Can we send a voyager 3 with much advance battery and sensor, and at much faster speed so that it may reach farther than voyager 1 and 2, in let’s say just couple of years ?
Looks like we lost contact with 10 and 11 in 1995 and 2006 respectively. They both ran out of power and shut down.
The voyager missions used a rare planetary alignment to get boosts. And a radioisotope thermal engine that has gotten pushback in later spacecraft designs, although they have ceramic versions now meant to address most of the issues.
That said, New Horizons, which gave us those lovely shots of Pluto, was launched in 2006. But it is traveling faster than the Pioneers but slower than Voyagers, so it’ll be the third farthest away at some point.
1. Our rocket / propulsion technology today may be cheaper (thx largely to SpaceX), but it doesn't really necessarily provide MUCH more delta V. Meanwhile
2. Voyager launches relied on a once-in-a-blue-moon (not quite once in two centuries) alignment of various planetary bodies to give a spectacular orbital slingshot boosts.
So my limited understanding is that we can't really overtake voyagers very easily. Whether our current technology coild be made more reliable in the long term is another good point of discussion :-)
New Horizons didn't nearly overtake Voyager. It's currently traveling about 4 km/s slower, and as it's still closer to the Sun, it's also decelerating more.
Various forms of nuclear propulsion have been investigated. None of them are anywhere near ready for missions, but that seems to be more due to lack of investment in their development (and environmental/legal/regulatory/geopolitical/etc concerns) than any scientific obstacle. If NASA/etc were really serious about it (as in willing to spend multiple billions a year on it), it could probably be made to work in only a few years.
The idea pursued nowadays is you launch using chemical propulsion and then only turn on the nuclear propulsion once you reach a safe distance from Earth. This is different from the original 1950s Project Orion which proposed to use nuclear pulse propulsion (i.e. repurposing nuclear weapons for propulsion) from the surface to orbit, which would have produced enough fallout to likely kill a handful of people per launch (in the long-run through higher cancer rates). The question then is - is it safe to launch nuclear material to orbit using chemical propulsion? Yes, we can secure it in containers designed to survive catastrophic loss of the launch vehicle. But, will the general public believe it is safe, even if it actually is? Possibly not-which is a political obstacle rather than a technical one.
The other issue is that nuclear propulsion systems can be too large/heavy to launch on a single chemical rocket, but you could launch them as multiple modules assembled together in orbit.
I don’t think this need or should depend on off-Earth manufacturing or mining capacity. I think it is going to be a long time before the highly complex manufacturing supply chains needed to turn raw materials into cutting edge technology like nuclear space propulsion systems exists off Earth. But we should be able to manufacture them modularly on Earth, such that in space we’d be doing module assembly rather than manufacturing.
I think that’s probably a very optimistic timescale. If there’s heavy industry on the moon inside 50 years I’d be surprised.
…but we’re very close. The next technique will be flying near the sun then deploying a solar sail for a huge speed boost. Voyager goes 3 AU/yr, solar sail boost with todays technology will enable 7-9 AU/yr.
Highly recommend watching Slava Turyshev discuss his work on an SGL telescope, which employs this technique.
https://www.youtube.com/live/lqzJewjZUkk?si=57VS4oqbaKEXmyOR
Yes: we could lift off a much heavier spacecraft, give it plenty of fuel, and many of its parts would be lighter than their 1970s equivalent, giving us lots of room for modern sensors
No: the "battery" in the old ones is nuclear and it's going to be difficult to beat that (but not impossible: a nuclear stirling engine, either powered by fission or by decay, e.g. https://www.nasa.gov/technology/rps/stirling-convertor-sets-...)
Also no: the old Voyagers benefited from a lot of gravity assists from half the solar system, thanks to an alignment which won't happen again until 2151 (https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5075/when-is-the-n...), so unless you're not in a hurry, we won't have that.
Why would we: the _point_ of the Voyager crafts was to do close flybys and collect plenty of data from the outer planets, not to go as far away and as fast as possible. You want to be as slow as possible near them, so you have science time. You're rushing this part in order to get right away to the centuries of nothing which follow?
Newer atomic batteries can theoretically last centuries instead of decades.
V'ger 1 atomic battery is based on Plutonium-238 which has a halflife of ~88 years. It's down to ~210W output from initial 470W at launch time.
Americium-241 has a half-life of over 400 years.
So yes maybe with Americium-241 we could have something which lasts 4 times a much _and_ gives us the same amount of power thanks to a SRG.
Voyager-2 gained about 10 km/s at Jupiter, about 5 km/s at Saturn, about 2 km/s at Uranus, and lost about 2 km/s at Neptune. [1]
Dawn spacecraft gained 11.5 km/s from ion thrusters.
So just gravity assist maneuver just around Jupiter alone + massive tank for ion thrusters gas might give 20+ km/s
Though I agree that value of such a mission would be low.
[1] https://www.planetary.org/articles/20130926-gravity-assist
If you approach e.g. Jupiter you gain speed (it's pulling you in), which you then lose as you get away from it (as it's still pulling you in, meh). Gravity assists work because you use your chemical rocket right when you are closest and speed away, "robbing" Jupiter of the chance to claim the energy it lent you on approach.
Ion thrusters have very low thrust, so you would accelerate veeeeery slowly away from Jupiter's gravity well - and in this time it will keep affecting you and slowing you down, and the whole thing would be barely worth doing.
You could bolt on a very simple solid rocket booster just for the gravity assist, of course, but its ISP will be lower and you'll have to carry its mass until you can expend it.
Which, to your point, only works against the idea of hypothetical Voyager 3.
We could make a Voyager 3, but I don't think there is any way to expect it to catch up with currently feasible technology. And it could only be launched at specific times.
It certainly could have more advanced sensors and batteries. I don't know if the battery improvement would really matter on a decades long mission.
If we had something capable of getting to Voyager in a year that might be worthwhile, because it would stand a chance of getting somewhere interesting in a few decades. But we are absolutely nowhere near that level.
That's not why Voyager's sensors are being shut down, they're being shut down because the probes no longer have the power to run them.
Not a couple of years. The Voyagers have been doing around 38 000 mph since the late 1970's. That is rougly 17 km/s. The proposed Interstellar Probe mission aims to do 20 km/s or slightly more. It will take it decades to overtake any of them (no actual overtaking will probably take place though, as its trajectory most likely will be different).
As others have pointed out, the speeds for Voyager 1 were because of gravity assist of Jupiter and Saturn while Voyager 2 was a gravity assist of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Jupiter & Saturn line up relatively often enough so we could try to outdo Voyager 1 speeds a bit with a lighter air craft due to various advancements. But it's unclear we'd learn anything really new from having sensors that reached further out and our technology for propulsion really hasn't meaningfully advanced to outdo gravity assists from Jupiter + Saturn. There's some proposals to use nuclear explosions behind a probe to achieve speeds of ~10k km/s which would be substantially faster but there's numerous obstacles (cost + international treaties banning the use of nuclear in space).