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Where are the Voyagers?
- josho 10y agoAs amazing as space technologies are, we are in the stone ages when it comes to spaceflight: > Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 2 is traveling from Earth, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain times of the year. We don't even have the technology to escape the sun's gravity without needing a gravitational slingshot from other planets, and that still leaves us with a space craft moving slower than the earth.
- civilian 10y agoNitpicky but.... we'd still want to use gravitational slingshots even if we had more deltaVs to burn.
- hcrisp 10y agoYes, in fact per Mark Adler [0] you'd use a Jupiter flyby to fly back to the sun and then do a high thrust burn at closest approach to maximize your speed into interstellar space (Oberth effect). [0] https://www.quora.com/Can-we-use-the-gravity-of-the-sun-to-slingshot-spacecraft-into-interstellar-space-or-to-other-stars https://www.quora.com/Can-we-use-the-gravity-of-the-sun-to-s...
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoProblem is we don't really know where to go next. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin tried to cook up alternate space travel methods for years and still couldn't come up with anything better than the same basic rocket model that put Gagarin into space. Most theorized "warp drives" either require more energy than humanity is capable of producing or necessitate breaking a law of physics or two just to move anything organic or larger than a postage stamp. Then again, the answer could be right under our noses. There's a Sci-fi story - I forget the name - where space travel is actually quite simple if you know the math to make it happen, and when a peaceful alien race visits Earth, the humans - with their thousands of years of armed conflict - kill the aliens and take their spaceships. Makes me wonder that if we treat the rest of the universe the way we have treated our planet, do we truly deserve the right to roam the stars?
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoIt would be nice, and is certainly the result I hope for (with all the good wishes do), as I'm not sure we will work very well with slow and expensive growth. Reading 'Against a Dark Background' was certainly interesting as it considers a system which essentially has its growth capped by the distance between itself and the rest of the universe.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoSomething I noticed in that novel is that they still had incredibly advanced technology. The Lazy Guns alone hint at what they lost! Maybe there's a reason Golter is where it is, and maybe it wasn't always there.
- zipwitch 10y agoI read _Against A Dark Background_ as a teen an thought of it as a pretty fun sf, almost space-opera adventure story. Then I read it again as an adult and... wow. Bank's SF work is very good, but the quiet existential horror that lurks behind the scenes in that novel really merits the title. Makes good old Lovecraft seem like a piker by comparison.
- meric 10y agoYou write a good comment, I don't know why you were down voted.
- macintux 10y agoI recall the story too: if I recall correctly, it was actually a branch of chemistry we had missed, not a math problem per se. The aliens stormed off the ships with muskets and we slaughtered 'em.
- bitJericho 10y agoNot doing any kind of reconnaissance before a conflict would be crazy! But I guess maybe they didn't think of it! It's also my working theory of why we won in Independence Day the movie :) Aliens were never warring among themselves and/or allowing any kind of a hacking culture, so didn't think to secure their systems!
- Diederich 10y ago> we are in the stone ages when it comes to spaceflight Indeed, only 59 years since we first put something into earth orbit. We're just getting warmed up!
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoBut that was only 54 years after figuring out powered flight.
- kaybe 10y ago> We're just getting warmed up! Literally, sadly.
- Diederich 10y agoSigh..I see what you did there.
- sien 10y agoWe could build something nuclear powered that would be able to do it. Project Orion or Project Daedelus would be able to escape the sun's gravity without needing a gravitational slingshot. But we have decided for now not to build something like that. Maybe in the next century at some point a nuclear powered spacecraft could be built in space that could start exploring other star systems.
- sandworm101 10y ago>> nuclear powered spacecraft. The voyagers are nuclear powered. They have RTGs powering their electronics and heat from those devices has changed their trajectories. The concept of a nuclear reactor powering an electric thruster isn't very far fetched. If we were going to go anywhere outside the solar system, that is the sort of nuclear power we would use.
- mjevans 10y agoSein is probably referring to something running quite a bit hotter and likely exciting hydrogen atoms or other expendable fuel sources. I think these might have been looked at for purely interplanetary/solar travel in the past, but written off for the dangers of lifting cargo to orbit (think about the failure cases!) and also the general cost compared to alternatives. If we had mining in lower gravity well areas (such as the asteroid belt) yielding that kind of fuel it might make a lot more sense.
- supergarfield 10y agoSpecifically, projects Orion and Daedalus are based on nuclear pulse propulsion[0], which is essentially detonating thermodynamic bombs behind the spacecraft. It's one of the only realistic options we currently have to do interstellar exploration. There was a discussion on HN not too long ago[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705705
- Sanddancer 10y agoKeep in mind that the Voyager probes weren't designed to go as fast as possible, they were designed to do planetary surveying while taking advantage of a rather favorable set of planetary alignments [1]. They could have been set on a much faster course if we were just concerned about getting them as far out into space as fast as possible. Voyager 1, for example, had its path altered away from Pluto to do a more in-depth survey of Titan. Regardless, using planets to help speed things is just good sense. Think of going on a long trip in a car. You don't hook a trailer full of all the fuel you'll need to get to your destination, you stop at gas stations along the way. Using planets is a lot like that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
- peterwoo 10y agoNew Horizons was launched directly into a solar escape trajectory. It's going slower than Earth but that is no indication of how advanced the technology is. The whole goal was to get a close encounter with Pluto-Charon. What's the point in flying off into nothingness any faster after that?
- angusp 10y agoNot really, earth is waaaay closer to the sun, so goes faster in its orbit but has a lot less energy (when normalised for mass) than any of the voyagers. They are going way faster than Earth in the sense that we're they to suddenly to telephone to Earth's perihelion, they'd be going ridiculously fast relative to Earth
- 0942v8653 10y agoUm, what about Voyager 6? I'm worried...
- cyberferret 10y agoYou mean V'ger?
- run_kmc 10y agoIt's programmed to learn all that is learnable, then return to the creator. I wouldn't worry.
- Jaruzel 10y ago> I wouldn't worry Yeah... what could go wrong, eh?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoWould be really cool to stick some velocity numbers on there as well, I find it hard to relate to such huge distances. 62 thousand kilometres per hour feels larger because I can kind of comprehend it. Though really cool anyway, I was going to say that Voyager 1 managed short of 30 light seconds a year until I realised the question is one of acceleration and deceleration not velocity. If I wasn't on my way to bed I would dig around for some data to make acceleration graphs for them (hint hint :P ).
- ars 10y ago> Would be really cool to stick some velocity numbers on there as well Bottom of this page: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-reports/index.htm http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-reports/index.htm
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoThat is a great resource, thank you
- pkituu 10y agoYou can ride along with Voyager in "Eyes on the Solar System" (https://eyes.nasa.gov https://eyes.nasa.gov) It's an open world Solar system with NASA missions and imagery.
- secfirstmd 10y agoI love NASA's work but I find it's websites are very messy and without a decent standard framework or layout. I really wish someone go to a GOV.UK job on them and get some decent standardisation going with them.
- rootbear 10y agoThere are some standards for NASA websites, but I think they have more to do with responsibility for content and other bureaucratic matters than design concerns. The group I used to be with, the Scientific Visualization Studio, at svs.gsfc.nasa.gov has a pretty decent website, in my biased opinion.
- peterwoo 10y agoI wrote a much less complete/polished program like this using WebGL this year: https://wioux.github.io/tracking-station/ https://wioux.github.io/tracking-station/ I was playing a lot of Kerbal Space Program and wanted to use those UI concepts to explore real missions and orbital maneuvers. I was particularly interested in the Cassini trajectory. But I started the project before discovering Eyes on the Solar System, which is awesome and now I find I'm kind of robbed of my motivation.
- cyberferret 10y agoAnyone know why in the second video (side plane view of solar system), they show 4 separate items moving out into deep space? I could pick Voyager 1 and 2, but no idea what the other 2 probes are?
- ars 10y agoProbably Pioneer 10 and 11. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_leaving_the_Solar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...
- Keyframe 10y agoPioneer 10 and 11 maybe?
- cyberferret 10y agoAh - thank you - Pioneer 10 and 11 makes sense!
- ars 10y agoIt's sad to think they only have about 9 years of life remaining before they run out of power. And only a couple of years of useful life remaining.
- hanoz 10y agoThis is all very well, but where are they in the night sky is what I would like to know. And no I'm not expecting to see them, just to think about them in the right direction.
- civilian 10y agoRight Ascension: 17h 11m 31.0s Declination: 11° 57' 50.9" (J2000) http://theskylive.com/voyager1-tracker http://theskylive.com/voyager1-tracker It's in the constellation Ophiucus. It'll be doing a flyby of Gliese 445 in 40,000 years, but it'll be brick'd by then. http://www.space.com/22783-voyager-1-interstellar-space-star-flyby.html http://www.space.com/22783-voyager-1-interstellar-space-star...
- netsharc 10y agoGeez, I wonder if anyone will find it. And since we won't even survive this century due to climate change, it'll be "a relic of a civilization long gone."
- civilian 10y agoWe are totally gonna survive climate change! Humans are adaptable as fuck. We might lose 90% of life and our global economy might temporarily go away, but we'll survive.
- nswanberg 10y agoThis shows their positions on a sky chart: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=voyager+1,+voyager+2+sky+chart http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=voyager+1,+voyager+2+sk...
- Jaruzel 10y agoI added: 'London, Tonight' on that query, and discovered they are only visible in the southern hemisphere. Boo.
- Animats 10y agoLeaving the solar system, as usual.[1] [1] https://xkcd.com/1189/ https://xkcd.com/1189/
- sidcool 10y ago> Because Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 1 is traveling from Earth, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain times of the year. So obvious yet so mind blowing.
- patrickmn 10y agoWe really are on a fragile blue ball doing loop-de-loops through space!
- RangerScience 10y agoWiggly loop-de-loops.
- lisper 10y agoIf you shrunk the sun down to the size of a ping-pong ball, earth would be a poppy seed orbiting ten meters away. Pluto would be 100m away. The Voyagers would be 300m away. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be 500 miles away.
- milansuk 10y agoI wish my code runs without maintenance for so long as these "babies" fly.
- blauditore 10y agoI recently experienced a VxWorks system completely crashing due to a sequence of simple ftp (reading) commands. We had to go and manually restart the machine on-site. Then I read about VxWorks being used for space exploration and was glad they never tried to read data from curiosity through ftp...
- parish 10y agoEventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars. In about 40,000 years....
- Waterluvian 10y agoI love that you can almost reasonably measure their distance in lightyears.