Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Science Data
blogs.nasa.gov
blogs.nasa.gov
I'm very impressed about figuring out this problem and working around it. It would take 50 years to repeat, because it would take so long to send another mission that far out (47 years, depending on how much delta-V we could give it), and the odds that it survives that long is low anyway. We are too poor, too involved in arguing about other stuff to come close. There are the interesting ideas to send tiny specs of space ships using lasers to another solar system.
I can't really agree. Voyager 1 & 2 have been extraordinarily successful machines but that's aided by the simplicity of their mission and their design. The core scientific purpose of the missions (visit and survey the outer planets) has been repeated many times over by other craft (Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini–Huygens, New Horizons, Juno) with greatly improved instruments.
Compare Voyager to the Large Hadron Collider, the Manhattan Project, sequencing the genome, or even the Opportunity rover. All of these projects were successful despite being massively more complex undertakings.
It's comforting to know that the human race will leave a trace beyond the gravity well of our own star, but hurling a chunk of metal away from the sun is not an inherently great achievement.
Simplicity is a property of good engineering, especially where reliability and longevity is concerned. Weighing the achievement of a project by it's complexity alone ignores the wisdom of the process that arrived at that solution.
Certainly not by the budget, spending money isn't hard -- but by success in the face of complexity, yes, absolutely.
Sure, with this line of thinking perhaps you'd have to compare them more with the Pyramids or Antikythera-type devices, and I think I'd be comfortable with that.
Imagine something deadly enough that the first solution variolation killed 1-2% of those who took it and people still lined their kids to take such lifesaving medicine. Historically, Smallpox killed ~1/3 of the infected and the survivors were often blind and or horrifically scared and it was literally doing this for thousands of years. And yet it’s been almost completely forgotten about today.
Something like a billion lives saved and counting.
I find it hard to imagine 300-500 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century. Yet we both eliminated it May 8, 1980 and had drastically reduced the number of cases well before that point. The last US case was in 1949 and the vaccine was being administered starting in 1796.
It's tempting to suggest the latin alphabet, too. Thank the Phoenicians.
That we're had them for so long shouldn't diminish the fact that they have specific physical characteristics that need to be discovered and optimized.
Can all good? Have they have their different impact and their contribution? And can we have all, as we have them all already.
As said it is interesting to have you with us. All of you.
4k video of the innards of the engineering model still present in the lab at JPL (I think they have one of those, right?)
They don't, this is why the recent fix took so long and was so risky, they were testing in production. They didn't make engineering models for that mission, the Voyagers were their own prototypes, which makes them more amazing.
It’s expected that over the next decade it won’t have enough power for a single scientific instrument, and by 2036 it will be out of range of the deep space network.
and then there is always the faint hope of unexpected surprises
1) There are diminishing returns on investment, as we go further out. We'd need to go exponentially further out to get useful information.
2) The sensors on the craft are old, and modern methods can tell us more from far away then ancient sensors from deep space.
... and so on. I'm not going to argue about which assumption is best, because intuitions will differ. I was hoping to get a concrete answer from someone who might know rather than was speculating.
Ergo, the question.
I was hoping for an answer of the form "Nope. It's not worth throwing it away, but it's pretty obsolete now." or "Yup. We recently learned that ____" (fill in the blank).