Voyager: Still dancing 17 billion km from Earth | Hacker News Reader

Voyager: Still dancing 17 billion km from Earth

bbc.co.uk

64 pointsJacobAldridge26 comments

There's something inspiring about this robot we built careening on the edge of the solar system. We should be launching another one today, with even more ambitious exploration goals.

That would be great. However, we just spent a trillion dollars to destroy a few cities in some desert in the Middle East, killing some 100k people on the way. For some reason that seemed to be a better idea than exploring space. :(

>> in the next few years, leave the space dominated by the influence >> of our Sun and enter the province between the stars - interstellar >> space.

That sounds just awesome.

Space seemed so much closer when I was 5-10 yo (early 80s) than it does now. So much space fiction has been replaced by fantasies about wizardry and vampires in an Earth-setting, as though they're somehow more realistic for daydreamers.

Its astonishing how good the engineers built this device and such other devices like the land rovers.

Anyone know the specs of Voyager? What sensors it actually has on it?

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/instruments.html

Thanks for that link. I just spent 20 minutes playing 'alien' and trying to figure out who, where and what we are from these images:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/sceneearth.html

I love the premise.

"Please note that these images are copyright protected. Reproduction without permission of the copyright holder is prohibited."

So the Aliens first have to come to earth to ask permission to make copies for analysis :) ? Smart NASA, smart!

Be sure to also check those two amazing summaries of incredible things: the "Fast Facts" and "Did you know?" pages:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/fastfacts.html http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/didyouknow.html

I regularly wish that I could have been born earlier and that I could have been part of the whole team that accomplished this huge achievement.

The "Grand Tour" of the Solar System by the Voyager probes is one of the greatest achievements of mankind IMHO.. :)

Hmm, 32 hour ping time.

I wonder if they can do another photo of the earth or if it would be pointless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

("only" 6 billion km away in 1990)

The earth takes up only one pixel on that image, that's kinda its significance.

Now they're 11 billion km further away, the earth is obviously never going to be detectable using that camera.

Maybe they could do "Pale Blue Dot II" when it's sufficiently far from neptune.

Depending on which side Neptune & Voyager is on, the Earth might be closer than Neptune... ;-)

But it's almost four times bigger than Earth...

The Earth is about 12% the luminosity from Voyager's perspective now as it was in 1990; that camera might still be able to image it, at least on its own.

But a bigger problem might be the Earth getting lost in the Sun. When the image was taken in 1990, the Earth was something like 1.4 degrees from the Sun at most, and that was close enough for the nearby Sun to cause the imaging artifact that shows up as the apparent sunbeam the pale blue dot is suspended in; at the same time, NASA said they couldn't image Mercury because it was too close to the Sun, when Mercury was about one half degree away from the Sun at most. The Earth is now about one half degree away from the Sun at most, at Voyager's current distance (assuming my back-of-the-envelope math is correct for all of the above).

I've posted this before but it's relevant again now and might interest those who missed it the first time. Please, no need for upvotes because I got them last time.

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I hear you. I actually managed to wrangle Voyager 1 into a brief nerd-out component of my wedding speech:

"Like me, the space probe Voyager 1 launched in 1977. Unlike me, it is one of the pinnacles of human achievement. It is currently the farthest man-made object from the Earth but it could not have achieved its speed and distance to date without gravity assists from Saturn and Jupiter. When space probes are launched, their path is often planned to get a gravitational slingshot from the most significant entities in our planetary family, to take them further than their launch alone might do. That boost is something invaluable, natural and efficient."

"I don't want to call my parents, (mother's name) and (father's name), giant balls of gas, but the boost, the impact they have had on my life, on my sister's life, my brother's life and now the lives of our partners, is huge."

[And then, later on] "Everybody, wish me luck that in our future together, there are only a few occasions where (bride's name) wishes I was the farthest made-made object from Earth."

How does it get powered?

nuclear battery, more or less

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen...

From radioactive decay of plutonium. According to Wikipedia, its power cell is expected to last until at least 2025. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power

Here's some more about the RTGs:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html

They used to provide about 470W, now it is down to the mid-200s.

Could one of these ("nuclear batteries") be used to power one of those exoskeletons from Lockheed or Raytheon?

It's been a while since I worked the numbers, but I believe that humans regularly put out more power than that during daily activities. Assuming the exoskeleton was extremely efficient, it wouldn't really get you all that much advantage.

A cyclist working hard will put out 300ish watts, so, during daily activities, unless you are talking extremely short bursts like lifting/jumping, we put out much less. Store a good amount of power in some capacitor system and that would be enough to power an exoskeleton I bet.

The mass of a Voyager RTG putting out 158W is about 38 kg (84lb). (It looks like Voyager used 3 of these RTGs.) Seems like they would be too heavy for your purpose.

It seems the Galileo RTGs were more powerful: 300 W in 56 kg (123 lb). This is still pretty heavy but maybe getting in there.

Solar panels have only been practical out to missions to Mars or the asteroid belt at farthest. For any more distant mission, nuclear power has been the only feasible power source, in the form of RTGs at least. Spaceborne nuclear reactors have long been contemplated for providing much higher levels of power.

When will Voyager encounter the machine planet and become self-aware, though?

wasn't it something like 300 years from now? 24th century.

That was Voyager 6

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