Voyager Set to Enter Interstellar Space

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/28apr_voyager/

by pwg • 15 years ago

187 64 15 years ago

science.nasa.gov

pwg• 15 years ago

How many years until V'Ger returns home?

prawn4• 15 years ago

For anyone who didn't get the 'joke' (like me) and who knows nothing about Star Trek (also me), turns out that "V'Ger" is a Star Trek character. From Wikipedia:

"A sentient being that evolved from Voyager 6, a fictitious space probe from the 20th Century that vanished into a black hole and was given life by a race of living machines. The story of V'ger and its return to Earth to seek "the creator" forms the plot for the first feature film in the Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Motion Picture."

reallyacow• 15 years ago

I'm personally waiting for V-GINY.

calebmpeterson4• 15 years ago

Every time I read about either Voyager I/II or Pioneer 10/11 I am amazed at just how vast space is. Nothing like spending the better part of 50 years to go an incredible distance - a distance, which is so small in the grand scheme of things...

At the same time I'm delighted to be alive during a part of history in which humanity accomplished such a pitifully tiny and yet monumental feat.

brudgers5• 15 years ago

>"Nothing like spending the better part of 50 years to go an incredible distance - a distance, which is so small in the grand scheme of things"

50 years is very short on a galactic scale as well.

calebmpeterson4• 15 years ago

True, and yet it's a good chunk of a lifetime for a human.

icehawk• 15 years ago

Voyager is a beautiful example of reliable code and engineering. 30 years and 10 billion miles out, and still functioning.

alienfluid• 15 years ago

Exactly what I thought. This is what real engineering looks like.

brudgers5• 15 years ago

As an engineering approach to generating power, thermopiles are considered differently today than in the 1970's due to environmental and health risks associated with plutonium and the probability of a launch failure.

ANH2• 15 years ago

I agree with your assessment if you're talking about perception, not actual risk.

Shortly before Cassini was launched there were some people on my college campus protesting the mission on grounds of risk of radioactive debris spreading if the launch failed. Motivated by my distaste for fearmongering, I did some reading and found that nearly all the scholarly research and engineering studies suggested the risk was infinitesimal, and in a worst case scenario the spread of dangerous concentrations of radiation would be highly localized.

Aside: Bill Nye (himself a trained engineer) also uses his position as Executive Director of The Planetary Society to advocate for the use of nuclear power generators in deep space missions.

jeza• 15 years ago

This was back in a time when one guy could be familiar with every single line of code running on a computer, from user space programs right down to the kernel. This level of simplicity surely did wonders for reliability. Not to say you couldn't achieve good results with a more complex modern system, though to spend a lot more time making things failsafe.

Deestan• 15 years ago

> This was back in a time when one guy could be familiar with every single line of code running on a computer, from user space programs right down to the kernel.

This is still possible, by the way. Humanity hasn't lost the ability to create simple computers. :) We just see less of them because the complex ones are more useful for day-to-day life.

veb2• 15 years ago

Fantastic read!

Fantastic technology! This stuff is old, but it still works extraordinarily well. They sure knew how to engineer stuff then. They say that they might keep going until 2020 -- I bet those bad boys will surprise us and keep on kicking for much longer!

rflrob• 15 years ago

> They sure knew how to engineer stuff then.

Arguably, the current generation of engineers aren't too shabby themselves. Spirit and Opportunity were designed to last 90 sols, with their actual missions lasting some 25 times that, and Opportunity is still knocking about up there.

veb2• 15 years ago

On a second thought, you're absolutely right. There's really no way I can tell what's good engineering or bad in present time until a few decades down the track.

jberryman• 15 years ago

From memory, the probes will shut down their functioning gradually as they run out of power. Also if they stop receiving messages from earth they will keep doing science according to some preprogrammed procedure and beam the results back. Go humans!

brudgers5• 15 years ago

Plutonium 238 which powers the thermopiles has a half-life of about 87 years and many of their instruments are no longer in operation, so the remaining mission scope is an issue of power management.

cal5k2• 15 years ago

It's almost as if the universe was created to mock us. So much space to explore, but physical law makes it impossible to explore more than the smallest, most insignificant fraction.

rorrr• 15 years ago

Which is why we need to work on the aging problem. Once that is solved, we can explore all we want.

cal5k2• 15 years ago

Agreed. Aubrey de Grey is a crazy bugger, but he's got the right idea.

naz• 15 years ago

We've already solved that with reproduction. We need to figure out how to out-live our planet.

calebmpeterson4• 15 years ago

We may be limited by physical from visiting in person, but we nonetheless have an incredible set of front row seats here on Earth.

r00fus• 15 years ago

The concept of the light-cone[1] really frustrated my younger self (raised on heady expectations, warp drives and transporters). There might be a sentient race very close to us in time-space that we will never know because the light-cones will never meet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone

nolite• 15 years ago

Well if the light cones never meet, then they're not that close

shin_lao2• 15 years ago

Correction: laws of physics as we currently understand them

For example, we still don't understand inertia and gravity.

Nothing is impossible.

Locke16892• 15 years ago

This is what I like to refer to as the "bias of computing." The idea is that we deal with so much scientific progress in our fields that we tend to think that scientific progress can take us anywhere and no restriction will stand up for long.

However, this is a fallacy that really has no grounding in the laws of physics. What reason do we have for thinking that information can travel faster than the speed of light? Moreover, what evidence do we have that the second law of thermodynamics could be reversed on a macro scale?

The assumption that all barriers will fall as others have seems unreasonable and contradictory to our current evidence.

Jach• 15 years ago

Funny you should try to imply that our fundamental physics are somehow wrong in a serious way that we have a high chance of finding a deeper physics that shows "impossible" things by today's physics are possible (want to take bets on timeframes?), on an article about two space probes that have lasted 34 years out there because of our understanding of the fundamental laws. As for not understanding the "why" of inertia and gravity, we nevertheless have general relativity which is pretty darn good.

wladimir3• 15 years ago

I think the problem is the opposite. We evolved on a planet, so we're only (naturally) suitable to live on a planet.

Once we're able to modify ourselves and our DNA and outrun evolutionary constraints, that might change. Once we're a swarm of small, near-immortal devices, I suppose exploring the universe on large scale will make a lot more sense.

But in the short run, it's fun and interesting to explore the solar system in human form, even given the limits of our current technology. And to not worry about what a small, insignificant fraction it is, because it's still a hell of a lot more than we've seen until now.

schumitsch• 15 years ago

define "we"

jaysonelliot• 15 years ago

It just so happens I was listening to some beautiful 1970s space music when I read this (Tangerine Dream, if you're interested).

The dreams of exploration we had from the time of the first man in space through the 1980s were so wonderful and optimistic. I grew up reading OMNI and Discover, watching Carl Sagan on television and playing with toy Space Shuttles.

When the Voyager left earth, we believed that man would walk on Mars by the end of the millennium, and that first contact was just around the corner. It was unthinkable that, in 2011, we would be seeing the end of the Space Shuttle with nothing to replace it and the suspension of SETI.

I hope that moments of wonder like Voyager leaving the solar system, still functioning, will light our collective spirit and inspire us to remember why we wanted to reach for the stars in the first place.

calebmpeterson4• 15 years ago

> It just so happens I was listening to some beautiful 1970s space music when I read this (Tangerine Dream, if you're interested).

Thank you for introducing me to Tangerine Dream.

bane• 15 years ago

I was just going to say thanks for reminding me about TD, I haven't listened to them in a while...but now I'm back on them ;)

tsuipen• 15 years ago

> It just so happens I was listening to some beautiful 1970s space music when I read this (Tangerine Dream, if you're interested).

The Pink years were the best.

kinkora• 15 years ago

nothing to replace it? See SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.

drm237• 15 years ago

SpaceX in a few more years should be able to do human transportation to orbit. Virgin Galactic is for space tourism and doen't fulfill any of the roles the shuttles were used for. When the shuttle retires, there really isn't anything else (in the US) that comes close to replacing it.

wil2k2• 15 years ago

I was just listening to "Space Night Earthviews" :D (A late night show in Germany combining great music and visuals. Can be found on YouTube.)

jasongullickson2• 15 years ago

I was really depressed about the retirement of the Space Shuttle until I saw that SpaceX (http://www.spacex.com/) crew simulation demo video the other day.

Time for us to run with the baton for awhile folks.

haberman• 15 years ago

The article reminded me of this classic story of geek-love between Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan as they were creating the "gold record" that is traveling on both Voyagers.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1235348...

paraschopra• 15 years ago

I'm so proud of Humanity right now. Thousands of years later when future Historians would be studying our period, I am sure they will feel proud about the far-sighted decision this Voyager project had been. Future scientist may thank us for setting a benchmark they now have to excel.

daimyoyo• 15 years ago

The fact is that we won't break the bonds of earth with NASA. Decades of bureaucracy and budget cutting has left them as little more than another government agency that exists solely to expand and maintain it's own budget. I'm 29 years old. So is the space shuttle program. It's completely unacceptable that we are taking 30 year old vehicles to space. Would you trust a 30 year old sedan on a cross country road trip? I wouldn't. And now, the program is being discontinued with nothing ready to replace it. We are going to have to rely on Russia until we can get our next rocket operational. If the men who created the Apollo program were told that one day we'd rely on the Russians for our space travel, they'd laugh you out of the room. Also, why haven't we been to the Moon in nearly 40 years? Is there nothing worth exploring left on the entire thing? Thank(insert deity here) that companies like Space X are taking up the slack. It's unfortunate that NASA has fallen so far, but it has.

jordan0day• 15 years ago

Your 30 year old sedan analogy is terrible. A space shuttle isn't a "daily driver" that NASA changes the oil in every three months or 3 million miles. They're meticulously maintained. Yes, they're old tech and certainly in need of replacement, but they're not bad just because they're old.

Heck, thousands of people use the Golden Gate bridge every day, and it's 70 years old!

Anyway, I'm much less pessimistic w.r.t. NASA than you. Am I disappointed that we don't have permanent bases on the moon and mars? Most definitely. I'm a huge fan of space exploration, and I really wish we were farther along. That said, NASAs robotic exploration continues to impress. There have been failures, mismanagement and poor performance in plenty of cases, but I'd be willing to pay even more tax to increase NASAs budget. I still view them as a good example of things the public sector can do right.

Voyager Set to Enter Interstellar Space

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