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johnohara

Distance: 8,600,000,000 miles

Radio wave: 186,282 miles per second

Push instructions: 12 hours, 49 minutes, 12 seconds

Flip bit: ?? milliseconds [+]

Wait for sample data: 12 hours, 49 minutes, ?? seconds

Process sample data: ?? milliseconds [+]

Analyze and confirm sample data: ~4 hours

[+] does anyone know this value?

It's a continuous signal so it had to have been exciting to view the stream at the appointed time and see the correct format. Kind of like setting the baud rate and parity on an old VT100 and getting the username prompt.

Congratulations to everyone involved.

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It is kind of depressing to think this spacecraft that we launched over 30 years ago is only 1/2 light day away and the next nearest star is over 4 light years away.

More good info here: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/science/index.html

Batteries should be good until 2025, data is sent back at 160 bits/second

500 years ago the only way a human could go faster than, say, 20mph was by jumping off a tall structure. Even 200 years ago nobody knew much about the nature of the Universe outside our own Solar System, nobody knew how atoms worked, nobody knew about fission or fusion, nobody knew how the Sun worked, automobiles, computers, heavier than air flying machines, and spacecraft were as fantastical and unbelievable as any Greek myth, perhaps more so.

Since then humanity has grown by leaps and bounds. Conquered diseases. Conquered limitations of distance. Learned many of the answers to the Universe's deepest questions. We know how stars work to a degree that would astound an astronomer from 1800. We know the age of the Universe to an incredible precision. We've spied on the microwave echo of the big bang. We've sent humans into space repeatedly and landed on a neighboring planetary body. The Universe is a big place, we've only barely started to explore it and understand it, but we shouldn't ignore how far we've come.

Horses and some sailing ships go faster than 20 mph, but yeah.

Also, Voyager wasn’t designed for maximal speed out of the solar system. Even then, if we had wanted to get to Alpha Centauri as fast as possible, we could have done better. Not that the numbers aren’t humbling.

Pinging VOYAGER2 with 20 bytes of data:

Reply from VOYAGER2: bytes=20 time=46152000ms TTL=53

And I thought my latency was bad...

The Voyager probes are absolutely astounding. I thought President Bush had proposed cutting funding to that project as a cost cutting measure. I'm glad that never occured.

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