Voyager spacecraft begin to power down
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Paraphrasing, the person said "You carry more computing power in your pocket than what we have on Voyager. And by that, I don't mean your smart phone. I mean you car key fob."
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a30916315/usb-c-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
Or are they just so obscenely expensive?
If you could use these then you wouldn't really need batteries, which you do need if you go solar.
Is it even possible for a mortal to buy a RTG?
And it's the type of thing that is only used by government programs, very dangerous to handle, and which requires a whole specialized industry to produce. The accounting gets complicated. I wouldn't be surprised by a $100M cost per RTG unit.
They are at least up to PowerPC with the most recent Mars missions, probably not a terrible tradeoff of computing power vs. radiation vulnerability.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/02/nasa-mars-perseverance-...
https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A...
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-annive...
The datasheet mentions SRAM, but no indication how much, and no indication of clock speed AFAICT.
> telnet horizons.jpl.nasa.gov 6775
The interface is pretty difficult to use, but there is a python wrapper for it. I forced myself to stumble through the telnet interface.
> Voyager
(no semicolon–othewise it'd look up in the small-bodies table)
That tells you Voyager 1 is ID 31, and Voyager 2 is ID 32.
> 31
> E
> <Enter> x2 (take defaults)
> 2022-06-18
> 2022-06-19
> 1h
> <Enter>
> A
Spits out this data:
https://gist.github.com/connorjclark/de205ce62a7f1d4fda6d8fa...
I'm not knowledgable enough to know how to utilize this data in an interesting way, but I assume this "Ephemeris" data can be utilized to determine where to point your telescope for any given object.
FYI, though, I think this may be looking at the wrong object ID. It selected "31", which appears to be the entry for one of the Lagrange points. Voyager 1 and 2 appear to have negative ID numbers, "-31" and "-32".
The web UI is here: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/
I once did a hobby project doing 2-body orbital simulations, and was able to use this data to set up a model of the solar system, and satellites orbiting the Earth. It's quite a fun dataset!
By default, it does solar system bodies … planets and our moon … but you can direct it to other SPK files (time-based ephemeris summaries) for asteroids, other moons, and spacecraft.
I love the words from the President included on the spacecraft: “We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”
Whether or not anyone could have stopped that doesn't matter, ppl attribute this to him.
A President usually sets the tone and direction of policy, but avoids personal accountability for the details for a variety of reasons.
My childhood church group (all Republicans, I’d guess) used to build houses with Habitat. It’s kinda hard to think poorly of Carter when he built something that does so much good.
I wonder if the loud, vitriolic right wingers make it seem like the right thinks as a united, extreme block, when maybe there’s a large, quiet group that is not well represented? Not sure. I may also just be in a bubble of reasonable centrists. My left wing and right wing friends are pretty centrist in my estimation.
Often referred to as the "silent majority".
> My left wing and right wing friends are pretty centrist in my estimation.
I think this is many (?most?) people's experience, whilst media (social/traditional) are geared towards demonizing both "sides", to increase engagement. I say "sides", because most people's opinions skew left/right depending on the issue in question, rather than fitting perfectly into the stereotypical archetypes.
They are all voting for Trump and the Trumpists. How moderate are they?
Johnson was a sociopath, who gave us Medicare, Medicaid, desegregation, and “standardization of computer communication.”
Your point made, however: it takes a true monster to survive American politics.
Speaking as a left-leaning resident of Georgia, it seems obvious to me that Jimmy Carter is not all that well-loved by his own political party:
* Part of this is because he made the mistake of bringing his own people when he went to Washington, instead of populating his administration with more federal insiders.
* Part of it is because he lost, and no one likes a loser (I'd say that Carter's place in the Democratic Part is similar to that of George H.W. Bush, without the legacy of an heir going on to serve two terms).
* And I believe that part of it is because, on the heels of the Civil Rights Act and the re-alignment it ushered in, Democrats were never all that genuinely enthusiastic about having a white Southern leader. It took 12 years of futility for them to embrace Bill Clinton (see point above, about how people more fondly remember Presidents who win re-election). And even Clinton's legacy has picked up a lot of tarnish over the past decade.
His election was like Clinton and administration like Biden.
I was a Carter fan before it was cool, seems like more and more people are coming around and revisiting his legacy.
Nor should we care. It is of far greater significance to be a good parent or a Gary Flandro than to be President.
That's what the sociopaths want you to think. Look at the most successful people politically, who got the most done - Lincoln, FDR, MLK, etc. They weren't sociopaths. The recent sociopath at the top of the ticket underperformed their own party.
Cancel culture is dangerous, but being tolerant of some behaviours (which of course are much more specific and contextual in this case) was also his downfall
This applies to almost every job. You need soft skills to be successful.
Reagan's first act was to sign an Executive Order eliminating all oil and gas price and allocation controls.
The gas lines vanished literally overnight (and I'm not exaggerating) and never returned. Boy do I remember that.
Carter could have done that. But he simply didn't understand economics.
Sadly, Biden is considering having the government control fuel distribution again.
Btw, the oil price controls were a Nixon initiative, continued by Ford. Carter did not invent them, he just didn't remove them.
Reagan was the beneficiary of the collapse of the OPEC price war internationally.
Something Carter could have done at any time. But he didn't. Reagan did.
> he just didn't remove them
That's right, for 4 years he didn't. He gets the blame for it for those 4 years.
Remember, Reagan did it on his first day in office. Carter could have done it the day before.
If you lived through that transition (I did) it was wonderful to have the gas lines disappear overnight and never return. Thank you, Reagan!
It was during the Nixon administration that price controls and rationing of gasoline were introduced, in response to the OPEC oil shock of 1973 (crude oil prices had been set by government since 1971). You mention Reagan's executive order, but that was just closing the stable door after the horse had bolted; Carter began the phaseout of the Nixon-era price controls in 1979.
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/04/06/archives/carter-to-end-pr...
All your article shows is Carter simply didn't understand the problem. Reagan did.
Not mentioned is the DOE also controlled allocation of gasoline to filling stations. That was quite a disaster. Reagan ended all that nonsense with the same EO.
Isn't it interesting that Biden is going down the same path? He'll fail just like Carter.
I might observe that Carter's 'dinking around' also reduced the federal government's budget deficit, which increased sharply under the Reagan & Bush administrations, along with the national debt.
From "TheU.S. Petroleum Crisis of 1979", PHILIP K. VERLEGER, JR.
>...On February 28, 1979, DOE published the following notice in the Federal Register: "It is essential that refiners enter the spring driving season with adequate gasoline stocks to meet seasonal demand requirements. We recognize that gasoline stocks are currently at adequate levels for this time of year, which is usually a period of low demand. Recent industry data indicate that total stocks are now in excess of 265 million barrels, which is less than last year's record high levels during the same period but above the average levels of previous years. Our concern is that these stocks not be drawn down precipitously as soon as the impacts of the Iranian shortfall are felt by refiners. Refiners are urged to keep stocks high enough to meet expected demand during the 1979 summer driving season, even if it is necessary to restrict somewhat the amount of surplus gasoline that is made available to purchasers currently" The implementation of these instructions had the effect of restricting the volume of gasoline available to service stations to between 80 and 90 percent of 1978 levels. This reduction was greater than the reduction in total gasoline supplies.
>...In April 1979, DOE ordered the fifteen largest refiners to sell 7.8 million barrels of crude oil to smaller firms that were unable to obtain supplies on the world market at competitive prices. …These transfers probably reduced the volume of gasoline produced in the second quarter because the refineries that purchased the crude oil had only a limited capacity to produce gasoline, while the refineries that sold it could have produced more. ...In addition to reducing the supply of gasoline, the buy/sell program appears to have affected the geographic distribution of crude oil and gasoline. This is because the primary recipients of the crude oil were refineries in the Midwest and the gulf coast areas, while the sellers were companies that were marketing throughout the nation.
>...…In April, DOE turned its attention to the low stock of distillate fuel oil … Two impacts were observed on domestic markets. First, excessive stocks of heating oil were accumulated. Second, companies may have been influenced to increase gasoline stocks in anticipation of the mandator yield controls that DOE threatened to impose. These controls specified the percent of refiner output that had to be heating oil. Such controls were designed to curtail the output of gasoline. By building higher gasoline inventories, refiners could smooth out the month-to-month distribution of gasoline despite the controls.
>...Price controls on gasoline may have also created an incentive to withhold gasoline from the market when the prices of crude oil were rising rapidly. …In summary, the refiners had the capacity and the knowledge to take advantage of this opportunity. Ironically, the instructions from DOE to the companies were to do precisely what was most profitable.
>...In addition to encouraging the buildup of stocks, DOE may have added to the shortages by creating an incentive to reduce the output of crude oil. Although it is difficult to estimate what domestic supplies of crude oil might have been in the absence of any restriction, a DOE announcement in November that control levels of the base period were to be reviewed may have constrained production in the first half of 1979.
A gas station had to apply to the DOE to get gas, and write a paper justifying this. I know this because a friend bought a gas station. He couldn't get a DOE allocation because the gas station across the street filed an objection with the DOE that no gas was needed for the new owner. So his gas station sat with no gas for 6 months or so.
That's Carter's energy policy. Well meaning, but completely wrong.
Let's go back to what happened - Carter didn't fix it in 4 years. Reagan did overnight as his first action. Reagan gets the credit.
Read also Carter's policy proposals for energy. All terrible, just like Biden's.
Gawd, what an awful proposal.
This is a lovely saying, but it feels like fairly strong false advertising. "We hope X", interpreted literally, implies that people physically engage in such forms of thinking. I do not believe this is actually true at ground level, rather, I think this is more of a story that we like to tell ourselves about ourselves.
SpaceX is doing exciting stuff in the field of rocketry; that's really happening and it's worth being excited about, but they aren't doing more. It's misguided and dangerous to treat them as utopian idealists.
[1] https://www.spacex.com/mission/
[2] https://www.gutenbergcanada.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-outofthesilent...
Criminy, aren't they doing great? I finally found a way to buy some shares of SpaceX. I don't even care if that investment does badly, I just want to share in a tiny bit of SpaceX.
> dangerous
?? On the scale of things that terrify me, SpaceX doesn't move the needle.
Plenty of us do. The fact that we're not running the world is a detail.
> Plenty of us do. The fact that we're not running the world is a detail.
Engineers doing good things even though everyone else doesnt want to care & just wants something cheap. Heartbreaking long tale of humanity, that opting to do good things is so hard to get buy in on.
As an engineer myself, having worked on product and having been a client of engineers working on products for me, I can tell you that engineers that think they have an inside track on what the client "really" wants are often wrong. The feeling is similar to that false confidence you get in any field when you have learned just the absolute basics, and I have felt it myself. That's why you don't just go and spend 10% of the clients budget without talking to them first. If clients are saying they don't want a feature, it's quite probable that the person you're dealing with actually knows what they want, and what they want is not what you've come up with.
A lot of projects that filter their way through HN die because the engineers are solving the problem for themselves and not talking to users. That is also the pattern you see with a lot of "what I wish I had known when I started my project" posts on here. Avoiding a conversation with the client because you're afraid they won't approve the feature you want to add is not really great engineering.
I disagree, engineers are not robots. Good engineers may second guess and get technically involved in adjusting badly written instructions or mangled schematics, and do so all the time. And no, the "process" for querying and changing requirements is not always practical. Of course good engineers should document and report all deviations from the recspec and talk to the quality manager. Spotting that a capacitor or diode voltage is under-rated and swapping the part number, no problem. Upgrading a part if it makes no other difference seems okay too. I've been very grateful to fab or pick and place engineers who corrected a silly mistake I made instead of just sending me back a board that obviously wouldn't work. But those kind of people who take initiatives are rare to find these days,
Pharaoh: "But that would be too expensive right? Don't waste the treasury's money. Ordinary mortar is fine."
Engineer: (goes off and mixes volcanic ash into the mortar, despite the cost)
Otherwise a structural failure would likely have happened.
So if the whole process of spec'ing and validating the quality of sourced materials was within their action space, ofc they'd choose (potential) fault-tolerance over price, as it was mission critical.
So there might be a reason why we refer to it today as space race and not race to the bottom.
Ps I always thought that record was a bit funny. I mean it's a good method of initiating communication. Just strapping it to a can of poison is kind of a mixed message. "Hey buddies we're peaceful humans, ps here's a can of instadeath" :) Though I suppose little radioactivity would be left by the time it ever reached an alien civilization.
And radiation is something that's pretty unversally poisonous (instead of biological poisons which tend to be only poisonous to certain species). I don't think there's a single species on earth to which radiation isn't deadly.
I just think the records would have been better launched on their own (and hundreds of them in different directions of potentially life-sustaining systems). That'd have been cool (even though it's still a total long shot).
With a half life of 87.7 years there won't be any left by the time it's found.
They'll have to know nuclear science to even propose a hypothesis about what was in that container.
If they don't then they'll scratch their heads about how this thing was even powered.
The nature of unstable (and therefore radioactive) elements is that they'll decay until they are stable elements.
It'll all be gone. Literally every single atom in about 7500 years.
Almost all RTGs use Pu-238 which is an alpha emitter. It is so active it gets red hot from its own energy. The reason they use it is that alpha radiation consists of relatively large particles which are easy to capture and thus take advantage of their energy. Also, gamma radiation would probably interfere with instruments and it's super hard to block in a lightweight spacecraft.
But it's not safe. Get a dust particle in your lungs where there is no protection from alpha particles (unlike the skin, which would at its worst develop easily-detectable skin cancer), and you'll die a slow and painful death. Not what I'd consider safe. Not instadeath either like I said, I know..
I.e. the Simpsons view of plutonium, which is likely what's in most people's minds.
Anyone encountering the probe will pretty much by definition be very advanced, to not only get to space but also intercept something going above their star's escape velocity.
You'd expect them to wear gloves and stuff.
Plutonium may not even be the most hazardous thing on there. They may be deadly allergic to gold. (though yes plutonium is the one thing on there we can pretty much guarantee is hazardous while existing in fairly large quantities)
But who knows, maybe their equivalent of eyes get the equivalent of cancer from alpha radiation.
Although by the time it reaches any aliens the plutonium is going to be all spent. Half life of 87.7 years. After only a thousand years all that's left is 0.037%.
That's of course the thing about radioactivity: The more dangerous it is, the shorter a time it's dangerous. If Voyager were heading towards proxima centauri then it'd take 73 million years to get there.
Lots of it is already gone:
"As of June 17, 2022, Voyager 1 has 70.19% of the plutonium-238 that it had at launch. By 2050, it will have 56.5% left, far too little to keep it functional".
After 73 million years it'll be 5.1e250573 times less. It was about 37.7kg at launch. If I calculate right then the last pu-238 atom decays after only about 7500 years or so.
It's much less dangerous now than when it left earth, which is of course exactly why it's powering down.
tl;dr: By the time they find it there may not even be a single plutonium atom left undecayed.
* 1 LD from Earth = November 18, 2026 -- 1,614 days from today
* 1 LD from Sun = Feb 03, 2027 -- 1,691 days from today
https://www.quora.com/When-will-Voyager-1-become-1-light-day...
It was fun watching the scientists boiling over with excitement when all their theories were trashed by each new picture, and they had to reinvent them from scratch.
Coincidentally, randomly the other day, I thought how much more advanced our computing would be today as a species if we worked within the constraints of the computing of available at the time of Voyager or even the 90s.
I think we would favor information and communication vs. cruft and entertainment. Working within constrained computing environments forces us to make tough decisions about what is important or pushes us to innovate and be creative with what we have to work with.
1. The last human to touch the spacecraft was a physicist inspecting two detectors — probably part of the low-energy telescope system (LET).
Although many scientists have worked on the Voyagers over the decades, Cummings can make a unique claim. “I was the last person to touch the spacecraft before they launched,” he says. Cummings was responsible for two detectors designed to measure the flux of electrons and other charged particles when the Voyagers encountered the giant planets. Particles would pass through a small “window” in each detector that consisted of aluminum foil just three microns thick. Cummings worried that technicians working on the spacecraft might have accidentally dented or poked holes in the windows. “So they needed to be inspected right before launch,” he says. “Indeed, I found that one of them was a little bit loose.”
2. Carl Sagan not only commented on the “Pale Blue Dot” but also persuaded NASA to take the photograph in the first place.
Sagan urged NASA officials to have Voyager 1 transmit one last series of images. So, on Valentine's Day in 1990, the probe aimed its cameras back toward the inner solar system and took 60 final shots. The most haunting of them all, made famous by Sagan as the “Pale Blue Dot,” captured Earth from a distance of 3.8 billion miles. It remains the most distant portrait of our planet ever taken. Veiled by wan sunlight that reflected off the camera's optics, Earth is barely visible in the image. It doesn't occupy even a full pixel.
Sagan, who died in 1996, “worked really hard to convince NASA that it was worth looking back at ourselves,” Spilker says, “and seeing just how tiny that pale blue dot was.”
Just imagine the skills and knowledge with the technology at the time, to figure out how to land something safely in an unknown environment. Love it!
We are doing more space launches than ever right now, it just doesn't define this time. The birth of the internet and rise of computing technology sent us into the information age.
The so-called "ages" are named for what is new within them, there's no implication that the technology is lost when the next supposed "age" starts.
We're usually now referred to as being in the Information age, which puts the Space age in the past.
The only other magazine that I miss as much is old-school Byte.
I would add Nat Geo to that list, given one has an interest in our planet, peoples, culture. I had subscriptions to these given to me as a kid and enjoyed reading every one of them. It was like a part time general education course that I really did not appreciate until roughly a decade after it was all over.
I can think of three ways:
(1) get the direction right in the first place and just assume the craft is where we calculate it should be;
(2) watch it from afar somehow; or
(3) have it tell us where it is.
These seem like three quite different options and I would love to know how it’s actually done.
However, they also calculate range precisely by sending it pings and timing its response. They calculate velocity precisely by looking at the Doppler shift of that return signal (https://geekswipe.net/technology/aerospace/how-nasa-calculat...). Measuring those over time provide a fairly precise location.
When external forces impart a force on the craft (eg exciting new moons!) how is that taken into account?
And then what?
But until starfaring is developed enough, we should be careful with any gigaton-scale spacecraft doing gravity assists!
TL;DR: It will not happen. You would need to throw on the order of a thousand Earth-masses to even get close to neutralizing Jupiter's orbit.
All processes in this world are unsustainable, but only some matter.
Uncalibrated and/or unfalsifiable computer models should never be trusted.
Uhh...won't they still be the first?
They will be the ones that have traveled the farthest until faster objects catch up and surpass them. It may take time until we send anything faster, and it's going to need time to catch up, so it will take decades.
If I’m the first person to be the fastest runner, then nobody else can be first. It just doesn’t make any sense. Someone can be faster, but they’ll never be first.
“And they have crossed into interstellar space, according to our best understanding of the boundary between the sun's sphere of influence and the rest of the galaxy. They are the first human-made objects to do so, a distinction they will hold for at least another few decades.”
Imagine that Voyager 3 and 4 are launched next year.
In 100 years from now, people will say that voyager 1,2,3 and 4 were the first.
It's not that voyager 1 and 2 will lose that distinction, but they might share it with others, in the same way that Voyager 2 shares it with Voyager 1 to our eyes.
How many of such startling discoveries get noticed by bureaucracy/administration nowadays? Back then, it seems ideas percolated to execution stage pretty fast. I wonder if a part-time working grad student's serendipitous finds will be taken seriously to action in today's environment.