Voyager 1 spots new region at the edge of the Solar System

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/voyager-1-spots-new-region-at-the-edge-of-the-solar-system/

by Reltair • 14 years ago

167 67 14 years ago

jlgreco5• 14 years ago

>Researchers suspect it may take several years for Voyager 1 to clear this area entirely, after which it will finally reach interstellar space.

The RTGs in Voyager 1 are only good until about 2025 iirc, ~12-13 more years. Here's hoping it makes it through in time.

Wingman4l73• 14 years ago

Strictly speaking, the RTGs will continue generating power past that time -- it just won't be enough to power any of the instruments or the radio; the thermocouples also degrade, which further impacts the power produced. (tomato, tomahto) Attitude propellant is also an issue. Around 2020, they'll start to turn off instruments until they don't have enough power to run any of them anymore. Apparently, they haven't picked the shutdown order yet -- but they have 10 years to decide, so no rush. =)

NASA's timeline for the Voyager lifetimes: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html

giulianob• 14 years ago

It would be cool if they could shut it down for a long time then have it wake up and send some data back with the remaining power.

jtchang• 14 years ago

Should have went with the extended extended-battery.

jlgreco5• 14 years ago

Ha, true. From what I can find, each of Voyager 1's RTGs is about 5% of the total mass of Voyager 1, so about 15% of it's mass total. Seems surprisingly low to me, considering they are basically trashcans full of plutonium. I'm not sure how many more you would have to add to keep Voyager 1 operating longer, but the more you add the slower it would ultimately be going (well, the harder it is to get it going the speed the mission required). My guess is that additional/larger RTGs couldn't be justified or technically pulled off at the time.

ra• 14 years ago

Oh man I get so excited every time I hear news from the Voyager program.

What an amazing achievement to do what those guys did back in the 1970s.

CodeCube• 14 years ago

No kidding. When I saw the headline, my heartrate spiked a noticeable amount while I waited for the link to load.

justincormack• 14 years ago

Don't diss the 70s. The 50s went to space. The 60s went to the moon. The 70s left the solar system. Progress...

btilly2• 14 years ago

The 70s went to space. The 80s shifted right.

znowi• 14 years ago

Yes, same here. It's an inspiring craft for me. I was enchanted by the program as a kid. Distant voyage, golden records, Carl Sagan... almost a romantic sci-fi novel :) I was a bit sad to know that it'll never be seen again. But now I think it's likely that one day we'll find it and put in a museum. Possibly on Mars :)

xyzzyb• 14 years ago

So instead of a hard delineation between solar wind and cosmic rays we're seeing something more like velcro?

speedyrev• 14 years ago

Maybe it's V Ger! Look out Capt Kirk!!!

brador• 14 years ago

How fast is Voyager travelling? Could we send out a Voyage X at a faster speed and with better tech to catch up and surpass it?

mylittlepony2• 14 years ago

Sure, but even at x2 speed it will take decades.

randomaccount5• 14 years ago

You can go look it up, but IIRC, the slingshot method (using a rare alignment of planets) produced a higher "speed" (so to speak) than would be reasonable to produce even with today's technology. (i.e taking the same budget today and doing everything we can to get a probe out at the same "speed" would be impossible).

kibwen2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if it's actually impossible. IANA physicist, but if your singular all-consuming goal was to get out of the solar system as fast as possible you could probably get a better gravity assist from a single pass of the sun than Voyager got from the entire grand tour.

(Feel free to correct me, physicists!)

The bigger issue is convincing someone to hand you millions of dollars to literally throw away faster than anything in prior human history.

darklajid• 14 years ago

Catch up and surpass something we launched decades ago, travelling (according to Wikipedia, entry was last edited .. today) 3.595 AU per year [1].

The question you're asking is hard to answer: When do you want to catch up? If we send a new object to space today, which travels 5% faster, is that good enough? It won't pass Voyager 1 for a looooong time, but will eventually.

Is that what you're aiming for? Why? Or are you asking for a magical way to cross that distance (35 years of traveling) 'instantly'?

1: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.595+AU+per+year&d...

Jach• 14 years ago

Considering c is 63,198 AU/yr, and Voyager 1's only about 123 AU away, there's still a lot of room left for future engineers in increasing the speed of our devices to very quickly surpass it. Will we achieve even a hundredth of c within the next 100 years? Depends.

alayne• 14 years ago

Voyager did pass Pioneer 10 (1972) in the late 1990s. The alignment mentioned by others made the difference. New Horizons, which is going to Pluto, had the fastest launch speed of any man made object.

kibwen2• 14 years ago

Launch speed isn't the whole story though. You can accelerate to ludicrous speeds once you're in space. Compare the following to New Horizon's launch speed of 16 km/s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_probes (70 km/s)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Probe%2B (theoretical 200 km/s)

jlgreco5• 14 years ago

If you wanted to have a probe pass Voyager 1 in 10 years, you would need to launch it today and get it going 15.9 AU/year, which is blazing fast. Almost 5 times as fast as Voyager 1. New Horizon, if launched today, could almost do it (14.13 AU/year), but it's mission wasn't set up to leave it traveling as fast as Voyager 1. Although it's going out in the same direction and was launched faster, it will ultimately end up going slower.

If you give yourself 10 years to design the probe and something to get it going that fast, then the speed you actually need jumps up to 19.5 AU/year. The longer it takes you to design your fast rocket, the faster it has to go in order to catch Voyager 1 in the same amount of time.

Realistically, unless something exotic happens in space propulsion technology, we will never catch Voyager 1 within our lifetime. If we launched today at twice the speed of Voyager 1, then we could catch it in around 50 years, but that's not going to happen.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

We could but it wouldn't be easy. Likely what we'd do is use a really big rocket like the Delta IV Heavy or the upcoming Falcon Heavy to give the spacecraft a lot of extra speed. Then we'd use electric propulsion on the craft itself to continue to build up speed over its life. Ultimately, even with today's technology, we could catch up to these probes but it would take decades to do so.

suhastech• 14 years ago

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

Provided it survives that far out, New Horizons is likely to follow the Voyager probes in exploring the outer heliosphere and mapping the heliosheath and heliopause. Even though it was launched far faster than any outward probe before it, New Horizons will never overtake Voyager 1 as the most distant man-made object from Earth. Close fly-bys of Saturn and Titan gave Voyager 1 an advantage with its extra gravity assist. When New Horizons reaches the distance of 100 AU, it will be travelling at about 13 km/s (29,000 mph), around 4 km/s (8,900 mph) slower than Voyager 1 at that distance.

ghubbard• 14 years ago

> A few models did have a feature like this, but it was only a transient one that appeared at certain times of the solar cycle.

How transient is transient? 30 days is not a large fraction of an 11 year solar cycle.

ggchappell• 14 years ago

I'm wondering about that, too. Shouldn't the article say something like, "The new data lend support to models predicting that a region with the observed properties will appear during certain parts of the solar cycle." Is that statement not true?

aptwebapps3• 14 years ago

Perhaps they didn't predict it at this particular point of the solar cycle?

mylittlepony2• 14 years ago

I had to double check when I read that the Voyagers started their mission 35 years ago, it's hard to believe.

Why aren't we sending more of these, in every direction?

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

Well the ESA is going to send one, but the answer is simply budget. It takes money to run one of these missions, it competes with other missions. Not only is there the space craft cost, the launch cost, and the team cost, since its going to take a long time to get out there you've got to have 50 years of time reserved on the deep space network etc etc.

A good question would be "Why are the space sciences so under funded?" and that policy question is best addressed with your legislators. Lately I've been positioning space as a 'back up plan' [1] for the Global Warming crisis.

[1] Motivating politicians is hard, especially if they can't point at what they've done and say "See how impressive is that!" Space sounds like a 'waste' to a lot of voters, so I've been taking the tack, "Global Warming is a crisis, and we don't yet know how to control the climate on our planet, we may get to a point where we are seriously thinking about moving off planet and this information will be invaluable, there is also the asteroid threat which space craft "out there" where the most likely earth killing asteroids are hiding (the Ooort cloud) would be a tremendous early warning, you might be saving the entire human RACE by funding these projects at NASA, how cool is that?!"

avar• 14 years ago

It's not just budget ,the Voyager program took advantage of a favorable planetary alignment that wouldn't recur for 175 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Grand_Tour

I have no idea how favorable this was, i.e. whether you could get the same effect today with more propulsion, but it's quite possible that we don't have the technology to do this in any reasonable timeframe today.

eshvk• 14 years ago

Sadly enough most people and their legislators find it hard to devote money to something that is extremely long term (Decades or even centuries). I think the best we can hope for for more funding in Space is competition from China in the form of a space arms-race.

derekp7• 14 years ago

What can happen to our planet that would make it less hospitable than Mars or deep space? Most of the threats (global warming, asteroid strike, etc) still leave Earth with a usable atmospheric pressure and breathable oxygen, they just affect food supply (there is no food on Mars), or other things that still leave you better off than facing the vacuum of space.

I remember reading a story when I was a kid, about a future society that moved underground to get away from unfavorable planet conditions. The description was remarkably like what I'd picture as a large scale off-planet settlement -- everyone living in a rather confined space, and kids only knowing about what Earth was like from reading books and watching old movies.

aptwebapps3• 14 years ago

I would like to know the name of the politician that thinks that many elections ahead.

kamaal• 14 years ago

In this case it makes more sense to privatize these sort of things.

T-hawk2• 14 years ago

We've shifted to orbiters instead of one-shot flybys. Galileo at Jupiter, Cassini at Saturn, Messenger at Mercury, Juno on the way to Jupiter now. A ten year spacecraft mission can deliver a lot more science when it's orbiting a planet (or driving around on it) rather than cruising through endless void.

(New Horizons is set to flyby Pluto, because orbiting it wasn't feasible as the dwarf planet doesn't have nearly enough mass to capture a fast incoming spacecraft. New Horizons would have had to fly to Pluto much slower if it wanted to orbit it.)

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

The magnetic highway begs to differ. There is value in both kinds of missions.

bigiain2• 14 years ago

Cynical-me thinks "economic rationalism and the decline of cold war dick-size-competition".

I hope I'm wrong…

felideon• 14 years ago

I was trying to visualize the so called 'magnetic highway' and found this along with further explanation.

http://phys.org/news/2012-12-voyager-encounters-region-deep-...

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

Could it be instruments degrading? 35 years in the cosmic wind is a long time.

bobsoap• 14 years ago

> Today's announcement clarifies that the confusion was caused by the fact that nature didn't think much of physicists' expectations.

LOL

rdl2• 14 years ago

I wonder how hard it would be to do purely private (or maybe university-consortium) deep space probes. I assume almost any of the standard rockets could accommodate an extra stage to do escape, especially if you just need earth escape and can steal mv from other bodies to escape the solar system.

The expensive part would be operating it indefinitely, right? I assume you could outsource to a satellite TT&C facility.

wiradikusuma• 14 years ago

I have mixed feeling every time I read this kind of news. I envy those people who made it happen 35 years ago, they produced stuff that's still sophisticated by today's standard, while I'm here writing crappy websites. Man, I feel small.

laacz• 14 years ago

What I find most interesting about Voyager-1 and 2, that these crafts went to the outskirts of our Solar system because of funding cuts for Mariner program (Venus and Mars research). Marvelous what you can achieve even when you are given less money.

Voyager 1 spots new region at the edge of the Solar System

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