know how budget situations would have affected this.

      If a similar "alignment" opportunity comes along, but is not taken advantage of, then I can see a real complaint. But so far nothing like that has been "missed" that I know of.

      The closest similarity may be the tentative Pluto probe: if they don't launch soon, then Pluto's atmosphere will be frozen for another 200 years or so, losing any opportunity to study its non-frozen atmosphere close up for a long while. (Pluto has a highly elliptical orbit compared to most planets.)

      If they cancel the Pluto probe, then somebody should be summarily fired (even if a Senator did it). The ISS keeps sucking up the funds for it.

      Europa and Mars are not going anywhere soon, but Pluto's atmosphere is.

      I think they should send *two* probes in case one fails. Bleep happens. Even the Voyagers had intermittent problems, despite a "full" budget. Galellio (sp?) had a huge antenna problem which prevented most planned photography despite a full budget, and Mariner 8 totally failed.

      So far, the failure rate of the newer crop is not significantly more than the 70's probes. I think Countour's recent failure bumped up the newer number to stand out a bit, but it is still not that much worse.

    • The space station is the biggest waste of money ever in the history of *ANY* space program.

      Yes, we're living in space, but so what. The Russians lived there for years on MIR.

      The scientists are supposed to be doing science, but all they are doing right now is maintenance. Over 75% of their time is spent doing maintenance of the space station.

      What are we acheiving here? At least with the Apollo program we got to go to the moon and developed TANG [safeshopper.com].

      A great opinion piece [guardian.co.uk] on this states, "This latest project is the international equivalent of a timeshare apartment. Sixteen countries have been conned into paying their bit towards a half-built orbiting holiday home." Amen.
    • im sorry this offtopic but i can't figure out how to msg you. but, 'fyi' the word MENSA comes from central/southern americas where the poor peasant class children would call eachother mensa to taunt eachother, its equivilent english meaning would be 'idiot' or moron.
    • Isn't "cheaper and faster" a great SCAPEGOAT?

      NASA can blame "accidents" on this ideology instead of blaming themselves.
      NASA can "pretend" that there was an accident, with such a scapegoat in their back pocket.
      NASA can utilize these "lost" spacecraft and never be accountable for reporting their findings.

      Space exploration is NO LONGER about science. Why do people foolishly believe that NASA doesn't know exactly what they are doing?? NASA thanks each and every gullible sheep in this flocking nation!

  • Corrected link (Score:4, Informative)

    by MagPulse ( 316 ) on Sunday August 25, 2002 @10:45AM (#4136648)
    http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagegallery/ [space.com]

    It's not much, just 10 pictures. Click on "Voyager's Photo Legacy", then again for a Javascript pop-up gallery.
  • Isn't stating distances in these units a bit 'oldie style.... Shoulden't we be always stating Light Years, where,

    27.4 milli-Light years = 1 Light day

    114 micro-Light Years = 1 Light Hour

    1.9 micro-Light Years = 1 Light Minute

    Mix and matching units isn't the way to go, for instance, how many times further is the Voyager from the sun than us?... (12 light hours compaired to 8 light mins, is more complecated than 15 uLightYear compaired to 1368uLightYear, where in the latter, it can be seen that it is approx 100 times further.)

    • You're brain damaged as well (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The proper distance unit in the solar system is the "astronomical unit". Voyager 1 is currently 85.601 AU from Earth. [heavens-above.com] That makes it, ahem, 85.601 times further than the sun because the distance of the Sun is 1 AU.
    • Since a light year isn't an SI unit, I don't think it matters.

      Personally, I find 8 light minutes easier to conceptualize than 1368 micro-light years. We all think of minutes as very small compared to years. I'm pretty sure that all of us, being nerds that we are, have calculated how MANY minutes there are in a year. And most of us know that it takes light just minutes to reach the inner planets. But when I think of micro-light years I have nothing to reference. Can light reach Mercury in a micro-light year? Jupiter?

      It's just a matter of taste and custom. But since light-years aren't standardized, I don't see a problem with the norm.

    • Oh yeah, in regular life I estimate how 15 * 10^-6 relates to 1368 * 10^-6 so much more than how 8 minutes relates to 12 hours.

      You know, I suggest we start using SI to the point. For instance, speed should always be measured in m/s. Or, even better, it should be measured without units altogether, as a fraction of speed of light, since this is one true way to express speed.

      Remember not to exceed 0.0000000926 on the road next time!

    • Re:Slightly offtopic but... Light Hour? Light minu (Score:5, Insightful)

      by freeweed ( 309734 ) on Sunday August 25, 2002 @11:18AM (#4136721)
      Mix and matching units isn't the way to go, for instance, how many times further is the Voyager from the sun than us?... (12 light hours compaired to 8 light mins, is more complecated than 15 uLightYear compaired to 1368uLightYear, where in the latter, it can be seen that it is approx 100 times further.)

      Most people educated past grade 2 these days are taught that there are 60 minutes in an hour, and have no trouble working these sorts of figures out.

      The biggest reason *I* like to see light-hours/minutes/etc is that it's actually meaningful. 871 micro-Light Years is some arbitrary figure. 11 light minutes means that light (a really, really fast thing) takes 11 minutes to travel that distance. And if I want to communicate with a spacecraft that's 12 light hours out .. well, I won't be getting my response back until this time tomorrow. Things like that.

    • This is true... but you always run into this sort of trouble when you have a non-metric (or non-10-base) system. We would never have this problem with meters and millimeters and so forth.

      The clear solution to this problem is to use metric time. I'm sure that would never happen, but we could conceivably break each day into metric units. Each Mhour would be a tenth of a day (or 2 hrs., 24 min. of the old units). Then would could make an Mminute one hundreth of an hour (or 1 min., 26.4 sec. old units), and then an Msec would be one hundredth of that (.864 old seconds). So, everything would be the same up to an order of magnitude or so. As much sense as this makes, it ain't gonna happen. Hell, in the US, we're having trouble converting to other metric units, so this won't happen.

      On an even more off-topic note, this reminds me of something a long time ago. When I was in high-school, I was a waiter at this restaurant, and there was a timeclock which (as most do) actually recorded everything, not in hours and minutes, but decimal hours. For example, if you clocked in at 4:30pm, it would say 4.50pm. So, anyway, there was a couple of times that the dishwashers (who spoke only Spanish and no English) were asking me what the story was with the machine, since it always put "the wrong time".

      Now, I'm pretty comfortable with changing units, so it never bothered me, but it was hard to explain. Actually, I'm thinking that to explain about breaking an hour into anything other than 60 pieces, in English, say, to my mom, would be extremely hard. Now, I had to do it in Spanish, which I had sort of learned around the house and the neighborhood, and had never had any school on. Whew. I don't think I ever explained it to these dudes... the closest I came to making them happy was that I convinced them if the timeclock was crazed out, I wouldn't use it either.

    • Aren't the Voyagers a bit less than a centimeter out? :)
      ... at, err, 10^15 scale (1 Terameter/mm)

      We all know light-seconds are a foot long (about 300 Mm) illustration [vendian.org].
      That's just the old "a foot is a light-nanosecond" network wiring rule.

      Similarly, light-minutes are almost 2 cm long (a bit less than 20 Gm),
      light-hours are meters (about 1000 Gm (1 Tm)),
      and light-days are inches (about 25 Tm).
      So the heliosphere is coin-sized [vendian.org].
      Light-years are centimeters (10 Pm),
      and a parsec is a longish inch (30 Pm).

      I find it much easier to use SI, than to constantly have to convert between units. ;)

    • Actually, if you're going SI, go all the way. Interstellar distances should be stated in petameters, exameters, or the like...
  • For the first time we are recieving photos of distant parts of the solar system.
    Not Quite. Now most of Voyager's mission is focused on its other instruments, like its magnometer, rather than the camera. The area near the heliopause is kind of short on photographic targets! The pictures space.com has are all photos of planets that were taken decades ago.

    Daniel
  • As an amateur phtographer, I found this fact to be amazing...

    "Like humans, the Voyagers must be steady when taking pictures. At Neptune, engineers programmed them to be 30 times steadier than the hour hand on a clock."
  • The heliopause is not quite the end of the suns influence I think. There are is a comet like could that lays far beyond it that is barely held there by the suns gravity. If I remember correctly it is called oorts cloud and it will take voyager a bit more time to get there. 200 centuries or so.

    What I find most amazing is that the voyager is still going on a computer system that you could buy, in proccessing power terms, in kids toys but that the stability has yet to be equaled. Would love to have a look at that source code.

    • Re:One small error (Score:2, Informative)

      by Deadstick ( 535032 )
      The heliopause is the limit of the sun's contribution to particle flux. The sun spews out a constant flow of particles of various kinds, called the solar wind. As you go out, they naturally get more and more sparse.

      At the same time, there are a certain number of particles just flying around free in space, with a (very roughly) uniform density all over the universe.

      The heliopause marks the points where the density of solar particles has declined to that of the free-space particles. Inside it, most of the particles you see are from the sun; outside it, most of them come from elsewhere.

      The solar gravity does indeed reach farther. The Oort Cloud is made up of objects so far out that while they're basically orbiting the sun, they're also affected by the gravity of other stars in the "neighborhood". Once in a while this disturbs one of them enough that it falls into the inner solar system and we get a comet.

      rj
    • Would love to have a look at that source code.


      Look here. [usgs.gov]

      I'm not sure if you can get the original Voyager OS source from there, but it's a starting point. :-)

      Cheers, Ulli

  • New technology (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Whispers_in_the_dark ( 560817 ) <rich...harkins@@@gmail...com> on Sunday August 25, 2002 @11:46AM (#4136787)
    It makes me wonder what we could do with the even lower power and lower weight computer/sensor technologies we have available now. Looks like the Voyagers are going to last past 2020 but with even lower power one might marvel at how long newer devices could last. That is assuming, of course, that we can ever straighten out conversions between english and metric units.
    • (* It makes me wonder what we could do with the even lower power and lower weight computer/sensor technologies we have available now. Looks like the Voyagers are going to last past 2020 but with even lower power one might marvel at how long newer devices could last. *)

      Too small of electronic parts cause problems near heavy radiation areas like Jupiter and other gas giant planets. Some of this can be helped with sheilding, but the sheilding increases the weight where it may be more effective to use fat electronics rather than fat shielding.

      One of the reasons that a planned Europa (Jup moon) probe was postponed is that the cost of radiation sheilding was more expensive than they thought. Older probes did not have as much worries about that because their electronics were larger. Now they have to weigh more tradeoffs because of the options and problems that minituration provides WRT heavy radiation.

      Plus, doesn't the power needed for radio transmission remain pretty much constant, especially in light of the fact that newer missions send more data than older ones?

      The efficiency of radio transmission has not followed Moore I don't believe. It is linear I think.
  • They keep changing the units from KM to Mile across the article. an annoying feature, and really points out that it was rather rushed and the reporter probabbly just copied some figures and pasted them together.

    sigh...
  • The voyager spacecraft are about to cross heliopause,

    Per project manager Ed Massey in the Yahoo article, it's a long way away:
    http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story &u=/nm/ 20020820/ts_nm/space_voyager_dc_2

    ... "We don't run out of electrical power until about 2020," he said. "There's every expectation that Voyager 1 will ... at least enter the heliopause. There may be a question as to whether it will exit out the other side before we run out of power."

    At 59, with only about four years with Voyager, Massey said he would be retired long before the probes hit the heliopause. ...

    • (* "We don't run out of electrical power until about 2020..." *)

      This implies they run off of "regular" batteries, which is not the case. They use nuclear power cells, which lasts a good while, but I believe chemical corrosion of some type in the cell reduces the harvest rate over time.

      (* [The voyager spacecraft are about to cross heliopause,]....Per project manager Ed Massey in the Yahoo article, it's a long way away: *)

      The bottom line is that nobody knows for sure where this heliopause thingy really is. There is no known direct way to tell from Earth. It is only an educated guess at this point. Voyager(s) is tredding where no (working) probe has gone before.

  • Neptune is cool (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday August 25, 2002 @12:09PM (#4136854) Journal
    In the mid 80's I remember walking by the newstand, and suddenly seeing a picture of a big, blue/green spooky looking planet on the front page. Then right next to it was "Voyager Reaches Neptune!".

    I remember the space books before that simply showed grainy star-like blob photos of neptune (assuming no guessed illustration).

    Then low and behold, this big spooky ball with wispy clouds and a jupiter-like dark spot is revealed, and its a real place, waaaaaay out there at the cold edge of the solar system.

    It fit well the stereotype of a distant, strange, lonely, but beautiful planet.

    Thumbs up, Voy!

  • I don't mean to be pessimistic... (Score:5, Funny)

    by guttentag ( 313541 ) on Sunday August 25, 2002 @12:30PM (#4136899) Journal
    but you do realize that someday Voyager is going to crash into a planet and obliterate an entire city of extraterrestrials.

    Years later we will cheer and gawk as NASA or the U.S. Air Force reports a fleet of unidentified space ships entering the atmosphere... until they pull out their laser blasters and photon torpedoes and come looking for revenge.

  • "For the uninformed voyager is the most distant man made object."

    Correction:
    The most distant object that we know about.

    Aliens, Macro wormholes or Gravitionally anomalies may have caused a human manmade object to appear farter from earth than this probe.
    • Someone's been watching way too much Star Trek...
      • No, someone's been watching too much Farscape. And Crichton's hanging in space above the Earth because of a poorly executed trip through a worm hole, and he'll be there until JANUARY when the new season starts. Don't ask me how I know.
    • Aliens, Macro wormholes or Gravitionally anomalies may have caused a human manmade object to appear farter from earth than this probe.

      Yeah, right. "Scientist discover the 'Sock Cloud'"... That's the real explanation.

      There's no foundation in the rumors about a Black Op to create a system to gather odd socks from every washer and dryer in the world to create a superweapon to smother anyone, anywhere, anytime.

      No! The socks actually disappear/are abducted to the space and form gigantic clusters lightyears away from us!

      (NOTE: The international standard regarding Bad, Predictable Humor classfies this comment to Category II. It is not recommended to read Slashdot comments with this category of humor more than 5 per story due to risk to the sense of humor. This message may also be illegal according to local humor regulations (justfully so).)

  • Okay well anyone who's not familiar with what the voyager project is, or you just want a quick nostalgic recap.

    Here [nasa.gov] is a RM stream that has a nice little highschool science class feel to it, but is still very informative.

    But I don't get why we keep in contact with the Voyager satellites, everyone knows we'll just lose contact anyways ... (Ref: Star Trek: The Motion Picture [imdb.com])

  • Slashdotted.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by robpoe ( 578975 ) on Sunday August 25, 2002 @12:47PM (#4136941)
    We slashdotted NASA. OMG. I keep getting permission denied. Then a reload SLOWLY brings up the site.

    "ISS to Houston, come in please."

    "Houston, go ahead"

    "Will you fix the toilet up here? It's not flushing and theres shit all over the place."

    "ISS, we're trying, but 200,000 bloody people are trying to look @ pictures of Uranus right now. Will advise."

  • * The sensitivity of our deep-space tracking antennas located around the world is truly amazing. The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level. >>And 25 years later my cellphone still doesn't work in the elevator...
  • If man does not blow-up the planet, be obliterated by any plausible environmental catastrophe. It is very likely that man will eventually travel much faster and further than Voyager ever will.

    Assuming the above - Now what happens when we catch up with it? do we let it go on its merry way (dead or alive) or do we put it in a museum?

    Perhaps some spacecomber will put it up on an ebay auction and NASA has to send in the FBI to get it back...

    • Space is a very very large place and the Voyager craft are only about the size of an economy car. The odds of ever finding one of them are, well, astronomical. (sorry!)
    • No, No Watch Star Trek The Motion Picture. It will find a bunch of super-intelligent aliens, get data on the entire universe, then fly back to earth as the center of some nebula looking for the creator and wanting to destroy all humans.

      Simple (:
  • Didn't they go further? Those where launched a while before Voyagers... Is it a speed matter?
    • Yes, it's a matter of speed. Pioneer 10 was for a long time the furtherest man-made object, but Voyager 2 passed it about 10 years ago or so. The Pioneer's were launched with less powerful rockets and didn't use as much gravitational slingshot. Voyager 1 and 2 are simply faster.
  • Are there any predictions as to whether Voyager's
    trajectory will cause her to orbit our sun? Or will she break free of our solar system's gravitational field(s)?
    • They (both of the Voyagers) are travelling at greater than solar escape velocity. So are Pioneer 10 and 11. None of them will orbit, all four are destined to never return to our solar system (unless we go out and retrieve them at some point)...
  • I hate reading stories like this. Yeah, I'm a libertarian and all (at least until right this minute) but I'm sick of all this "budget" crap that NASA gets. Why don't we just give NASA the priority over *everything*, even national defense. Let them keep most of our tax dollars. I'd much rather be working as a slave for the cause of space exploration than whatever the reasons of the day are for our massive government. What we need, not in a few decades or centuries but *right now*, before I even finish this post, is a real space exploration program. Blank checks for the following programs making use of serious spacecraft perhaps powered by nuclear fission and/or fuel cells.: 1. A permanent lunar base devoted to the purpose of manufacturing spacecraft too large or fragile to be constructed and launched from earth. We could use a space station for this, but to hell with that. A lunar base is more appropriate for showing those aliens that we've got a pair. 2. Serious preparations for launching manned missions to, not just one, but all of the interesting targets in our solar system at the same time. These would include Mars, most of Jovian moons (and yes, there are many) not forgetting about Io or Europa which might even support some kind of life. 3. Immediate serious planning for high speed manned and unmanned interstellar space travel to Alpha Centauri and all other star systems less than 10 light years away making use of whatever current or near future tech we need to get us there. This may include such proposals as pulsed fission bomb propulsion such as The Orion Project. Unmanned missions might also make use of Jovian planet slingshotting to get an initial boost. 4. And obviously we're going to be needing more than just a few of those new space elevators. Time to get cracking. Those people working on medical cures can keep right on working but everyone else should start thinking about what they can contribute to the War Effort, err, I mean, Space Effort. Our entire economy should revolve around it. If the Russkies had never launched Sputnik maybe we'd all still think the moon was made of cheese. (Although didn't I read that those videos were faked?:))
    • Unfortunately, for the average tax-payer the problems of daily life are much more important than space-exploration. They rather have their tax-money spent for things they see and understand the need for.

      From my point of view this is, of course, short-sightened. Until now mankind had always room for expansion. The romans conquered europe and kept their realm stable by constant expansion. The discovery of america kept us busy for another few centuries.

      Todays society and econmy needs constant growth to survive. Without a growth of GDP, people will loose their jobs, poverty will increase etc etc.

      Unfortunately, our planet is small. We have covered all space that is available. The only ways for continued expansion are either a) war and elimination of a continent or two so we can rebuild it (indiscussable, of course) or b) expansion into space, which is huuuuge. And at least our own solar system is within our reach, if Einstein was right and faster-than-light travel is impossible. And even our own small solar system should keep us busy for some time.
      • Todays society and econmy needs constant growth to survive. Without a growth of GDP, people will loose their jobs, poverty will increase etc etc.

        Indeed - quite a telling indictment of capitalism, no?

        It doesn't make rational sense that we should have to keep on growing the world economy beyond the capacity of the earth to bear it, just to feed everyone. It's only a system built on greed and selfishness that makes things this way.

        • It doesn't make rational sense that we should have to keep on growing the world economy beyond the capacity of the earth to bear it, just to feed everyone. It's only a system built on greed and selfishness that makes things this way.

          No, Mr. Luddite. Individuals want to continually improve their own lives, and each generation wants the next generation to be better off than they were. I certainly want my kids to live better that I am.

          If you want to see stability (stagnation, no progress or improvement) look at the life of the average person in the year 500AD, then the life of the average person in the year 1500AD.

  • and for the first time scientists can get the feel of what lies outside the solar system.

    they probably won't be getting too much. To my understanding, Voyager is currently in a minimal power usage mode and is not able to send back much data. I also believe the nuclear generator onboard is set to run out of fuel in 2020 or some time around then.
  • Soon to be heard in the Voyage control room?

    Ahhh, sir? I think there's something wrong. ::studies display::
    Yes? What is it?
    Well, as far as I can tell...
    Uhhh, I mean according to the numbers here... ummm...
    What happened? Spit it out already!
    Uh, yeah, well, according to my display here,
    uhhh... well... it says Voyager 1 bounced sir.
    What do you mean BOUNCED? Did a micrometor jiggle it or something?
    uhh, no, not exacly...
    Well? Then WHAT exactly ?
    Exactly? Ahh, well, as near as I can make out, it bounced off of the heliopause sir. It seems to be coming back this way now.
    Huh? But there's nothing out there, it's pretty much just a mathematical line where the force of the solar wind balances the force of interstellar gas, right?

    Uhhh, yeah, at least that's what all the scientists just sort of assumed, I guess.

    -

  • Mod this down (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of Voyager space probes?

    NASA's aims in this are quite clear:

    1 - Launch probes to outer space
    2 - ?????
    3 - Profit!
  • I had heard that while voyager is the furthest spacecraft from earth, the furthest man made object was an unfortunate manhole cover used in a nuclear test pre-sputnik.

    Google brings up a pile of results like these [google.com]

    • Doug William? is that you? It has to be.
    • The story of the Manhole Cover is true, but some of the numbers thrown around are not. I found the following at a site with lots of nuke information. [enviroweb.org]
      This article appears to be largely responsible for the presence of the "Sputnik manhole cover" legend on the Internet, where it has been often discussed. It does not identify the test, but from the information in the article it can be deduced that it had to be Pascal-B, which has since be confirmed to me by Dr. Brownlee

      ...

      If the description of the plate is accurate - 4 feet wide, 4 inches thick and made of steel - then it would weigh about 900 kg (a lower weight is possible if the dimensions are inaccurate or if it was not of uniform thickness). A velocity of 6 times Earth's escape velocity (67 km/sec, since escape velocity is 11.2 km/sec) would give the plate a kinetic energy 60% larger than the total energy released by the explosion. This is clearly impossible.

      • true, but it wouldn't be like flinging a plate on it's lonesome through the atmosphere, it would have been surrounded by a mass of plasma for a long ways out.

        be interesting to see the effect that'd have.

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