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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Lets imagine... hypothetically [1] that we could design a new kind of space oriented machines, sort of a "spatial server" or a "telephone repeater", that could be left in Pluto (or an asteroid, or orbiting Saturn, whatever...), and be designed to take this weak signals, amplify it, and resend it to the earth

Would this help to increase the range of what discover can report and... hum, discover?

Would help us to have the info in two months instead in eight? (maybe splitting in a multipart message and broadcasting in several threads and different frequency bands at the same time or so?).

or would be basically useless?

Could be used to start a exploring outer web that would be improved with each new launching as other countries connect to it?

[1] I don't know how realistic, or technically difficult would be. Is an idea idea that just occurred to me

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Its useless. Most of the time Earth is closer to the Voyager spacecraft than Pluto (or Saturn or...) is! In addition, we can build and maintain much better equipment here on Earth than we can ship to Pluto.

If you wanted to do this "for real", the better option is to send a train of repeaters after the Voyager spacecraft in roughly the same flightpath. More effective, and vastly easier.

Yes but that would need a similar planetary alignment I assume. Could a repeater send orders to voyager too?

You'd need a good planetary alignment to get the huge boost that voyager got. But not to get on the trajectory. Your repeater would get further and further from voyager, but not as quickly as earth is.

And yes, the repeater can both do tx and rx repeating.

That said, I'd expect Earth based (including earth based orbit) solutions to outperform at a lower cost for a long long time.

Probably not. It takes Megawats of power to ensure the small antenna on the proves gets the signal, it's not feasible to put such a thing on a spacecraft. Add to this the limited usefull life of Voyager's RTG power source (after 40 years, half the plutonium have already decayed) and we can conclude that this is not a good idea.

Anybody wondering why earth is closer to yovager than pluto? CGP Grey has a good explanation https://youtu.be/SumDHcnCRuU

Carl Sagan mentions this possibility in Pale Blue Dot, concluding that such a mission's budget could be better utilized for other projects. For the following reasons:

1) Voyagers have turned off most of their instruments due to their diminishing power sources

2) Voyagers are moving away with speeds that are hard to match by even contemporary launches thanks to their gravitational assist trajectories.

I like it. You'd need (many) more than one. Pluto has an orbit of 248 years. Kind of like putting your wifi router on a train track on your property line and sharing with your neighbours.

Perhaps on a bunch of objects at Lagrange points [0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_po...

Interplanetary Internet [0]

When I first heard about the Deep Space Network I thought it was something like this, and not a bunch of dishes on Earth.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet

That's exactly how the Soviets pulled off the geopolitical coup of broadcasting images from the dark side of the moon back to earth. They pulled it off first, because they were clever about it.

What you are proposing will absolutely work. Imagine a self-routing datagram trying to get closer to its destination at each step. In fact, that's exactly how the Internet is designed. Self-healing, self-routing, best-effort. Chop messages up into little pieces, and send them off to their destination, and hope for the best that they'll be reassembled correctly at the destination.

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