Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years (nasa.gov) 127
If you tried to start a car that's been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use. NASA announces: Voyager 1, NASA's farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or "puffs," lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980. "With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years," said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
Now THAT is amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
That honestly boggles the mind to think of something built so long ago, sitting in the harsh environment of space still able to function that well - not to mention all of the other hardware working well enough to instruct the thrusters to fire. Well done.
Re:Now THAT is amazing (Score:5, Informative)
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https://xkcd.com/1189/ [xkcd.com]
And this from 2014:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezvpvj/voyager-maybe-didnt-leave-the-solar-system-yet-again-again-again [vice.com]
But I like Munroe's take better.
And I get the feeling that they may pronounce the thing dead a few times too...
We may someday get a Pythonesque "I'm not dead yet" from this interesting little device we tossed into the sky...
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I only believe it has left "our backyard" when we get a ticket for flying a vehicle without a license in public interstellar space.
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To deliver the ticket would mean someone would have to violate the interstellar quarantine symbol - rings around the second gas giant.
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It's not the second gas giant that's the reason they're avoiding us. It's the rings around Uranus.
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2620 can't come soon enough.
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Shut up, meatbag!
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Those aren't rings around Uranus, they're Klingons.
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The part that worries me isn't just that they can't seem to figure out where the edge of the solar system is, it is that the conditions there do not match predictions, and yet nobody thought, "maybe we should scale back our predictions about things more than 10 AUs away" or something.
If we can't predict Earth's radiation belts, and we can't predict the conditions at the edges of the solar system, why do we think we can accurately see 14 billion years away?
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The part that worries me isn't just that they can't seem to figure out where the edge of the solar system is, it is that the conditions there do not match predictions, and yet nobody thought, "maybe we should scale back our predictions about things more than 10 AUs away" or something.
If we can't predict Earth's radiation belts, and we can't predict the conditions at the edges of the solar system, why do we think we can accurately see 14 billion years away?
OK, if you want to go down that road we could damage a bunch of theoretical disciplines...
I'm alright with that in principal but it's gonna break my heart the first time I see a nicely dressed PhD holding a sign saying
Will extrapolate sparse data for food!
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Right, if the best defense of science is a jobs program, maybe we should silo that part of the data, and let the science part just be smaller?
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Maybe be a little less pontificating about the theory du jour...
and in that vein, I wonder whose house Elon's car will land on...
This is Air Force Space Command, we are tracking a red sports car falling through the upper stratosphere...
Do we get to shoot at that sucker or what?
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Can we redefine the solar system so it can leave it one last time?
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I don't get this about stoves. I have this conversation with people fairly frequently, where they talk about replacing a stove or electric heating system because it's inefficient. "No balls it's inefficient, that's how a heating element works" or something to that effect. I don't see how a 50-year-old appliance which serves no purpose other than generating heat can cost more to run than a brand new one.
Obviously this doesn't apply to fridges.
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Funny that. I just had a conversation with my brother that my 30 year old maytag is still humming. He said don't get rid of it, his experience has been newer models last only 5 or 6 years.
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The point is that the new one could have been built to last long too, while being efficient.
I've seen some well-built appliances for $3-5000 a pop. Bet they last a long-time. Too bad I can't afford them.
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https://www.goodreads.com/quot... [goodreads.com]
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
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Quite possibly. I've seen a lot of fridges made after 2000 that only lasted about 7 years. Whether the energy savings are good enough to justify it are up to you. With that said, $30/mo is about what my 22 year old fridge uses (works fine by the way). I've run the math and while I could save a few bucks by replacing it, the payoff is longer than what the replacement fridge would likely last, so...
Re:Now THAT is amazing (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I agree it's amazing... but I'm not looking forward to when it eventually returns.
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Never mind V'ger, I'm more afraid of V-GINY!
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Re:Now THAT is amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
What's harsh about space other than it being relatively cold? Besides some solar radiation (which it's probably too far for anyway) there is nothing to interact with the systems, no molecules or fluctuations of radiation or physical pressure/stress that interact with it so it won't corrode or fatigue.
Yes, it's amazing that it still works because the design was good. What's more amazing is that they didn't fuck up the data transmission to interact with the hardware/software on the system. You're talking about 50's and 60's era electronics and hand-made/hand-programmed stuff that's still working at rates like 40 bits per seconds with nibble-sized serial communications to the CPU, how many programmers still know how much a nibble is these days and how to craft a message using it on modern systems?
Re:Now THAT is amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
What's harsh about space other than it being relatively cold?
What comes to mind:
A temperature of minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit (only about 5 degrees above absolute zero). Many materials and electrical components do not behave or age the same when subjected to decades of extreme temperatures and it wouldn't be a surprise at all to find some materials slowly getting brittle or changing shape or thermal or electrical conduction.
Radiation. A complete lack of protection from a planet's magnetic field or atmosphere means every single gamma ray heading the right direction hits it, hence the shielding and hardened components used to build the satellites. Maybe this drops off as it moves away from the sun, but we really don't know what the nature of space beyond the sun's immediate influence looks like.
Heat dissipation. No atmosphere means there is no convection so all heat must be dissipated via radiation emissions, which can be very slow. This means if you have hot spots in your electronics or the RTG power system without proper heat sinks, it can build up to a thermal failure.
And in space, no one can hear you scream.
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Re:Now THAT is amazing (Score:4, Informative)
The radiation is mostly cosmic and, if you've ever priced a chip that is hardened for space travel, you'll know it isn't a minor price difference. It's nasty.
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Try the new Pringles Space, hardened for space travel!
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Yeah, those are nasty too
Re:Now THAT is amazing (Score:4, Funny)
>but we really don't know what the nature of space beyond the sun's immediate influence looks like.
If only we could construct some sort of vehicle that could traverse space and send back signals...
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That's what I was thinking.
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Man, I'm disappointed in Slashdot. I laughed my ass off when I wrote that.
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What's harsh about space other than it being relatively cold?
What comes to mind:
A temperature of minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit (only about 5 degrees above absolute zero). Many materials and electrical components do not behave or age the same when subjected to decades of extreme temperatures and it wouldn't be a surprise at all to find some materials slowly getting brittle or changing shape or thermal or electrical conduction.
Heat dissipation. No atmosphere means there is no convection so all heat must be dissipated via radiation emissions, which can be very slow. This means if you have hot spots in your electronics or the RTG power system without proper heat sinks, it can build up to a thermal failure.
And in space, no one can hear you scream.
It is pretty cold out there. The mean temperature for matter in interstellar space is 3.2 K, which is the Cosmic Microwave Background of 2.7 K plus 0.5 K because of integrated starlight. But by far the major amount of heating Voyager gets its from its 3 RTGs mounted on a short boom that together still put out 4.5 kw of heat. Currently 249 watts of electrical power are available to run Voyager, a lot of that is used for electrical heaters (the transmitter is just 22.4 watts). I did a bit of Googling trying t
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Good news! Electricity is radiation!
Also, electrical current is heat. See also: Ohm's Law, Heat Exchanger. (hint: when considering heat dissipation, you left out conduction to everywhere other than air. You're missing convection in space, so you lose the fan on top of the heat sink, but you don't lose conduction so your heat sinks still all work.)
And people can hear you scream if you die in an explosion, or at least your suit gasses are released while you're screaming. (Yes, explosions make sound in space;
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In a vacuum? What do they conduct the heat to?
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*sigh*
to the heat sink . The problem isn't that space is hot or that your device will be hot in space. The problem is localized heating on one part of your device.
Notice that they're listing temperature as a problem because it is so cold? Not because it is so hot? The heating issue is localized heating, eg, a pinpoint of heat right on your IC.
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You don't seem to understand what "is" means. Electricity is linked to radiation and heat, but electricity is neither radiation nor heat.
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You're mistaking distinctions that help you understand the physics for the physics itself.
You can't actually separate the parts of the phenomenon in this case.
You're just parading ignorance as understanding, and then attempting to correct deeper understanding.
Without radiation, electrons can't move. You can't separate these laws. Actually, almost everything other than gravity is already unified...
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That's a pretty high horse you've got here!
You might have understood those concepts but you do a poor job of communicating it.
This sentence is quite simply 100% wrong.
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Really? Just cold space is, is it? Do you even know what Voyager went through on its way through the solar system? That probe was designed by the best of the best for just a dozen or so years of life expectancy. It has been through huge magnetic fields, radiation, dust, the heliopause and many other things. These designers really knew what they were doing. Oh, and it's still running on its original power source. How cool is that?!
Re:Now THAT is amazing (Score:5, Funny)
About 2.7 Kelvin according to wikipedia.
Re:Now THAT is amazing (Score:4, Interesting)
What's harsh about space other than it being relatively cold?
That is much like saying what's harsh about the inside of the sun other than it being relatively hot. Or what's harsh about the surface of venus other than it rains sulphuric acid.
Electronics lasting 30+ years at only a fraction of a temperature above absolute zero, a point where molecules themselves stop moving completely is amazing. Physical stress isn't the only killer of equipment. The amazing part isn't the programming but those 50s and 60s era electronics still ticking along. I don't have anything from the 50s or 60s anymore that I haven't had to repair. Even back then electronics used chemically reactive components capable of drying out or physically changing, and I'm sure none of it would do so well submerged in liquid nitrogen either.
That just reminded me something. Liquid nitrogen is very effective at converting heat. Electronics in space typically undergo immense stress as there's no convection possible. They gradually cool to incredibly cold temperatures and then when they fire up have to rely on only radiation to dissipate heat. It's counter intuitive but if your simple design has a heatsink to run here on 25C earth then it will instantly overheat in the -270C space. milliwatts cause stress.
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The hardest part is that in the movies everybody dies, unless they have transporter beams and gravity generators. And we don't have transporter beams or gravity generators.
So the hard part is the terrible anxiety of imagining the electrons surviving without a space suit.
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That honestly boggles the mind to think of something built so long ago, sitting in the harsh environment of space still able to function that well - not to mention all of the other hardware working well enough to instruct the thrusters to fire. Well done.
Back when shit was built in the United States by Americans. Source: family member was project manager for Voyager II.
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It's not arrogance if you really are better than the others. The number one reason the US pisses everyone off is it's total lack of empathy for non-US entities. If everyone would focus on their own well being instead of expecting the US to solve all their problems while also serving as the scapegoat for the failures of others. It's about time to re-shuffle the deck of international order. The current generation,especially in Europe, have never known a time when their national security was not guaranteed by
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America's arrogance is why it's becoming less important every day.
Or is it because we stopped being arrogant and started buying all our consumer goods from the Others?
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You mean, back when shit was built to last against the expressed wishes of the beancounters-in-charge who only wanted the probe to last long enough for the 4 planetary encounters.
Detroit showed us that "built in the United States by Americans" is not an indicator of quality.
Re:Now THAT is amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
For these thrusters (which I think are Aerojet 0.2-lb monoprop, MR-103 series), there's nothing to degrade from mere age or vacuum, and the environmental thermal cycling is negligible. So it is not that surprising that they still work. Using them is another story, and pulsing certainly does degrade them (eventually - hundreds of thousands of pulses).
It's not terribly unusual to switch to redundant equipment after decades and have it work. Essentially we rely on that working, and I have seen many examples of it working perfectly well. Vacuum is a very good storage medium for anything that does not outgas. Radiation degrades solid-state electronics and power supply components (particularly high-voltage components) are somewhat prone to degrading from age or outgassing. Longest I have personally been involved with is a prime flight computer that was believed to have failed on the day after the launch that was turned on 32 years later as a final test, and that worked fine for at least a few hours. But other components were switched to (of necessity) after ~20 years fired right up and worked fine, showing the same parameters as the day we turned it off.
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There's nothing to degrade on the thrusters themselves, but the valves that feed them are mechanical items and potentially subject to cold welding and other means of getting stuck. There have been thruster failures in deep-space missions.
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I'm curious (and know nothing about the subject). How do the thrusters work? Is there a fuel and a valve that has to open to release the fuel? Is the valve moved electrically? Is there some kind of spark plug that has to ignite the fuel? For thrust lasting a millisecond - isn't it enough just have a compressed gas container and release a bit of the gas without actually igniting it?
Re:Now THAT is amazing (Score:5, Informative)
It's not less than a millisecond, I think the minimum on-time is 15 milliseconds (you can go lower but you get disproportionate amounts of error).
It's an electrically-driven valve, a skinny tube with an injector at the end, which is embedded in the catalyst. When the fuel is released, it squirts out the injector and onto the catalyst. This causes it to decompose into steam (think putting hydrogen peroxide on a cut in your skin, but vastly more energetic). The steam is then accelerated out a nozzle, creating thrust.
As far as rocket engines go, it's not very efficient, and typically you have to heat the catalyst bed with a heater to keep the thermal shock of a firing from cracking the catalyst into dust. That, and development of "varnish" in the (tiny) injector passages - baked-on crud like a baking pan, is what causes them to wear out. One or both of those is apparently a factor in degradation of the prime attitude control set.
It's not terribly good for attitude control purposes due to the limited pulse life in the "fire once, wait 3 days, fire again" duty cycle, but it has the advantage of being very small (0.15 or so lb) and very inexpensive (I think something like $20000 a piece now, much less at the time) and has an extraordinary number of flights on it.
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Thruster's? Merely by using that phallocratic word you are literally raping 35 billion people.
P.S, you should, change you're password more often - sign'd AmiMoJo)
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Protip: read - and understand - entire post before responding.
Semantics? It's all interstellar, right? (Score:2)
The space between the stars? Show me somewhere that isn't between two stars.
It seems NASA has an answer at https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/in... [nasa.gov]
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The space between the stars? Show me somewhere that isn't between two stars.
Harvey Weinstein's dick. According to my calculations, it was periodically positioned inside a star at one time or another.
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In 1668, John Wilkins attempted to construct a language [wikipedia.org] which works the way you want language to work: everything made sense, everything was systematic, down to the way words were formed. Robert Hooke (of Hooke's Law fame) even wrote a scientific paper in it, describing the operation of a pocket watch. It never caught on, because making everything consistent and sensible also makes things unbearably cumbersome.
People use language to accomplish things, and the construct words to do useful things, not adher
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Everyone knows what a vacuum of space [nocookie.net] looks like.
No problem (Score:2)
Just pull out the choke, pump the throttle, put a cartridge in the Coffman starter and fire it.
Deep Space Network real time (Score:5, Informative)
FYI, you can see what each antenna in NASA's Deep Space Network is doing at any given moment by Looking at this site. [nasa.gov].
Below each antenna is the craft being communicated to. Clicking on the antenna and then "+ more detail" will get you some info about signal strengths, transmission rates, round trip light times, and more.
I don't see one right this moment but it is common to find one of the 70m antennas talking to one of the Voyagers. Right now Goldstone antenna 14 (70m) is talking with New Horizons.
Captcha = acquire
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As of the time of my post, Madrid is getting downlink data from voyager 1, and Canberra has a downlink carrier for voyager 2.
It's the only human made object alleged to have... (Score:2)
left the solar system. There is the very real possibility that some Russian Cosmonauts have ended up there.
LK
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left the solar system.
That and a manhole cover.
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left the solar system.
That and a manhole cover.
and a teapot.
V-ger seeks to merge with the creator... (Score:3)
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There is no space, there is no earth, there is no eclipses. There is no spoon.
Not looking forward to starting dad's truck (Score:1, Offtopic)
6 years later dad is still going strong, health wise, is totally gone, mentally wise, and I don't remember which wires I crossed and am not an A-1 mechanic. Plus 4 flat tires, and a truck that hasn't moved in 6 years/
31 years from now? My niece is
Gold Records (Score:5, Funny)
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Don't need one. With a high enough resolution flat bed scanner, we have software that can "play" it back from the image. (the same basic technology as today's laser based turntables.)
Cool Piece Of hardware (Score:1)
Re:Trump Will Be Impeached (Score:5, Funny)
But do his thrusters work after 37 years?