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:You have to give it to the engineers (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not really... (Score:5, Insightful)
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But keep in mind that instruments brake down or degrade in unexpected ways over time, presenting unique engineering challenges. The Voyager probes are not their former selves. Thus, the "engineering environment" does change.
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But keep in mind that instruments brake down or degrade in unexpected ways over time, presenting unique engineering challenges.
In a near-vacuum? Something tells me you don't engineer spacecrafts for a living.
No, he is quite right. Even if this spacecraft were in near vacuum with no external inputs: heat, radiation, whatever, it would slowly change over time. For example, some metal alloys can develop "whiskers". There are other sorts of migration of atoms over long enough times. Any radioactive isotopes in the craft would decay.
If the vehicle radiates heat in a way that isn't symmetric, then that can generate net forces and torque which can perturb the vehicle's trajectory or spin it.
Once one adds a const
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.
Re:You have to give it to the engineers (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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how on earth was this comment "Insightful". Take a look at the financial figures. The market cap on Northrup Grumman is $16B. Raytheon is $19B. Boeing is $50B - which of course also has a commercial side. Microsoft is $262B. Apple is $630B. Amazon is $114B. Most of these companies (and others like Oracle, IBM, Target, Walmart, etc.) are bigger than ALL THE DEFENSE companies. Take a look at the history of these companies. The best ones track the DOW, Nasdaq, SP. The lesser ones don't even keep u
Re:You have to give it to the engineers (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.
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they switched to the backup thruster set
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20111114.html [nasa.gov]
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>>> 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...
There are lots of military ships and planes with 35 year ages (aircraft carriers, bombers, Vietnam fighter jets). What they have to deal with is the constant erosion by earth's weather & hungry bacteria.
In space none of that exists so deterioration is much slower: Basically zero in human lifespans. Voyager will eventually run-out of nuclear power, but its electron
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Re:You have to give it to the engineers (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, even for some of those, 35 years is a stretch...
As an interesting counterexample, the B-52 Stratofortress [wikipedia.org] seems to be immortal:
Also:
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Aye, just AWESOME engineering ... and truly worth every penny.
Just hope some of the data will provide us with new insights on spaceflight.
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I also find it neat that there is something man-made that is 17 light-hours away. That is reeeeally far.
V'GER! (Score:5, Funny)
You will disclose the First Post. V'GER requires the information.
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Has it made it ? (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at this picture [nasa.gov], 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 ? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Always the frontrunner? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Not in our lifetime. The CEOs and the politicians all need new Ferraris!
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.
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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 t
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Shuttle speed = 7.5 km/s
Voyager 1 speed = 17 km/s
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Re:Always the frontrunner? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Voyager 1 is currently the most distant man-made object [nasa.gov], and is more distant than Pioneer 10.
Re:Always the frontrunner? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but wrong. Voyager I overtook Pioneer 10 in 1998 [uiowa.edu] :
Until 17 February 1998, the heliocentric radial distance of Pioneer 10 has been greater than that of any other manmade object. But late on that date Voyager 1's heliocentric radial distance, in the approximate apex direction, equaled that of Pioneer 10 at 69.419 AU. Thereafter, Voyager 1's distance will exceed that of Pioneer 10 at the approximate rate of 1.016 AU per year.
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It's always that one thing that you're pretty sure of and don't bother to fact-check before posting that bites you in the ass. I got the two missions reversed. :-\
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Brain-fart - I got that completely backwards! Back to coding...
Re:Always the frontrunner? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Always the frontrunner? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
There's some planetary alignment issues such that it would be really hard to catch Voyager. The New Horizons probe, despite being something like the fastest probe ever launched, is moving considerably slower because it had unfavorable gravitational assists, something like 10% slower than voyager. The planets have to line up, unless you do something ridiculous like launch a tennis ball a Saturn-V
Both are practically slow crawling compared to the Helios probes from the late 70s/early 80s which were moving something like 6 times the speed, although toward the sun not away. The Helios probes are still the fastest controllable "things" produced by mankind. The "controllable" is necessary because there's a famous nuke bomb test film where analysis of adjacent frames shows a manhole cover moving about about 0.1c... at least for a little while.
Re:Always the frontrunner? (Score:5, Informative)
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as it's hard to believe that atmospheric resistance could suck the momentum out of a four foot wide, four inch thick chunk of solid steel in the second and a half that it would have taken to exit the troposphere.
Well, keep in mind that each square inch of surface area has to push about 6.5 kg of air. If you have a square of the alleged thickness of the cover moving face on, it is pushing along about 15,000 kg of air, but the slab itself weights about 750 kg. So the cover, if face on, collides with about 20 times its mass in air. Even if it is moving edge on, it'll still run into around 1250 kg of air. That's still 50% more mass than the cover has.
In the former case, that would mean that the cover would decelerat
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> manhole cover moving about about 0.1c
A manhole cover [wikipedia.org] has a mass over 50kg. Traveling at 0.1C, it's kinetic energy would be over 2x10^18 joules [google.com], which is about half a gigaton TNT equivalent [wikipedia.org].
By comparison, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated [wikipedia.org] had a yield of 50 megatons.
Moral of the story: never underestimate the venerable C (when compared to human scale objects and measurements).
Correction (Score:2)
It should be 2x10^16 joules, or 5 megatons (somehow 0.1C became C in the Google equation while copy-n-pasting). A little less impressive but still highly unlikely.
Note to self: preview is your friend.
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Sounds like preview can be your friend too.
link for spaceprobe speeds (Score:2)
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:A trail of breadcrumbs (Score:4, Interesting)
Odds are that they'll run out of fuel long before we lose communication and/or a relay craft could catch up enough to make a difference. They estimate about eight years left.
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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.
For me the Infinite Improbability Drive is a fact as we're only limited by our own imagination.
Re:Always the frontrunner? (Score:5, Informative)
It would be nice to think that one day we'll reach a technological level that allows us to overtake Voyager 1.
Keep in mind that with the small velocities that our probes are leaving the Earth with at the moment, a small change of initial velocity makes for a big change in asymptotic velocity as the craft flies through the shallow parts of the gravity well (i.e., when it is far away). That means that we can already do that today.
You don't even need to integrate any trajectory to find this out, that's simple physics the kind of which I was doing in high school. Just calculate the kinetic + potential energy balance of the Sun-Earth-spacecraft system. Just escaping the Sun means balancing the (negative) potential energy of the probe within Sun's gravity well. The balance is v_terminal^2*m*(1/2) = E_p + v_initial^2*m*(1/2), where E_p is negative, of course, and v_initial is the speed relative to the Sun after leaving the Earth ("leaving the Earth" meaning here "getting far away enough so that the remaining potential energy caused by the presence of Earth won't skew the results too much"). If v_initial is 42.1 kps, you'll end up with v_terminal = 0. You'll get that if you leave Earth with initial speed of 16.6 kps which you can calculate in a similar manner. Now as to the the deltas to initial velocity of 16.6 kps near Earth and respective final velocities relative to the Sun in the infinity:
extra 1 kps => 10.6
extra 2 kps => 15
extra 3 kps => 18.4
extra 4 kps => 21.2
There are diminishing returns, but you can overtake Voyager 1 by having extra 3 kps when leaving the Earth *at any time*. The reason Voyager 1 is so fast despite having left Earth at a very modest velocity are the four grav assists. Today, all you need is the same ion engine that Dawn has and you're well on the way much faster than any probe before.
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What the hell high school did you go to? The most they taught is my school is how to balance a check book and not everyone understood that...
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Yeah, but that ~1kps difference needs to make up 10 billion km.
That's about 315 years. So your new probe has to last that long. At least.
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Well,V1 had only 2 gravity assists...
And, as I posted above, the Jupiter-Saturn dual gravity assists come up every 19.87 years - the next will be at the end of the decade.
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Re:Always the frontrunner? (Score:4, Interesting)
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There are a few reasons. Celestial mechanics is a big one: Voyager 2 took advantage of a rare planetary conjunction so it could visit all four of the gas giants. The next chance to do that is in something like 150 years.
Most of the time you'd be spending $$$ on a fly-by of one planet, and that money would be better spent on a mission that can orbit that planet instead. So instead of Voyager-style craft, you get missions like these:
Cassini-Huygens: Saturn and its moons
Dawn: Vesta in 2011-2012, and Ceres in 2
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I have tried to get some people at NASA Advanced Concepts interested in a voyage to Sedna [caltech.edu] (now near perihelion at ~ 89 AU). Sedna is especially interesting because of its orbit - there is a chance it is an interloper from another solar system [arxiv.org]. It's so far away that a trip in a reasonable time would require a higher velocity than Voyager.
Note, by the way, that the next double Jupiter - Saturn orbital assist would require Jupiter passage ~ 2018 and Saturn passage in ~ 2019. These only repeat every 19.87 yea
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There was the TAU [aiaa.org] 1000 AU probe, which was to be sold on parallax measurements (i.e., astronomy). I didn't regard that as compelling.
More interesting are the suggestions of a probe to the solar gravitational lens focus [utexas.edu], at 688.81 AU (or greater) (for light - it is less than that for gravitational waves or neutrinos, as they pass through the Sun, while light has to go around the Sun).
At that distance or greater, you could use the Sun as a telescope and greatly magnify any remote object at any frequency (and
iPod (Score:5, Funny)
"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?
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It is one of those new measurement units, like football fields or bathtubs.
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If hard drive space was your bottleneck - yes. Imagine if every time you tried to store more than 500GB you had to swap out to tape...
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According to what passes for science and technology journalism in this day and age, yes.
Sexy (Score:2)
slowly but steadily pushing through the heliosheath
Phwoar!
2020? (Score:2, Interesting)
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It's nuclear powered, so I believe it's just enough fuel to maintain its current minimal levels of operation until 2020, after which it will be little more than a chunk of metal floating through space.
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It's nuclear powered, so I believe it's just enough fuel to maintain its current minimal levels of operation until 2020, after which it will be little more than a chunk of metal floating through space.
Probably, but to karma whore a bit, as Sagan writes in Pale Blue Dot (pp 124-125):
Accordingly, as each Voyager left Earth for the planets and the stars, it carried with it a golden phonograph record encased in a golden, mirrored jacket containing, among other things: greetings in 59 human languages, and one whale language; a 12-minute sound essay including a kiss, a baby's cry, and an EEG record of the meditations of a young woman in love; 116 encoded pictures, on our science, our civilization, and ourselves; and 90 minutes of the Earth's greatest hits—Eastern and Western, classical and folk, including a Navajo night chant, a Japanese shakuhachi piece, a Pygmy girl's initiation song, a Peruvian wedding song, a 3,000-year-old composition for the ch'in called "Flowering Streams," Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Blind willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."
Space is nearly empty. There is virtually no chance that one of the Voyagers will ever enter another solar system...
But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we—otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space—perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records.
Re:2020? (Score:5, Informative)
Communications, I believe. It is just going where its inertia takes it at this point, and heading out of the solar system. It is obviously still under the gravitational influence of bodies in the solar system(and all the other ones, as best we can tell); but it isn't on a path that would be described as an 'orbit' in anything like the usual use of the term.
Re:2020? (Score:5, Informative)
The two Voyagers are gyroscope stabilized, so they don't need fuel for attitude control.
They are powered by Plutonium 238 RTG's, and that power is steadily declining as the Plutonium decays and the thermocouples age. I think that is what the article is referring to. I wouldn't call them fuel.
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Re:2020? (Score:5, Informative)
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Voyager 2 launched first? (Score:3)
So Voyager 2 was launched weeks before Voyager 1? Was the launch schedule changed at the last minute?
Re:Voyager 2 launched first? (Score:5, Funny)
George Lucas is to blame. He edited the order in Voyager: Special Edition.
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"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."
So Voyager 2 launched before Voyager 1, but despite that (fairly trivial) headstart of a couple weeks, Voyager 1 has traveled almost 30% farther than Voyager 2. Clearly there's some kind of tortoise and hare thing going on here. Perhaps it's time to start reading wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Re:Voyager 2 launched first? (Score:5, Informative)
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."
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You left out
7. Profit !!!!
Some kind of dupe (Score:5, Informative)
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
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The Linux Desktop is headed for the stars. You'll see!
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Because the Solar system doesn't have a clearcut borderline, crossing the heliosphere takes time.
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That is correct. We're all hoping it does not turn around and come back.
today was "round number" birthday: 35 years (Score:2)
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Won't be very long? Voyager won't be near another star system for roughly 350,000 years. That's more than 30 times the length of recorded history.
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Won't be very long? Voyager won't be near another star system for roughly 350,000 years. That's more than 30 times the length of recorded history.
That's wy the GP wrote: "it won't be before very long"...
35 years form now (Score:2)
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Yes, we will have the top 1% of the top 1% of 1% of income earners so far above the middle class that they will appear to have overtaken Voyager 1 by several lightyears.
Waiting for the astounded scientists. (Score:4, Interesting)
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yes, like when Truman Burbank sailed into that wall....
Where are they now? (Score:2)
18 billion kilometers? (Score:2)
Isn't that like 18 trillion meters or something?
Cool stuff (Score:2)
Whatever else we may think about the USA, they have done some cool stuff from time to time.
So Amazing (Score:2)
My grandfather would be proud... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish my grandfather was still alive to see Voyager 1 still in operation. He worked on the batteries and electrical system on the Voyager probes, spending most of his adult life working at JPL. He would be thrilled to know that they were both still operating, exploring, and sending data back to earth. Impressive!
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...
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Because science, that's why. Because it's useful, employs people, and leads us to a better understanding of the universe. Saying that science is wasting our money while ignoring the elephants in the room is insane.