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Interstellar space even weirder than expected, NASA probe reveals
- mbillie1 7y agoI cannot imagine the feeling of pride you must have if you worked on the Voyager program in any capacity. The first interstellar spacecraft, over 40 years old, and someone's still writing FORTRAN or ASM for it. So cool.
- mmazing 7y agoAnd a non trivial chance that they will outlive everything else with any association to humans and Earth.
- JonathonW 7y agoIf by "outlive" you mean "continue to exist"... the Voyagers have a finite useful lifespan defined by the output of their RTGs, and that's expected to drop below useable levels sometime around 2025 (for both craft). But they'll still be out there, barring a random encounter with an asteroid or something.
- fnord77 7y ago...while most things on earth will be burnt up when the sun swells in 5 billion years or so...
- taf2 7y agoInteresting to imagine what are the odds that earth burns up before they might be hit by a random rock
- mmazing 7y agoI think that two grains of sand on beaches of the opposite ends of the Earth are probably more likely to interact than a random rock and a tiny satellite that has left the Solar System into interstellar space. In fact, in about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass within about 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445. It's also likely that it's as close to a star as Voyager 1 will be again, ever. Space is pretty empty compared to Earth or even our own Solar System.
- mmazing 7y agoYes, I meant more along the lines of "not be engulfed by the closest star" as another commenter mentioned. :)
- DayDollar 7y agoI know this sounds contrived, but imagine the mission beeing not reliant on continous operation, but just a operation of any kind to continue. Could one just harvest the background radiation for energy, and switch on, once some storage capacitator reaches a critical threshold. A device harvesting this weak, but continous energy source, could work indefinatly?
- dguaraglia 7y agoThis is possibly the most poignant thing I've read since Cormac McCarthy.
- mmazing 7y agoWow, on par with Cormac McCarthy for sadness, ouch! I don't really see it as tragic or sad, more like ... liberating. Those sorts of thoughts remind me to not waste this precious time that we are lucky enough to have at all.
- mirimir 7y agoI wonder where they'll be in five billion years.
- dredmorbius 7y agoIf they were travelling in a straight linear track across the Milky Way, they'd be about 275 thousand light years from Earth, or somewhat further from us than the Milky Way is across (150k - 200k light years). Current speed of Voyager 2 relative to Earth is 5.4 * 10^8 km/yr, a half-billion km/yr, or 0.05 millilightyears/yr. In truth, they'll be orbiting the galactic centre in an orbit somewhat offset from the Solar System. The Milky Way will have completed about 20 rotations. No idea what the resulting offset would be, but all but certainly somewhere within the galactic disk itself. Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
- dkersten 7y ago> Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I liked Neil deGrasse Tyson's description of how what we call space is still ridiculously close to our planet and how far away everything else actually is, using a standard classroom globe for scale: https://youtu.be/Tt0uV5d8tss?t=99 https://youtu.be/Tt0uV5d8tss?t=99
- spookthesunset 7y agoThanks for that video. That is actually one of the more pragmatic, easy to visualize ways to explain the scale space operates at....
- everdev 7y agoI personally like this one where the scale of the solar system is demonstrated instead of described: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE
- samstave 7y ago
- mongol 7y agoWill the Tesla survive?
- latchkey 7y agohttps://www.whereisroadster.com/ https://www.whereisroadster.com/
- sunstone 7y agoLook upon my works ye mighty and despair.
- walrus01 7y agoTelecom satellites in geostationary orbit will be up there on a geological time scale. Humankind could knock itself down to a pre bronze age level of technology and rediscover spaceflight long before the orbits of any of them decay into the atmosphere.
- Existenceblinks 7y agoMaybe it's power of simplicity. When I coded 8086 assembly program, it's less likely to have bugs. There are just a few registers to use, most things are next to bare metal. Like what could go wrong moving hex around if we know exactly what we are doing.
- 7thaccount 7y agoYeah...the stuff we do in most industries today is so complex that if we used Assembly or even C, nothing would ever get done. The problem is the abstractions we need (OS, high level langs) create many additional layers of complexity that can fail and bite you. I might have a rudimentary understanding of electronics and digital design and could write Assembly and kind of understand the full toolchain from A to Z, but on a modern computer (hardware, BIOS, OS, programming language...etc) there is no hope. Everything is a trade-off. If I had to write code for a probe today I would opt for the absolute simplest hardware and software so there is a lot less room for error.
- marcoseliziario 7y agoYeah, I agree with you. A lot of modern complexity is kind of incidental. We need to deal with GUIs, protocols, out of order execution, parallel and concurrent programming. The core of things didn't change that much, you store a bunch of things in memory, you sort then, you search things, you move them to disk storage, you retrieve them and so on. If you wanted to run a factory floor and the machines in it just by using either assembly or C and our knowledge of a bunch of algorithms, it would probably work, but without all the advantages we leverage by modern technologies. Instead of "Select ProdOrders where....", considering we once have done a bunch of "create table" and "create index", we would have to manually define the disk structures layouts by hand, hand write sorting routines for each one. It would take armies of programmers, but a single iphone would suffice for all IT needs of a large multinational bank. The user interface would be terrible, you'll need speacialized operators for simply entering data on the system, or extracting results. But in a space probe, you don't need to care about user interfaces, ever-changing business requirements, nice integration points, so you could probably get away with a very simple and primitive time-sharing os, in a single-threaded CPU, by using only C and a barebones standard library, dropping from time to time to inline assembly. Actually it is an interesting imagination exercise. It makes me think that even if a catastrophic event happened like an EMP, we would probably be using computers again to help rebuild the world in less than 20 years. As long as we had people with the knowledge to deal with the basics.
- davedx 7y agoI was looking through this last night. So awesome. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-reco...
- pp19dd 7y agoDamned interesting made an interactive where you can listen to it and see the encoded graphics: http://voyager.damninteresting.com/ http://voyager.damninteresting.com/ Some of the music selection they added to the golden record is actually really ... good. I think it captures a good cross section of Earth.
- jcims 7y agoMy heart is really on edge for the folks working on JWST. Decades of work perched atop a giant bomb to get into space, then it's like six months from T-0 on the launch pad to first science images. Errybody going to have ulcers.
- lykr0n 7y agoI wonder if we'll someday launch a Voyager 3 & 4.
- planteen 7y agoIt would be pretty neat if we launched Voyager 3 & 4 around 2150, following the same 175 year cycle "Grand Tour" of the original Voyagers. I also wonder if the power source in 2150 would still need to be a RTG or if we will have an alternative by then.
- sp332 7y agoNew Horizons is heading out of the solar system too. But it's moving about half as fast as the Voyagers and won't hit the heliopause until after 2050. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_leaving_the_Solar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...
- pmoriarty 7y agoNot only that, but according to the article, when New Horizons "runs out of power in the 2030s, it’ll fall silent more than a billion miles short of the heliosphere’s outer edge."
- mdorazio 7y agoDo you mean interstellar probes? The Voyager missions were primarily planetary exploration missions, which NASA and other space agencies continue to run with new probes every few years. The interstellar exploration piece was kind of a secondary feature of the missions taking advantage of high speeds from all the gravity assists along the way. I don't think we'll see a dedicated interstellar probe for a long time. It just takes too much energy to get out that far in a reasonable amount of time without radical designs or a big leap in propulsion technology.
- pierrebai 7y agoWouldn't it be possible if we launched from the moon instead? Most of the trust of rocket is loss to get out of the earth gravity well. (Not that we're anywhere near having a rocket factory on the moon... but maybe one could be assembled and fueled in orbit?)
- badrabbit 7y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0920-y.epdf?referrer_access_token=YptgbTqu4rf2cjJ19DEkl9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NvQxyMvEHUqYz6PZPB2CM7MFEHtS7YS_M8EL0iadgrDtpis9Nbg7aE8i5f48BJtRqpVo6g6EhfPOkxvvTiWZBrb3t30tjLIs9ipt-hgoHx1r14vKes_LXUzORiTwrA6hpkNY9rzwMx6AeFRldIcvs789A6jsgkU1QGpq0RFzR5xw%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=www.nationalgeographic.com https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0920-y.epdf?refer... Natgeo cuts off the article midway asking me o subscribe. Above is link to OC.
- labster 7y agoReader mode worked for me for the whole article. TL;DR two data points (trajectories) is not enough to understand the dynamics of the heliopause, as we saw different flow in each, but it’s all we got.
- rogueSkib 7y agoAlt+Cmd+I -> Console -> closeOverlay()
- exhilaration 7y agoThat worked, but how did you find that particular method?
- grumpy8 7y agoNot OP, but if you inspect the overlay, just right next to it there's a <script> with a closeOverlay function. OP probably tried to inspect/delete DOM element and found that function.
- rogueSkib 7y agoHaha, yep, this. I hide a lot, but couldn't get scrolling to work, searched for "scroll" and stumbled on that obviously named method :)
- felixyz 7y ago"It was amazing to work on this cutting-edge data from spacecraft that were launched before I was born and still doing amazing science" I'm equally amazed (as a non-scientist) when I reflect that reading about the Voyager missions was one of the first things that opened up the infinite wonders of science to me some thirty years ago, and here we are still getting new data and new riddles to solve from those same probes.
- beamatronic 7y agoLet’s launch some more, for the next generation to use.
- rabidrat 7y agoVoyager 1 and 2 had to happen in a narrow window of time to take advantage of favorable planetary alignments. If we launched something like this now, it would take an order of magnitude more fuel and still not be able to go as fast. The next window for exploring interstellar space so efficiently isn't until 2150. Of course there are other long-term missions we could be trying now; but it's not quite so straightforward (due to the mechanics of space-time) as we're led to believe. For that matter, we could consider this whole anthropocene climate change thing we're doing to be one long-term experiment. You're welcome, children of the future, for all this wonderful data we're generating for you.
- Already__Taken 7y agoIt's what this sweet poster that hangs on my wall is for, first one in the set: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/
- noir_lord 7y agoI have one of those on my living room wall. The Kepler 16b one. The other wall has a cray supercomputer been serviced, a high res version of this https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/cray-1-nersc-disassembled.jpg https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/cray-... It’s amazing I have a partner, it really is.
- tectonic 7y agoFrom the last issue of Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com https://orbitalindex.com): > Today’s mind-blowing stat: Voyager’s transmitters use just 23 watts, roughly the same as an incandescent refrigerator bulb, yet we are able to interpret the 0.1 billion-billionth of a Watt that makes it to our 70 m dish from 11 billion kilometers away. Both spacecraft are expected to last another 5 years, until their plutonium batteries decay beyond usefulness and they drift with our golden record more or less forever among the stars.
- monocasa 7y agoI heard a rumour that by the time they've gotten to another solar system, they will have evaporated into a metallic cloud; that's how long this next part of their journey is.
- andrekandre 7y agodo you mean the plutonium batteries or the probe itself?
- monocasa 7y agoThe whole probe itself.
- namirez 7y agoTechnically you're talking about sublimation rather than evaporation. And no, it won't be very likely for the Voyagers to disappear. Most likely they will be damaged by impact or get absorbed by massive object, but sublimation at 10K will take a very very long time. I don't have the data, but if you want to calculate the rate of sublimation, you need to look at the vapor pressure of various metals at interstellar temperatures.
- Filligree 7y agoSome very low numbers indeed. But they're in interstellar space. I imagine high-energy collisions (with hydrogen atoms or loose protons) would be a more likely cause of evaporation, and I don't know the numbers for that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- negamax 7y agoAs I read this when listening to some rowdy drunk neighbors shouting. It's such a perfect contrast to be in two worlds.
- CriticalCathed 7y ago>And on the other side of the boundary, the interstellar medium is at least 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than expected. However, this plasma is so thin and diffuse, the average temperature around the Voyager probes remains extremely cold. I don't understand this. If the medium is 54,000 degrees wouldn't it have incinerated the probes? How can an extremely diffuse plasma be 54,000 degrees and yet also be extremely cold?
- arbuge 7y agoTemperature relates to how fast atoms are moving. If they're moving very fast, then we say it's very hot. Damage from high temperature however requires a substantial quantity of those atoms, not just that they be moving quickly. But there are very very few atoms in the interstellar medium. They are moving very fast, but there are very few of them indeed. To incinerate something, there would need to be a lot of atoms indeed moving at high temperature. An isolated atom hitting the probe, even at relatively high speed, won't be doing much incinerating. It's like a sparrow hitting a building. Won't do much, even it's a fast-moving sparrow. But a billion sparrows hitting it in unison - that might be a problem.
- Koshkin 7y agoBut there once was this Diamond Mountain in Lower Pomerania...
- iamkroot 7y agoHave you ever reached into a hot oven and grabbed a sheet of tinfoil with your bare hands? The foil is 350F (or hotter) but you don't feel anything because it's so thin and flimsy. There is not enough mass to hold enough energy to hurt you.
- CriticalCathed 7y agoseriously? I assumed that it simply cooled more quickly because of high surface area to mass ratio; not that it actually was 400F but I couldn't feel it. It doesn't make intuitive sense to me but I do understand the explanation.
- mrabcx 7y agoI wonder if these probes may rather be captured by humans in a few hundred or thousands of years and placed in museums back on earth. With faster space travel techniques that is a possible scenario.
- soulofmischief 7y agoMost unsurprising headline I've seen in a while.
- allard 7y agoa recent talk on the spacecraft and the project — https://youtu.be/H62hZJVqs2o https://youtu.be/H62hZJVqs2o
- xz0r 7y agoI wonder if there is a documentary with visual explanations. It would be amazing to watch and understand. I recently saw a mind-bending documentary[0] titled "Timelapse of the future", there's a brief mention of Voyager, it shows what happens to the universe in the long run and how it ends. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
- RubenF 7y agoInteresting read. Thanks for sharing
- walrus01 7y agoIt is kind of weird to me that they say the Voyager craft are in interstellar space, when their distance in AU from the sun is a great deal less than the aphelion of Sedna's orbit and other sednoids.