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Space Science

Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary 222

Posted by ScuttleMonkey 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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Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary More

Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 30th Anniversary

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  • hmmmm... (Score:2, Funny)

    by pwizard2 ( 920421 )
    Just wait until the Klingons find them.

    • Re:hmmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Spudtrooper ( 1073512 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @04:51PM (#20297643)
      The first post is a Star Trek reference, but NOT one about V'Ger? Your nerd license is hereby revoked, pwizard2, and may the gods have mercy on your soul.

      • Re:hmmmm... (Score:5, Informative)

        by eln ( 21727 ) * on Monday August 20, 2007 @04:53PM (#20297673)
        V'ger was the (fictional) Voyager 6, not Voyager 1 or 2. Of course, the probe the Klingons used for target practice in Star Trek V was Pioneer 10, so the OP isn't really accurate either unless I'm missing a Voyager reference in some other Star Trek.
    • Klingons, schlmingons. You'd just better hope that the Psychlos don't pick one of them up, backtrack its trajectory to figure out where we are, and send an invulnerable gas drone around the planet to kill us all!

      • FTFA:

        "The records also have directions on how to find Earth if the spacecraft is recovered by something or someone."

        I hope they don't show up any time soon - the way we're running things into the ground here on earth, it would be like getting hit by a bus without wearing clean underwear.

    • I was 17 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by p51d007 ( 656414 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @07:27PM (#20298917)
      and beginning my senior year of high school when those were launched. For those of you too young..........we had PONG and THAT was it! No cell phone, no internet, no video games. Telephones had these things called rotary dials. You couldn't call someone in another city, sometimes, without going through the operator. There were only THREE kinds of gasoline. Leaded (for the older cars), diesel, & unleaded. We didn't have the 5-6 types of unleaded, JUST ONE. Cars costs an average of 5-8 thousand dollars BRAND NEW. Of course, they fell apart, looked like boxes, and were noisy. For music, there were a couple of FM radio stations, most cars had AM, some had FM, and if it was REALLY fancy, it had (get this) an 8 TRACK TAPE player. Oh, we walked up hill 10 miles to school in the snow every day...both ways....LOL
  • Only 268 or so years left until Voyager comes back [memory-alpha.org]. Well, I'm not sure which one it is, but one of them is coming back. But we've got some time to deal with the carbon lifeform infestation ...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Knara ( 9377 )

      V'ger was a fictional Voyager probe #, if I remember right.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by iamacat ( 583406 )
      Ouch! Not only NCC-74656 was not designed to last 300 years without any starbase service, but the only occupants alive from the original generation of the crew are going to be a hologram and possibly a vulcan! Let's hope they find that Borg transwarp conduits before the later take care of our carbon liveform infestation.

  • Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kagura ( 843695 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @04:51PM (#20297647)
    A little off-topic and out of left field, but it's too bad these probes are three-axis stabilized, which means they cannot help us figure out exactly what is going on with the Pioneer anomaly [wikipedia.org]. The anomaly even featured as an Unsolved Problem of Physics on Wikipedia.

    • Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by nutshell42 ( 557890 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @06:20PM (#20298447) Journal
      I kinda hope there's not a trivial explanation (i.e. not a measurement error, non-uniform radiation pressure etc.)

      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.

    • It's ridiculous to think we could possibly know exactly every force being applied to the craft. The effect is extremely small and is probably a combination of computational accuracy, instrument accuracy, and external modifiers that we can't calculate.

      External modifiers would be things like storms on the Sun and other stars (temperature differences, particle emissions), the various particles in space, tiny gravitational forces that are too small to be measured (eg. even the galaxy on the other side of the u
  • Spock: Mentally, V'ger is a child...

    '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]
  • We need Probes!!! Thousands of Probes, streaking across the cosmos, searching, observing, huge "shelf life". Manned space flight is nothing but an election day promise. Our standard mode of operation should be automated probes. It's cheaper, easier, and doesn't bring the whole process to a screeching halt when something blows up.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by SomeJoel ( 1061138 )
      But probes can't give inspirational speeches to auditoriums packed with High School students.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rakishi ( 759894 )
      Yeah and then some idiot will make them self-replicating and set the self-replication priority to 999 to maximize their return on the investment.

    • Re:From a time when NASA actually "worked" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jdigriz ( 676802 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:38PM (#20298101)
      Agreed, automated probes are where it's at for long-range exploration. But imagine how much cheaper it would be to produce and send those thousands of probes if they already had orbital velocity at construction time as opposed to being launched from the Earth. We need space-based industry and infrastructure!
      • How much of it could be automatized by the time when this actually becomes an issue?

        I do agree that sooner or later we will need manned space travel. But shouldn't we first of all ensure that we can do it reliably and safely? We currently do have the technology to make almost every routine task in space something that can be done by machinery and computers. Currently I do not see the need to hope and pray every time that old crate takes off, whether those 7 people on board will make it. Currently, the point
    • Probes don't offer the fapworthy drama of sending humans up in primitive systems.
      Sending people up not is like exploring the ocean using the equipment and methods of 1492. We can evolve systems much more quickly if we wait to put meat in space and evolve proper machines instead.

  • But... (Score:3, Funny)

    by niceone ( 992278 ) * on Monday August 20, 2007 @04:54PM (#20297693) Journal
    will Janeway give the crew the day off?

  • Remarkable Spacecraft (Score:4, Interesting)

    by decipher_saint ( 72686 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @04:57PM (#20297717)
    Both Voyager I & II are amazing pieces of technology. Still giving us valuable information about the universe in which we live. So, kudos NASA but particularly to the development and current project teams at JPL.
    • It would be nice to see a president push the idea of having a voyager III. By using a powerful rocket (spacex's BFR or ares V) combined with electric engines AND nuclear power, it might be possible to get quite a bit further in a short time. I was thinking that while we need nukes for this, an ion engine would allow for some major speed to be built up. In addition, at this time, we would probably have a new array of instruments to put on there.
      • Realize that we live in a world where the first question asked is "How can we profit from it?" Back in the 60s, the reason to send probes into space was, amongst others, mostly to test the delivery technology for nukes. In fact, it often seems that the whole space programs of both sides was more or less a byproduct of that missle arms race. One could almost assume that Voyager and Pioneer just came into existance because their carrier rockets needed a test that didn't look like they're testing nuke delivery

    • Re:Remarkable Spacecraft (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Iskender ( 1040286 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @06:23PM (#20298465)
      Let's not forget what makes these probes possible: nuclear power, more specifically RTGs. No, I'm not trying to glorify nuclear, but we simply don't have the technology to make something equally robust at anything approaching a reasonable price and launch weight. So for the moment, RTGs it is for outer solar system probes, and nuclear reactors should be given consideration if they make more valuable science possible (remember, the Russians already used some of those in space AND had them fail, so they won't be the end of us).
  • we had pretty good good German rocket scientists in those days. but once they all died or retired, it was down hill for NASA.
  • ...it's time we send out some more.

  • IMHO (Score:5, Interesting)

    by StarfishOne ( 756076 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @04:59PM (#20297753)
    The Voyagers belong somewhere in the top of the list with the most amazing machines ever developed by humans.

    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.htm l [nasa.gov]
    [2] http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/fastfacts.html [nasa.gov]
    [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)

      by swschrad ( 312009 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:12PM (#20297889) Homepage Journal
      and isn't it curious how we can still find ways to play Edison cylinders, decode stone heiroglyphs, communicate at the edge of the solar wind with a handful of transistors ruggedized and wired in very conservative circuits...

      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.
      • Just to be clear: I did not intend to say that technology from the 70's was not good enough. I meant it more as a compliment to the men and women who designed this whole thing. For example: perhaps they were still using slide rulers at times[1]. This compared to the 'fancy CAD/CAM systems' that are now available on each desktop computers because those are now powerful enough to run such software now.

        Perhaps not the best example, but it's all I can think of right now to (hopefully) help make my underlying in

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by morcego ( 260031 )
          Quoting (or misquoting) Frank Herbert: "Computers increased the number of things humans could do without thinking"

          That in itself explains why we get to many crappy, broken things these days.
      • Well, some hieroglyphs. There are a good few hundred languages from the days of writing on stone or in clay that cannot be deciphered and quite likely never will be. I find the study of ancient languages fascinating, as they were never intended to be DRMed - uhh, unreadable, but they have become so. At the present time, nobody has successfully used computers to assist in decoding such languages except in the limited sense of counting sign combinations. This seems like a superb application, but it is also an unsolved application. Nobody, nobody at all, knows how.

        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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by DerekLyons ( 302214 )

          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.

          If the dam tak

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CharlieG ( 34950 )
        Ah, there is a 5-1/4 drive in one of the boxes right next to me
  • I wonder how many million miles per gallon of propellant these machines have gotten? Damn impressive engineering.

    • Re:Fuel economy (Score:4, Funny)

      by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) * on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:05PM (#20297815) Homepage Journal
      Yeah. A frictionless environment will do wonders for your MPG...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ArcherB ( 796902 ) *
        Yeah. A frictionless environment will do wonders for your MPG...

        That and the gravity boosts these probes got from our sun and the gas giants.

    • Re:Fuel economy (Score:5, Informative)

      by StarfishOne ( 756076 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:07PM (#20297829)
      It's not millions of miles per gallons. Launching costs quite a bit of fuel:

      "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.htm l [nasa.gov] :)

    • I wonder how many million miles per gallon of propellant these machines have gotten? Damn impressive engineering.
      Meh. I'm sure even Detroit could get great fuel economy is there was zero friction after you reached cruising speed.
      • Meh. I'm sure even Detroit could get great fuel economy is there was zero friction after you reached cruising speed.

        Easy. Just make sure your girlfriend's previous relationships involved men who are better endowed than you are.

  • Jsut shows you teh further away from (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Farakin ( 1101889 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:01PM (#20297779)
    our government, the better everything works...robots...farmers....technology...

  • billions of miles/km (Score:5, Informative)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:05PM (#20297811) Homepage Journal
    Sigh. Generally, if you have to use a really big number to describe something, you're not using the right units. In this case, Voyager I is approximately 104.28 astronomical units [wikipedia.org] from the Sun. In comparison, Pluto is about 39.5 to 49.3 AU from the Sun. Light takes about 14 days to get from Earth to the spacecraft. One day we might go out to the Solar Foci (around 550 AU) to use the Sun as a gravitational lens to image distant galaxies or the surface of exo-solar planets.

  • Factual misrepresentation. (Score:4, Informative)

    by ushering05401 ( 1086795 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:07PM (#20297831) Journal
    The furthest probe is about 1 billion miles from the 'edge' of the solar system (the heliosheath 8.7 billion miles from the sun). The second probe is still well short of that.

    Not quite the "billions of miles from our solar system's edge" that the summary states.

    Just nitpicking.
    • There are a number of possible definitions of the edge of the solar system. The heliosheath is quite an obscure one; I would imagine that most people would use the orbit of Pluto, which both Voyager probes have passed by several tens of AUs. You could also use the edge of the Oort cloud as a definition of the edge of the solar system, if you so chose. The heliosheath is the edge of the heliosphere, which is a lot more precisely defined in terms of extent than the solar system.

  • The really amazing thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by edwardpickman ( 965122 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:11PM (#20297883)
    The distance actually can be measured in light hours and I'll probably live to see it go into a light day distant and some on the forum may see it hit two light days, young teens with long lives. Puts interstellar travel into perspective.

  • Still going but fading from public awareness... (Score:5, Informative)

    by KokorHekkus ( 986906 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:15PM (#20297907)
    A couple of years ago we talked about portable electric power on the coffee-break at work and I mentioned that Voyager had some kind of nuclear powered source for electricity (corret term turned out ot be Radioisotope thermoelectric generator, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoel ectric_generator [wikipedia.org].

    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...

  • Billions and Billions (Score:5, Funny)

    by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:19PM (#20297943) Homepage
    15.6 billion kilometers is so hard to conceptualize. If only we had some measure of distance to give proper context; some sort of scale relative to the distance from the earth to another significant celestial body. A unit of measure large enough for "astronomical" purposes. Then we could say the probe is, oh, I don't know.. let's just pick a number and say the probe is 104 of these units away, instead of billions of kilometers. If only...

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by dkf ( 304284 )

      A unit of measure large enough for "astronomical" purposes.
      You mean the parsec [wikipedia.org]? "Voyager's now gone a bit over 500 microparsecs." Yeah, that works for me.
    • The other day someone asked me how far away the sun is. I told him with a straight face, "On average it is 1 away."
    • Nah, I can't conceptualise it unless it's in football-field lengths. Can someone figure that out for me? Google calculator won't do "15.6 billion km in football fields" so I'm stuck.
  • 'Scuse my ignorance but I thought Pioneer 10 was farthest away. Weren't the Pioneers launched launched before the Voyagers?

  • Farthest Man Made Object? I duno.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tmack ( 593755 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:25PM (#20297999) Homepage Journal

    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).

    I think theres Another contender [nuclearweaponarchive.org] for that title...

    Tm

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Two actually... this one [nuclearweaponarchive.org] has more confirmation that it actually was launched, and had a better chance of escaping earth.

      tm

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )
      That's without even raising the question of what constitutes an object. If photons or neutrinos count...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Seenhere ( 90736 )
      Except probably not:

      "Leaving aside whether such an extremely hypersonic unaerodynamic object could even survive passage through the lower atmosphere, it appears impossible for it to retain much of its initial velocity while passing through the atmosphere. A ground launched hypersonic projectile has the same problem with maintaining its velocity that an incoming meteor has."

  • Well if I punched that correctly into Google, that's still only 1/1000 of a light year (0.00165008086 light years). Hopefully someday we find a faster method of travel.

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&clien t =firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aoff icial&hs=ZMa&q=9%2C700%2C000%2C000+mile+to+light+y ear&btnG=Search [google.com]
  • about the record containing (among other things) directions to Earth. I don't guess it reads something like..."Take a left at the Crab Nebulae, and go about 2,000 light years...."

    • Re:I liked the part.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @07:28PM (#20298927) Journal
      It has so far travelled around 0.001 light years. At its current rate, it will have to travel for a at least sixty millennia before it's closer to any other start than ours (assuming one was launched in the direction of Proxima). It would have to go near another star and sling-shot off in a different direction before there could be any doubt as to which solar system launched it. Once you know that, you just need to pick the planet with all of the crap in orbit.

      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...

      • Re:I liked the part.... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @08:38PM (#20299415)
        No matter whether we're still alive (well, humanity, not you and me), should this craft be caught by some alien it can have some serious impact for their culture.

        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.
  • Can anyone elaborate weather or not Voyager one on two have sufficient velocity to escape the heliopause let alone the oort cloud. I would venture to guess they don't. However, their longevity is a testament to 70's electronics. If these were made with components of today, they probably would of failed decades ago.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )
      Yes, both Voyagers, and I think Pioneers 10 and 11 all have solar escape velocity.

      Voyager 1 has already passed the heliopause.

  • Richard Dawkins (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Nymz ( 905908 )
    Mr Dawkins made a statement that our society is increasing belief in superstitions, even as we make progress in science and technology. I can't help be reminded of this with the Voyager aniversary as news programs focus on the Golden Record [wikipedia.org] and Chuck Berry. Sure, at first I thought it was fun, but then reality sets in when I witness so many people that fully believe aliens and or angels are watching us, and just waiting for us to contact them.

    I'm sure at the time the record might of seemed harmless, exce
  • Does this thing have any navigation on it or anything to keep from splatting into stuff?

  • And I can remember... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SIGBUS ( 8236 ) on Monday August 20, 2007 @09:51PM (#20300041) Homepage
    ...when one of the "upcoming events" that was in FidoNet's FidoNews was "August 24 1989: Voyager 2 passes Neptune." Scary to think it was that long ago - it seems like only yesterday.

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