Voyager Set to Enter Interstellar Space | Hacker News Reader

Voyager Set to Enter Interstellar Space

science.nasa.gov

187 pointspwg64 comments

It just so happens I was listening to some beautiful 1970s space music when I read this (Tangerine Dream, if you're interested).

The dreams of exploration we had from the time of the first man in space through the 1980s were so wonderful and optimistic. I grew up reading OMNI and Discover, watching Carl Sagan on television and playing with toy Space Shuttles.

When the Voyager left earth, we believed that man would walk on Mars by the end of the millennium, and that first contact was just around the corner. It was unthinkable that, in 2011, we would be seeing the end of the Space Shuttle with nothing to replace it and the suspension of SETI.

I hope that moments of wonder like Voyager leaving the solar system, still functioning, will light our collective spirit and inspire us to remember why we wanted to reach for the stars in the first place.

> It just so happens I was listening to some beautiful 1970s space music when I read this (Tangerine Dream, if you're interested).

Thank you for introducing me to Tangerine Dream.

I was just going to say thanks for reminding me about TD, I haven't listened to them in a while...but now I'm back on them ;)

> It just so happens I was listening to some beautiful 1970s space music when I read this (Tangerine Dream, if you're interested).

The Pink years were the best.

nothing to replace it? See SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.

SpaceX in a few more years should be able to do human transportation to orbit. Virgin Galactic is for space tourism and doen't fulfill any of the roles the shuttles were used for. When the shuttle retires, there really isn't anything else (in the US) that comes close to replacing it.

Why should SpaceX be the only competitor who succeeds in the next few years?

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

I was just listening to "Space Night Earthviews" :D (A late night show in Germany combining great music and visuals. Can be found on YouTube.)

I was really depressed about the retirement of the Space Shuttle until I saw that SpaceX (http://www.spacex.com/) crew simulation demo video the other day.

Time for us to run with the baton for awhile folks.

The article reminded me of this classic story of geek-love between Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan as they were creating the "gold record" that is traveling on both Voyagers.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1235348...

Every time I read about either Voyager I/II or Pioneer 10/11 I am amazed at just how vast space is. Nothing like spending the better part of 50 years to go an incredible distance - a distance, which is so small in the grand scheme of things...

At the same time I'm delighted to be alive during a part of history in which humanity accomplished such a pitifully tiny and yet monumental feat.

>"Nothing like spending the better part of 50 years to go an incredible distance - a distance, which is so small in the grand scheme of things"

50 years is very short on a galactic scale as well.

True, and yet it's a good chunk of a lifetime for a human.

Until recently, 50 miles was a long distance for a human to travel.

It's almost as if the universe was created to mock us. So much space to explore, but physical law makes it impossible to explore more than the smallest, most insignificant fraction.

Which is why we need to work on the aging problem. Once that is solved, we can explore all we want.

Agreed. Aubrey de Grey is a crazy bugger, but he's got the right idea.

He looks crazy, with the enormous beard, but his appearance belies an impressive amount of sanity.

I've been really impressed by listening to him. In particular, he's very up-front about what we don't know yet, and the uncertainty involved, and he's very careful not to promise more than he can scientifically justify. This sort of thing does not come through very well in sensationalist mass-media portrayals of him, though.

I think he has a good chance of finding ways to slow down the aging process and buy us some time, just like we've managed to extend lifespans heavily through other advances in medical and related technology. However, I have very low confidence that that direction of research will manage to completely solve the problem. We have far too many ways of breaking down, and not all of them seem solvable by patching. I have somewhat more hope for a solution from the AI camp, personally. I just hope the Uncomfortable Truths Well (http://xkcd.com/568/) doesn't prove correct.

We've already solved that with reproduction. We need to figure out how to out-live our planet.

I think we know much of what we need to know (the basics: how to procreate, how to create a craft, etc; plus the steps to take) but the costs are just a little hard to justify for many given existing world problems and a predilection to just fighting everything.

If it is a generation ship or some other from of slow craft (and aren't they all at the scales we are discussing), then it needs to contain a biosphere if it is going to take humans in their current form. We aren't anywhere near good at making those at all.

Unless we are thinking about some form of entirely synthetic food and oxygen production, in which case, we aren't any better at those really.

True, true - but with funds and 5-10 years, surely we could ramp up a serious shot?

No, not exactly. We still dont know if we are able to give healthy births with no or less gravitation.

Reproduction doesn't address the aging problem at all. To quote Woody Allen, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality by not dying.". The same thing applies to reproduction: I don't want to achieve "immortality" of some fraction of my genetic code, I want to achieve immortality by not dying. :)

We may be limited by physical from visiting in person, but we nonetheless have an incredible set of front row seats here on Earth.

The concept of the light-cone[1] really frustrated my younger self (raised on heady expectations, warp drives and transporters). There might be a sentient race very close to us in time-space that we will never know because the light-cones will never meet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone

Well if the light cones never meet, then they're not that close

Correction: laws of physics as we currently understand them

For example, we still don't understand inertia and gravity.

Nothing is impossible.

This is what I like to refer to as the "bias of computing." The idea is that we deal with so much scientific progress in our fields that we tend to think that scientific progress can take us anywhere and no restriction will stand up for long.

However, this is a fallacy that really has no grounding in the laws of physics. What reason do we have for thinking that information can travel faster than the speed of light? Moreover, what evidence do we have that the second law of thermodynamics could be reversed on a macro scale?

The assumption that all barriers will fall as others have seems unreasonable and contradictory to our current evidence.

But if we never dreamed it so, then we never would have tried and never would have broken down those other barriers. Just the fact that we've broken down all those other barriers inspires me to believe.

I think predetermining that faster-than-light information transmission is possible is a bastardization of scientific progress. I don't see physics as a quest to break barriers, I see it as a quest to understand the nature of the universe. If the nature of the universe is that humanity will never colonize another world in a lifetime, then so be it. We simply have to learn to deal with the realities of our existence.

Well, things might be[come] possible if people like Burkhard Heim are correct with their theories and ideas.. :)

http://www.heim-theory.com/Content/Obituary_of_Burkhard_Heim...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6990323/Burkhard-Heim-Take-a-Leap-...

www.mufon-ces.org/docs/heimphysics.pdf

Funny you should try to imply that our fundamental physics are somehow wrong in a serious way that we have a high chance of finding a deeper physics that shows "impossible" things by today's physics are possible (want to take bets on timeframes?), on an article about two space probes that have lasted 34 years out there because of our understanding of the fundamental laws. As for not understanding the "why" of inertia and gravity, we nevertheless have general relativity which is pretty darn good.

I'm not implying that they're wrong, I'm implying we're missing pieces from the puzzle.

I think the problem is the opposite. We evolved on a planet, so we're only (naturally) suitable to live on a planet.

Once we're able to modify ourselves and our DNA and outrun evolutionary constraints, that might change. Once we're a swarm of small, near-immortal devices, I suppose exploring the universe on large scale will make a lot more sense.

But in the short run, it's fun and interesting to explore the solar system in human form, even given the limits of our current technology. And to not worry about what a small, insignificant fraction it is, because it's still a hell of a lot more than we've seen until now.

define "we"

Humanity, and everything that follows from it.

Once we are a "swarm" we will no long be human. I think that is a nightmare vision you have put for there.

Humanity is already a swarm. A swarm consists of individual animals that more or less coordinate to go in a certain direction (so this is different from a hive mind).

Also, it is 1000ths (or even millions) of years in the future I was talking about. Why would our current moral standards still hold?

If physical function is what makes us human, Stephen Hawking isn't much more human than a mind in a robot.

Fantastic read!

Fantastic technology! This stuff is old, but it still works extraordinarily well. They sure knew how to engineer stuff then. They say that they might keep going until 2020 -- I bet those bad boys will surprise us and keep on kicking for much longer!

> They sure knew how to engineer stuff then.

Arguably, the current generation of engineers aren't too shabby themselves. Spirit and Opportunity were designed to last 90 sols, with their actual missions lasting some 25 times that, and Opportunity is still knocking about up there.

On a second thought, you're absolutely right. There's really no way I can tell what's good engineering or bad in present time until a few decades down the track.

From memory, the probes will shut down their functioning gradually as they run out of power. Also if they stop receiving messages from earth they will keep doing science according to some preprogrammed procedure and beam the results back. Go humans!

Plutonium 238 which powers the thermopiles has a half-life of about 87 years and many of their instruments are no longer in operation, so the remaining mission scope is an issue of power management.

Voyager is a beautiful example of reliable code and engineering. 30 years and 10 billion miles out, and still functioning.

Exactly what I thought. This is what real engineering looks like.

As an engineering approach to generating power, thermopiles are considered differently today than in the 1970's due to environmental and health risks associated with plutonium and the probability of a launch failure.

I agree with your assessment if you're talking about perception, not actual risk.

Shortly before Cassini was launched there were some people on my college campus protesting the mission on grounds of risk of radioactive debris spreading if the launch failed. Motivated by my distaste for fearmongering, I did some reading and found that nearly all the scholarly research and engineering studies suggested the risk was infinitesimal, and in a worst case scenario the spread of dangerous concentrations of radiation would be highly localized.

Aside: Bill Nye (himself a trained engineer) also uses his position as Executive Director of The Planetary Society to advocate for the use of nuclear power generators in deep space missions.

In light of recent events in Japan, engineering risk assessments regarding the hazards posed by industrial uses of plutonium are not exactly gospel. The fact that 3 of 4 failures of the Titan IV rocket occurred following Cassini's launch, the prelaunch engineering risk assessment for Cassini is likely to have underestimated it's risk in a similar manner.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Titan_launches]

Cassini was launched by the IV-B variant of the Titan. Given that only one IV-B launch had taken place prior to Cassini, I'm guessing they applied a pretty big risk factor to the launch vehicle.

This was back in a time when one guy could be familiar with every single line of code running on a computer, from user space programs right down to the kernel. This level of simplicity surely did wonders for reliability. Not to say you couldn't achieve good results with a more complex modern system, though to spend a lot more time making things failsafe.

> This was back in a time when one guy could be familiar with every single line of code running on a computer, from user space programs right down to the kernel.

This is still possible, by the way. Humanity hasn't lost the ability to create simple computers. :) We just see less of them because the complex ones are more useful for day-to-day life.

I'd argue that more complex ones (appear) beneficial to programmers more than anything else (users don't appear to benefit from complexity).

The fact is that we won't break the bonds of earth with NASA. Decades of bureaucracy and budget cutting has left them as little more than another government agency that exists solely to expand and maintain it's own budget. I'm 29 years old. So is the space shuttle program. It's completely unacceptable that we are taking 30 year old vehicles to space. Would you trust a 30 year old sedan on a cross country road trip? I wouldn't. And now, the program is being discontinued with nothing ready to replace it. We are going to have to rely on Russia until we can get our next rocket operational. If the men who created the Apollo program were told that one day we'd rely on the Russians for our space travel, they'd laugh you out of the room. Also, why haven't we been to the Moon in nearly 40 years? Is there nothing worth exploring left on the entire thing? Thank(insert deity here) that companies like Space X are taking up the slack. It's unfortunate that NASA has fallen so far, but it has.

Your 30 year old sedan analogy is terrible. A space shuttle isn't a "daily driver" that NASA changes the oil in every three months or 3 million miles. They're meticulously maintained. Yes, they're old tech and certainly in need of replacement, but they're not bad just because they're old.

Heck, thousands of people use the Golden Gate bridge every day, and it's 70 years old!

Anyway, I'm much less pessimistic w.r.t. NASA than you. Am I disappointed that we don't have permanent bases on the moon and mars? Most definitely. I'm a huge fan of space exploration, and I really wish we were farther along. That said, NASAs robotic exploration continues to impress. There have been failures, mismanagement and poor performance in plenty of cases, but I'd be willing to pay even more tax to increase NASAs budget. I still view them as a good example of things the public sector can do right.

I'm so proud of Humanity right now. Thousands of years later when future Historians would be studying our period, I am sure they will feel proud about the far-sighted decision this Voyager project had been. Future scientist may thank us for setting a benchmark they now have to excel.

How many years until V'Ger returns home?

For anyone who didn't get the 'joke' (like me) and who knows nothing about Star Trek (also me), turns out that "V'Ger" is a Star Trek character. From Wikipedia:

"A sentient being that evolved from Voyager 6, a fictitious space probe from the 20th Century that vanished into a black hole and was given life by a race of living machines. The story of V'ger and its return to Earth to seek "the creator" forms the plot for the first feature film in the Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Motion Picture."

I'm personally waiting for V-GINY.

(For anybody curious, this is a reference to an episode of Futurama, which was an homage to the Star Trek episode. In Futurama "V-GINY" is the result of an FCC "v-chip" which was mounted on a space probe coming back to earth to cleanse earth or "inappropriate content". You can read about this, here: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/V-GINY)

It must suck to create a new account, just to have your first comment failguy out and render your account useless. Won't the auto-kill feature just automatically deaden any future posts from this guy? Seems like a poor way to nurture possible good HNizens who make a mistake or two in the beginning.

Technically he was only following the example of the V'Ger guy who isn't being downvoted.

V'Ger guy was being downvoted initially.

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