Another point of reference is the heliosphere, at 100AU. 1AU (earth to Sun) is 93M miles, so the heliosphere is around 2.5 Plutos away.
Nope. At its current speed, we’ve got another 129 years. That’s an underestimate because the spacecraft will continue to decelerate a bit as it pulls farther away from the sun.
That’s about 60,000 years to the nearest star.
Assuming it doesn't hit a rock or eventually fall into something. How long could it physically last with cosmic rays etc hitting it? will it eventually just an unrecognizable metal lump?
Likely a long, long time.
Neanderthal cave paintings have lasted upwards of 60,000 years.
So I expect Voyager to be more or less structurally similar in 60,000 years
I don't know if that makes it any easier to grasp, but I have a hard enough time relating to Pluto's distance, let alone the Voyagers.
Freaking HN.
So such a statement would either insinuate that Americans are genetically inferior somehow, or you're just culturally attuned to an outdated British system.
Same with "military" time.
https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/metric-internationally/...
And I doubt that calculations for the voyager mission where done in imperial. The output and for contractors yes, but internally it's metric.
Describing a distance as "4 Plutos" isn't that helpful when Pluto is too dim to see with the naked eye, and still only a dot with a good ground-based telescope.
Even smaller distances like "AU" are too big for a human mind, with the Earth itself being less than a pixel across if the orbits were drawn to scale on an 8K monitor.
That gives a pretty good feel for how far away it is!
Most stars (and galaxies) can be described with the same words I just used for Pluto, but stars and galaxies are thousands to trillions of times further away than Pluto.
- Pluto's the size of the moon, more or less. (Or even assuming it's ~Earth-sized), but... - ... can barely be seen from Earth, even with fancy equipment, and - ...The probe is 4x farther away than that.
Gives good "distant" vibes in a way that large numbers don't.
Putting large numbers in context helps understand them. "Muricans" know it, and so do Europeans at the European Space Agency. Here's what they write about the International Space Station:
> At 28 800 km/h it only takes 92 minutes for the weightless laboratory to make a complete circuit of Earth. Astronauts working and living on the Station experience 16 sunrises and sunsets each day.
They could have left it at 28 800 km/h - which is metric - and call it a day. But they went an extra mile (or should I say an extra 1.6 kilometer) to put that number into perspective.
https://www.jpost.com/science/space/article-761322#asteroid-...