7 ms·

Voyager Set to Enter Interstellar Space

187 points by pwg 16y ago

pwg 16y ago
How many years until V'Ger returns home?
- prawn 16y 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 16y ago
    I'm personally waiting for V-GINY.
    - blhack 16y ago
      (For anybody curious, this is a reference to an episode of Futurama, which was an homage to the Star Trek episode. In Futurama "V-GINY" is the result of an FCC "v-chip" which was mounted on a space probe coming back to earth to cleanse earth or "inappropriate content". You can read about this, here: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/V-GINY http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/V-GINY)
    - coderdude 16y ago
      It must suck to create a new account, just to have your first comment failguy out and render your account useless. Won't the auto-kill feature just automatically deaden any future posts from this guy? Seems like a poor way to nurture possible good HNizens who make a mistake or two in the beginning. Technically he was only following the example of the V'Ger guy who isn't being downvoted.
      - prawn 16y ago
        V'Ger guy was being downvoted initially.
calebmpeterson 16y 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.
- brudgers 16y 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.
  - calebmpeterson 16y ago
    True, and yet it's a good chunk of a lifetime for a human.
    - brudgers 16y ago
      Until recently, 50 miles was a long distance for a human to travel.
icehawk 16y ago
Voyager is a beautiful example of reliable code and engineering. 30 years and 10 billion miles out, and still functioning.
- alienfluid 16y ago
  Exactly what I thought. This is what real engineering looks like.
- brudgers 16y 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.
  - ANH 16y 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.
    - brudgers 16y ago
      In light of recent events in Japan, engineering risk assessments regarding the hazards posed by industrial uses of plutonium are not exactly gospel. The fact that 3 of 4 failures of the Titan IV rocket occurred following Cassini's launch, the prelaunch engineering risk assessment for Cassini is likely to have underestimated it's risk in a similar manner. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Titan_launches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Titan_launches]
veb 16y 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 16y 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.
  - veb 16y 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 16y 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!
  - brudgers 16y 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.
cal5k 16y 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 16y ago
  Which is why we need to work on the aging problem. Once that is solved, we can explore all we want.
  - cal5k 16y ago
    Agreed. Aubrey de Grey is a crazy bugger, but he's got the right idea.
    - pjscott 16y ago
      He looks crazy, with the enormous beard, but his appearance belies an impressive amount of sanity. I've been really impressed by listening to him. In particular, he's very up-front about what we don't know yet, and the uncertainty involved, and he's very careful not to promise more than he can scientifically justify. This sort of thing does not come through very well in sensationalist mass-media portrayals of him, though.
    - JoshTriplett 16y ago
      I think he has a good chance of finding ways to slow down the aging process and buy us some time, just like we've managed to extend lifespans heavily through other advances in medical and related technology. However, I have very low confidence that that direction of research will manage to completely solve the problem. We have far too many ways of breaking down, and not all of them seem solvable by patching. I have somewhat more hope for a solution from the AI camp, personally. I just hope the Uncomfortable Truths Well (http://xkcd.com/568/ http://xkcd.com/568/) doesn't prove correct.
  - naz 16y ago
    We've already solved that with reproduction. We need to figure out how to out-live our planet.
jaysonelliot 16y 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.
- calebmpeterson 16y 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 16y 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 ;)
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- tsuipen 16y 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 16y ago
  nothing to replace it? See SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.
  - 16y ago
haberman 16y 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=123534818 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1235348...
paraschopra 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.

187 points by pwg 16y ago

pwg 16y ago

How many years until V'Ger returns home?

prawn 16y 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 16y ago
  I'm personally waiting for V-GINY.
  - blhack 16y ago
    (For anybody curious, this is a reference to an episode of Futurama, which was an homage to the Star Trek episode. In Futurama "V-GINY" is the result of an FCC "v-chip" which was mounted on a space probe coming back to earth to cleanse earth or "inappropriate content". You can read about this, here: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/V-GINY http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/V-GINY)
  - coderdude 16y ago
    It must suck to create a new account, just to have your first comment failguy out and render your account useless. Won't the auto-kill feature just automatically deaden any future posts from this guy? Seems like a poor way to nurture possible good HNizens who make a mistake or two in the beginning. Technically he was only following the example of the V'Ger guy who isn't being downvoted.
    - prawn 16y ago
      V'Ger guy was being downvoted initially.

calebmpeterson 16y 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.

brudgers 16y 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.
- calebmpeterson 16y ago
  True, and yet it's a good chunk of a lifetime for a human.
  - brudgers 16y ago
    Until recently, 50 miles was a long distance for a human to travel.

icehawk 16y ago

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

alienfluid 16y ago
Exactly what I thought. This is what real engineering looks like.
brudgers 16y 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.
- ANH 16y 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.
  - brudgers 16y ago
    In light of recent events in Japan, engineering risk assessments regarding the hazards posed by industrial uses of plutonium are not exactly gospel. The fact that 3 of 4 failures of the Titan IV rocket occurred following Cassini's launch, the prelaunch engineering risk assessment for Cassini is likely to have underestimated it's risk in a similar manner. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Titan_launches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Titan_launches]

veb 16y 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 16y 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.
- veb 16y 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 16y 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!
- brudgers 16y 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.

cal5k 16y 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 16y ago
Which is why we need to work on the aging problem. Once that is solved, we can explore all we want.
- cal5k 16y ago
  Agreed. Aubrey de Grey is a crazy bugger, but he's got the right idea.
  - pjscott 16y ago
    He looks crazy, with the enormous beard, but his appearance belies an impressive amount of sanity. I've been really impressed by listening to him. In particular, he's very up-front about what we don't know yet, and the uncertainty involved, and he's very careful not to promise more than he can scientifically justify. This sort of thing does not come through very well in sensationalist mass-media portrayals of him, though.
  - JoshTriplett 16y ago
    I think he has a good chance of finding ways to slow down the aging process and buy us some time, just like we've managed to extend lifespans heavily through other advances in medical and related technology. However, I have very low confidence that that direction of research will manage to completely solve the problem. We have far too many ways of breaking down, and not all of them seem solvable by patching. I have somewhat more hope for a solution from the AI camp, personally. I just hope the Uncomfortable Truths Well (http://xkcd.com/568/ http://xkcd.com/568/) doesn't prove correct.
- naz 16y ago
  We've already solved that with reproduction. We need to figure out how to out-live our planet.

jaysonelliot 16y 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.

calebmpeterson 16y 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 16y 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 ;)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
tsuipen 16y 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 16y ago
nothing to replace it? See SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.
- 16y ago

haberman 16y 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=123534818 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1235348...

paraschopra 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.