16 ms·

Voyager spacecraft begin to power down

432 points by Element_ 4y ago

rektide 4y ago
> But if an engineer had a choice to put in a part that was 10 percent more expensive but wasn't something that was needed for a four-year mission, they just went ahead and did that. And they wouldn't necessarily tell management. Engineers doing good things even though everyone else doesnt want to care & just wants something cheap. Heartbreaking long tale of humanity, that opting to do good things is so hard to get buy in on.
- chasd00 4y ago
  not understanding and following requirements isn't something engineers should be doing IMO
  - marssaxman 4y ago
    Understanding requirements so well that you give the customer what they actually do want, even though they don't yet know they want it, sounds like really great engineering.
    - FastMonkey 4y ago
      There is balance in all things. Engineers shouldn't be ignored, but we are also not omniscient. As an engineer myself, having worked on product and having been a client of engineers working on products for me, I can tell you that engineers that think they have an inside track on what the client "really" wants are often wrong. The feeling is similar to that false confidence you get in any field when you have learned just the absolute basics, and I have felt it myself. That's why you don't just go and spend 10% of the clients budget without talking to them first. If clients are saying they don't want a feature, it's quite probable that the person you're dealing with actually knows what they want, and what they want is not what you've come up with. A lot of projects that filter their way through HN die because the engineers are solving the problem for themselves and not talking to users. That is also the pattern you see with a lot of "what I wish I had known when I started my project" posts on here. Avoiding a conversation with the client because you're afraid they won't approve the feature you want to add is not really great engineering.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > not understanding and following requirements isn't something engineers should be doing IMO I disagree, engineers are not robots. Good engineers may second guess and get technically involved in adjusting badly written instructions or mangled schematics, and do so all the time. And no, the "process" for querying and changing requirements is not always practical. Of course good engineers should document and report all deviations from the recspec and talk to the quality manager. Spotting that a capacitor or diode voltage is under-rated and swapping the part number, no problem. Upgrading a part if it makes no other difference seems okay too. I've been very grateful to fab or pick and place engineers who corrected a silly mistake I made instead of just sending me back a board that obviously wouldn't work. But those kind of people who take initiatives are rare to find these days,
  - bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
    Squeezing in “a little extra” is a time-honored tradition in engineering.
    - ridgeguy 4y ago
      That's why the really useful dials go to 11.
  - tejtm 4y ago
    Deciding that the Engineers don't understand is not something a bureaucracy should be doing, period.
- lkrubner 4y ago
  Engineer: "Gracious lord and Pharaoh, if we mix this volcanic ash into the mortar, your Pyramid could last for thousands of years." Pharaoh: "But that would be too expensive right? Don't waste the treasury's money. Ordinary mortar is fine." Engineer: (goes off and mixes volcanic ash into the mortar, despite the cost)
  - baud147258 4y ago
    Considering how the Pyramid were likely planned as an eternal afterlife home for the Pharaoh, I would have though the answer would be more along the line of 'Of course! I'll go and beat a few peasants for the necessary money'
  - JJMcJ 4y ago
    When Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Falling Water home was being built, the contractor realized Wright had too little reinforcing rod in the section of the house cantilevered over the creek, so added more against Wright's orders. Otherwise a structural failure would likely have happened.
- m34 4y ago
  I was on the receiving end of numerous support cases caused by what has to be on the sub-dollar cent savings (per single sku) region when multiple mainboard manufacturers chose to use capacitors with slightly worse tolerances all of a sudden (~25 years ago). So if the whole process of spec'ing and validating the quality of sourced materials was within their action space, ofc they'd choose (potential) fault-tolerance over price, as it was mission critical. So there might be a reason why we refer to it today as space race and not race to the bottom.
secondcoming 4y ago
This article is from the future, July 2022
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lunchpack 4y ago
  This is a pre-published article from the July 2022 magazine
litoE 4y ago
I remember having lunch at the JPL cafeteria and watching a TV monitor showing pictures of Jupiter being beamed down by Voyager. Exciting times.
- enriquto 4y ago
  Notice that today you can download all the raw data sent by the voyagers and create your own mosaics and false color composites (each image was taken with a separate multispectral filter). This is a very beautiful and inspiring project for tech students. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/data-access/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/data-access/
GekkePrutser 4y ago
It's the half life of the RTG that is limiting them, right? Because they're way too far to use any kind of solar power. Ps I always thought that record was a bit funny. I mean it's a good method of initiating communication. Just strapping it to a can of poison is kind of a mixed message. "Hey buddies we're peaceful humans, ps here's a can of instadeath" :) Though I suppose little radioactivity would be left by the time it ever reached an alien civilization.
- lazide 4y ago
  Eh, if they can’t deal with a little shielded can of death they’re not likely to have made it to space anyway. For anyone spacefaring, it’s about as hard to deal with or unexpected as a can of gas gas in an old car.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    True but they might not know what it is. And radiation is something that's pretty unversally poisonous (instead of biological poisons which tend to be only poisonous to certain species). I don't think there's a single species on earth to which radiation isn't deadly. I just think the records would have been better launched on their own (and hundreds of them in different directions of potentially life-sustaining systems). That'd have been cool (even though it's still a total long shot).
    - lazide 4y ago
      It seems pretty implausible to me that a species has managed to bridge interstellar space (pretty much required to run across the probe before the RTG has decayed to harmlessness) and has no idea that plutonium (or whatever their name is for it) or radiation is harmful. Hell, they’d be getting harmful cosmic ray doses without some kind of shielding even worse than they’d likely get from the RTG unless they cracked it open to feast on the chewy pellets inside.
    - knorker 4y ago
      > True but they might not know what it is. With a half life of 87.7 years there won't be any left by the time it's found. They'll have to know nuclear science to even propose a hypothesis about what was in that container. If they don't then they'll scratch their heads about how this thing was even powered. The nature of unstable (and therefore radioactive) elements is that they'll decay until they are stable elements.
TrueDuality 4y ago
Rest now sweet explorers. You've given us more knowledge than we asked for and inspired untold numbers. Even in your final dreams you give us beautiful gifts and prove to the universe that we exist.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  When was the launch date? It's been out there for almost my whole life. Maybe it will turn up in the 23rd century in female form with a shaved head and calling herself Vega.
  - ingsoc79 4y ago
    ...or suffer a more pedestrian fate of getting vaporized by bored Klingons.
bullen 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o
- dharmaturtle 4y ago
  StrangeLoop talk: "Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager" by Aaron Cummings
rozab 4y ago
This is a good overview of the Voyager program, but did they just slap that headline on it to try and make it news? I was expecting some sort of announcement. But there isn't even any definite plans to shut down any instruments in the near future.
- perlgeek 4y ago
  The title is also very weird, considering that Voyager 1 and 2 have been shutting down instruments since 1990 and 1991, respectively: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/thirty-year-plan/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/thirty-year-pla...
  - Aardwolf 4y ago
    The Voyager crafts generate a never ending supply of news articles about leaving the solar system or shutting down, because there plenty of different moments that are considered "leaving the solar system" or shutting down, and there are multiple Voyager crafts as well...
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
They are the first human-made objects to do so, a distinction they will hold for at least another few decades. Uhh...won't they still be the first?
- 333c 4y ago
  Not once we invent time travel in a few decades.
  - _0ffh 4y ago
    We told you, no spoilers! Stop messing with this time line, or we'll have to start over again!
    - RedShift1 4y ago
      Should we give them another chance to avoid the dark timeline and reset them to pre-Harambe?
- hourago 4y ago
  > They have traveled farther and lasted longer than any other spacecraft in history. And they have crossed into interstellar space, according to our best understanding of the boundary between the sun's sphere of influence and the rest of the galaxy. They are the first human-made objects to do so, a distinction they will hold for at least another few decades. They will be the ones that have traveled the farthest until faster objects catch up and surpass them. It may take time until we send anything faster, and it's going to need time to catch up, so it will take decades.
  - wyldfire 4y ago
    But when they do catch up and surpass them, they won't unseat the first ones at being first.
    - hourago 4y ago
JoshuaJB 4y ago
Very nice overview of the Voyager program. I love the words from the President included on the spacecraft: “We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”
- hansjorg 4y ago
  That's a nice sentiment. Suprisingly humble, coming from Reagan.
  - boulos 4y ago
    Except it was Carter...
    - diogenes_of_ak 4y ago
      People inexplicably hate Carter - not only was he a fantastic president… albeit unlucky but good, but also a genuinely amazing human.
      - mc32 4y ago
        Carter is a really nice man. He was not a good president though. Granted much of the badness was out of his control, but such is life.
        Ma8ee 4y ago
        How was he a bad president?
        cpuguy83 4y ago
        Mainly record high inflation and the gas crisis (which was way worse than today's). Whether or not anyone could have stopped that doesn't matter, ppl attribute this to him.
funstuff007 4y ago
- epgui 4y ago
  That’s called an “opinion piece”, it is editorial content. Scientific American is a popular science publication. Most people read it for the scientific journalism, not for the opinion pieces. Editorial content is always going to be hit or miss.
  - jgalt212 4y ago
    True, it's an opinion piece. On Anthropology and Sociology (at best), not Science.
    - epgui 4y ago
      Anthropology and sociology are both sciences.
      - ddingus 4y ago
        It is not generally possible and or ethical to apply the scientific method to these topics to arrive at greater understanding. People who understand science also understand the method is the basis for science. It's a simple thing, and when applied yields understanding. Understanding isn't knowing in some absolute sense either. It's in the predictive sense. We do A and get B. Degrees of confidence, and scope of applicability are relevant here too. Old understanding is as valid today as it was upon realization, for example. It's that we understand more and or the outcome of that greater understanding puts the scope necessary to get things done, or improve on our body of understanding, well outside what older understanding can do for us. General Relativity works well, until it doesn't, in which case we must use Special Relativity, for example. The basic problems we've got with these two areas of interest is an inability to roll back the clock and repeat experiments. Secondly, people are unique entities, unlike atoms and other things we encounter and want to study, and given we are discussing people here, subjecting them to experiments has numerous ethical and legal concerns. What we can do is work with the data we do get as an artifact of the people and their agency as well as the machinery of society and apply rational, and people who are experienced in these areas would argue inferential thinking as well as deductive type thinking, post fact and arrive at something like understanding[1], but the nature of all that means confidence is low, repeatability for all but supremely exceptional circumstances, and most definitely not on any sort of demand, is off the table. Add all that up, and it's not really science in the basic sense applying the scientific method can add to our body of scientific understanding.[0] It can't be! We are denied the use of the method! [0] Ideally, our body of scientific understanding is all rooted in the scientific method. What we get from our study of these two won't be rooted in the scientific method. [1] This is not to say these areas of study have no value! They absolutely do have value. Please do not take my argument here as anything other than an attempt to clarify why they are not science.
srvmshr 4y ago
> Flandro calculated that the repeated gravity assists, as they are called, would cut the flight time between Earth and Neptune from 30 years to 12. There was just one catch: the alignment happened only once every 176 years. To reach the planets while the lineup lasted, a spacecraft would have to be launched by the mid-1970s. How many of such startling discoveries get noticed by bureaucracy/administration nowadays? Back then, it seems ideas percolated to execution stage pretty fast. I wonder if a part-time working grad student's serendipitous finds will be taken seriously to action in today's environment.
- antihero 4y ago
  The amount of companies I’ve worked in where they’d just be like can we push back on the solar system a bit
  - samstave 4y ago
    SOL-utions...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- samstave 4y ago
divbzero 4y ago
Two bits of history I learned from the article: 1. The last human to touch the spacecraft was a physicist inspecting two detectors — probably part of the low-energy telescope system (LET). Although many scientists have worked on the Voyagers over the decades, Cummings can make a unique claim. “I was the last person to touch the spacecraft before they launched,” he says. Cummings was responsible for two detectors designed to measure the flux of electrons and other charged particles when the Voyagers encountered the giant planets. Particles would pass through a small “window” in each detector that consisted of aluminum foil just three microns thick. Cummings worried that technicians working on the spacecraft might have accidentally dented or poked holes in the windows. “So they needed to be inspected right before launch,” he says. “Indeed, I found that one of them was a little bit loose.” 2. Carl Sagan not only commented on the “Pale Blue Dot” but also persuaded NASA to take the photograph in the first place. Sagan urged NASA officials to have Voyager 1 transmit one last series of images. So, on Valentine's Day in 1990, the probe aimed its cameras back toward the inner solar system and took 60 final shots. The most haunting of them all, made famous by Sagan as the “Pale Blue Dot,” captured Earth from a distance of 3.8 billion miles. It remains the most distant portrait of our planet ever taken. Veiled by wan sunlight that reflected off the camera's optics, Earth is barely visible in the image. It doesn't occupy even a full pixel. Sagan, who died in 1996, “worked really hard to convince NASA that it was worth looking back at ourselves,” Spilker says, “and seeing just how tiny that pale blue dot was.”
- deleted 4y ago
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- exhilaration 4y ago
  The Pale Blue Dot picture for those that want a reminder: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-b...
whartung 4y ago
This is one of my favorite reasonably recent Voyager anecdote, from a recent special about the program. Paraphrasing, the person said "You carry more computing power in your pocket than what we have on Voyager. And by that, I don't mean your smart phone. I mean you car key fob."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- linsomniac 4y ago
  The one I often think about is: Your USB-C charger is more powerful than the Apollo 11's computer. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a30916315/usb-c-charger-apollo-11-computer/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a30916315/usb-c-...
  - ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
    This blew my 12 year old mind when someone said this about that Furby toy back in the late 90s.
  - verisimi 4y ago
    ... and yet its travelled 12 billion miles from Earth
    - elevaet 4y ago
      The power of persistence!
      - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
        and radioisotope thermoelectric generators... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
        4y ago
TheChaplain 4y ago
I find the space-age to be super fascinating! The Venera program is one favourite, where they managed to put a lander on Venus more than 50 years ago and send back data. Just imagine the skills and knowledge with the technology at the time, to figure out how to land something safely in an unknown environment. Love it!
- pcrh 4y ago
  Curious that you refer to the "space age" in the past tense. Though it might be because the enthusiasm for humans traveling between planets and stars has been somewhat tempered since the 1960's-1980's.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    I mean, we say industrial age as in past tense even though we have more industry than ever. We are doing more space launches than ever right now, it just doesn't define this time. The birth of the internet and rise of computing technology sent us into the information age.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    We still have Bronze, Iron, Industry, Machinery, Atomic technology, Space technology... The so-called "ages" are named for what is new within them, there's no implication that the technology is lost when the next supposed "age" starts. We're usually now referred to as being in the Information age, which puts the Space age in the past.
iJohnDoe 4y ago
Great article. Learned something new. The satellites were larger than I thought. Coincidentally, randomly the other day, I thought how much more advanced our computing would be today as a species if we worked within the constraints of the computing of available at the time of Voyager or even the 90s. I think we would favor information and communication vs. cruft and entertainment. Working within constrained computing environments forces us to make tough decisions about what is important or pushes us to innovate and be creative with what we have to work with.
- pvg 4y ago
  Our 'computing' is many orders magnitude more 'advanced' than what was available at the time. There's no technology that's advanced faster in the history of technology, a completely unprecedented rate of innovation even in the industrial era. It would be very odd indeed if it somehow became more advanced by not advancing it.
dry_soup 4y ago
If I could decide, I would happily scrap all human missions and launch one massive science robot with a huge visible light camera on it per year. Idlewords convinced me of this: https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm
- bergenty 4y ago
  I’m glad you can’t decide. I want my kids or grandkids to be able to live on other planets.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Why?
    - kyriakos 4y ago
      Colonisation of space is going to make us a more resilient species.
      - roflyear 4y ago
        Why do you care about this?
        kyriakos 4y ago
        Isn't it the same as asking why do we pro create?
        roflyear 4y ago
        Possibly.
jftuga 4y ago
When will Voyager 1 become 1 light-day distance away?[1] * 1 LD from Earth = November 18, 2026 -- 1,614 days from today * 1 LD from Sun = Feb 03, 2027 -- 1,691 days from today https://www.quora.com/When-will-Voyager-1-become-1-light-day-distance-away https://www.quora.com/When-will-Voyager-1-become-1-light-day...
- emmelaich 4y ago
  Yeh it's "only" 2/1000ths of a light year away.
tomohawk 4y ago
> if the models were correct, should have pushed the heliopause farther out than 120 AU. “It was unexpected by all the theorists,” Krimigis says. “I think the modeling, in terms of the findings of the Voyagers, has been found wanting.” Uncalibrated and/or unfalsifiable computer models should never be trusted.
sydthrowaway 4y ago
This frustrates me. How far are we from relativistic travel?
- grogenaut 4y ago
  about 9995 basis points https://theconversation.com/have-we-made-an-object-that-could-travel-1-the-speed-of-light-170849 https://theconversation.com/have-we-made-an-object-that-coul...
hoten 4y ago
I recently[1] learned that you can telnet to a NASA machine to query various information about astronomical bodies, including man-made satellites. > telnet horizons.jpl.nasa.gov 6775 The interface is pretty difficult to use, but there is a python wrapper for it. I forced myself to stumble through the telnet interface. > Voyager (no semicolon–othewise it'd look up in the small-bodies table) That tells you Voyager 1 is ID 31, and Voyager 2 is ID 32. > 31 > E > <Enter> x2 (take defaults) > 2022-06-18 > 2022-06-19 > 1h > <Enter> > A Spits out this data: https://gist.github.com/connorjclark/de205ce62a7f1d4fda6d8fa74acb2958 https://gist.github.com/connorjclark/de205ce62a7f1d4fda6d8fa... I'm not knowledgable enough to know how to utilize this data in an interesting way, but I assume this "Ephemeris" data can be utilized to determine where to point your telescope for any given object. [1] https://twitter.com/cjamcl/status/1536609292572184576 https://twitter.com/cjamcl/status/1536609292572184576
- basementcat 4y ago
  You can also point your browser to it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - woliveirajr 4y ago
    Point telescope x point browser: this one was funny :-)
- mct 4y ago
  Very interesting telnet site, thank you for sharing! FYI, though, I think this may be looking at the wrong object ID. It selected "31", which appears to be the entry for one of the Lagrange points. Voyager 1 and 2 appear to have negative ID numbers, "-31" and "-32".
- _petronius 4y ago
  Horizons is also available as a web interface (as another commenter mentioned), and if the orbital elements output (which is what you have there and is basically this data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements) is a bit opaque, you can also request it in Cartesian coordinates ("Vector table" under "Ephemeris type" in the web ui). Apparently it also has an email interface, which is neat. The web UI is here: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/ https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/ I once did a hobby project doing 2-body orbital simulations, and was able to use this data to set up a model of the solar system, and satellites orbiting the Earth. It's quite a fun dataset!
FloatArtifact 4y ago
If Voyager had the equivalent of a modern cell phone, worth of compute. What would have been the power requirements for the mission for the same duration?
WalterBright 4y ago
The problem with getting a gravity assist from Jupiter is that it causes Jupiter to slightly slow down. Now, you might imagine that Jupiter is very big, and the slowdown is infinitesimal. But these things add up, and as more and more craft get a boost from Jupiter, Jupiter will lose orbital velocity and spiral inward to get sucked into the sun. And then what?
- cdelsolar 4y ago
  lol
- nine_k 4y ago
  If Jupiter starts going significantly downwards by the time when it'll be just a fem million years until Sun goes supernova, we (whoever that will be) will have to hurry and flee anyway. It it involves crashing Jupiter into the Sun, and likely wreaking complete havoc in the inner planets' orbits, so be it; the system will become unusable anyway. But until starfaring is developed enough, we should be careful with any gigaton-scale spacecraft doing gravity assists!
- bergenty 4y ago
  You answered your own question. I’m not going to do the math you you would probably need trillions of flybys before anything observable happens.
- _zywo 4y ago
  xkcd did a What-If on this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/146/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/146/ TL;DR: It will not happen. You would need to throw on the order of a thousand Earth-masses to even get close to neutralizing Jupiter's orbit. All processes in this world are unsustainable, but only some matter.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Seems only one person got the joke :-)
gorgoiler 4y ago
Space navigation is amazing. If I throw a rock into the lake I can barely see where it is until it hits the water. When we fling these craft into the void how do we know where they are and where they are going? I can think of three ways: (1) get the direction right in the first place and just assume the craft is where we calculate it should be; (2) watch it from afar somehow; or (3) have it tell us where it is. These seem like three quite different options and I would love to know how it’s actually done.
- StellarScience 4y ago
  Votager 1 hasn't changed its trajectory much since 1980, so just modeling its trajectory from there would be fairly accurate. However, they also calculate range precisely by sending it pings and timing its response. They calculate velocity precisely by looking at the Doppler shift of that return signal (https://geekswipe.net/technology/aerospace/how-nasa-calculates-the-distance-velocity-and-position-of-the-voyager-spacecrafts https://geekswipe.net/technology/aerospace/how-nasa-calculat...). Measuring those over time provide a fairly precise location.
  - gorgoiler 4y ago
    Thanks for engaging! Do the pings return a location, or are these range and velocity (and orientation from onboard sensors?) values used for dead reckoning, with Earth as the starting point? When external forces impart a force on the craft (eg exciting new moons!) how is that taken into account?
    - hydrogen7800 4y ago
      I've read about determining the "state vector" on the Apollo missions, and I would imagine it's similar for voyager. The ping delay and Doppler shift should be enough to determine 3D position and velocity with respect to some coordinate sysem. I know JPL ( and/or perhaps other agencies like ESA) have a computer model of the solar system where you can run a spacecraft's trajectory forward through time. It can also account for gravitational anomalies if the distance to a planet/moon is close enough where it matters. Assuming they have gravitational anomalies modeled for that body. I'm pretty sure at least Jupiter has a decent anomaly map. In voyagers case, using the sun as a point mass, combined with its state vector at any known time, any undergrad student who knows the vis viva equation can determine voyager's position at any time.
WalterBright 4y ago
I remember when Voyager was swinging past Jupiter for the first time. Caltech set up monitors all over campus, where we got to see the pictures as they arrived. We'd check the monitors before class, after class, etc. A popular joke was if one of the moon pictures showed a giant Death-Star-like hatch on it, how fast we'd be putting together a manned mission to investigate. It was fun watching the scientists boiling over with excitement when all their theories were trashed by each new picture, and they had to reinvent them from scratch.
WalterBright 4y ago
Carl Sagan is mentioned in the article. He was quite a treasure. He came by our dorm once for conversation and dinner. The conversation was about whether life could be based on silicon rather than oxygen. I.e. living rocks! Very fun.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Did you go to Cornell?
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Caltech
- mongol 4y ago
  Was it not whether it would be based on silicon rather than carbon? I think that is usually where the similarity lies.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Oh, you're right, it was carbon.
_HMCB_ 4y ago
Amazing writing. And what a feat.
kristianp 4y ago
45 years in space. About time for another set of probes to go beyond where they went and explore the border of the solar wind with more modern instruments.
- qayxc 4y ago
  The New Horizons probe is still out there.
sytelus 4y ago
What is astonishing is how little these space crafts have travelled. They go at 38k mph and it would have still taken them 40,000 years to reach nearest star to the earth! The fastest space craft so far is Parker Solar Probe which was about 10X faster but even that would have taken 4000 years to get to nearest star. There are huge problems increasing speed beyond this because even a tiny particle can seriously damage the space craft at higher speed. The expanse of space is truly mind blowing. If physical requires that for a body to move from point X to Y it must travel through all points in-between then we are screwed.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  Even light is pretty slow compared to the size of space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qKOpvDa82M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qKOpvDa82M
doingtheiroming 4y ago
Probably because it’s so disappointed at how Scientific American has declined.
- kbelder 4y ago
  I am terrifically saddened by the fate of Scientific American. That magazine was formative to me in my teens; now I won't even bother browsing a copy left in the breakroom. The only other magazine that I miss as much is old-school Byte.
  - ddingus 4y ago
    Same. Both great publications. I would add Nat Geo to that list, given one has an interest in our planet, peoples, culture. I had subscriptions to these given to me as a kid and enjoyed reading every one of them. It was like a part time general education course that I really did not appreciate until roughly a decade after it was all over.
SyzygistSix 4y ago
Thanks, Jack. Looks like you gave birth to your magical child after all.
mrtri 4y ago

432 points by Element_ 4y ago

> But if an engineer had a choice to put in a part that was 10 percent more expensive but wasn't something that was needed for a four-year mission, they just went ahead and did that. And they wouldn't necessarily tell management. Engineers doing good things even though everyone else doesnt want to care & just wants something cheap. Heartbreaking long tale of humanity, that opting to do good things is so hard to get buy in on.

chasd00 4y ago
not understanding and following requirements isn't something engineers should be doing IMO
- marssaxman 4y ago
  Understanding requirements so well that you give the customer what they actually do want, even though they don't yet know they want it, sounds like really great engineering.
  - FastMonkey 4y ago
    There is balance in all things. Engineers shouldn't be ignored, but we are also not omniscient. As an engineer myself, having worked on product and having been a client of engineers working on products for me, I can tell you that engineers that think they have an inside track on what the client "really" wants are often wrong. The feeling is similar to that false confidence you get in any field when you have learned just the absolute basics, and I have felt it myself. That's why you don't just go and spend 10% of the clients budget without talking to them first. If clients are saying they don't want a feature, it's quite probable that the person you're dealing with actually knows what they want, and what they want is not what you've come up with. A lot of projects that filter their way through HN die because the engineers are solving the problem for themselves and not talking to users. That is also the pattern you see with a lot of "what I wish I had known when I started my project" posts on here. Avoiding a conversation with the client because you're afraid they won't approve the feature you want to add is not really great engineering.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > not understanding and following requirements isn't something engineers should be doing IMO I disagree, engineers are not robots. Good engineers may second guess and get technically involved in adjusting badly written instructions or mangled schematics, and do so all the time. And no, the "process" for querying and changing requirements is not always practical. Of course good engineers should document and report all deviations from the recspec and talk to the quality manager. Spotting that a capacitor or diode voltage is under-rated and swapping the part number, no problem. Upgrading a part if it makes no other difference seems okay too. I've been very grateful to fab or pick and place engineers who corrected a silly mistake I made instead of just sending me back a board that obviously wouldn't work. But those kind of people who take initiatives are rare to find these days,
- bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
  Squeezing in “a little extra” is a time-honored tradition in engineering.
  - ridgeguy 4y ago
    That's why the really useful dials go to 11.
- tejtm 4y ago
  Deciding that the Engineers don't understand is not something a bureaucracy should be doing, period.
lkrubner 4y ago
Engineer: "Gracious lord and Pharaoh, if we mix this volcanic ash into the mortar, your Pyramid could last for thousands of years." Pharaoh: "But that would be too expensive right? Don't waste the treasury's money. Ordinary mortar is fine." Engineer: (goes off and mixes volcanic ash into the mortar, despite the cost)
- baud147258 4y ago
  Considering how the Pyramid were likely planned as an eternal afterlife home for the Pharaoh, I would have though the answer would be more along the line of 'Of course! I'll go and beat a few peasants for the necessary money'
- JJMcJ 4y ago
  When Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Falling Water home was being built, the contractor realized Wright had too little reinforcing rod in the section of the house cantilevered over the creek, so added more against Wright's orders. Otherwise a structural failure would likely have happened.
m34 4y ago
I was on the receiving end of numerous support cases caused by what has to be on the sub-dollar cent savings (per single sku) region when multiple mainboard manufacturers chose to use capacitors with slightly worse tolerances all of a sudden (~25 years ago). So if the whole process of spec'ing and validating the quality of sourced materials was within their action space, ofc they'd choose (potential) fault-tolerance over price, as it was mission critical. So there might be a reason why we refer to it today as space race and not race to the bottom.

secondcoming 4y ago

This article is from the future, July 2022

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lunchpack 4y ago
This is a pre-published article from the July 2022 magazine

litoE 4y ago

I remember having lunch at the JPL cafeteria and watching a TV monitor showing pictures of Jupiter being beamed down by Voyager. Exciting times.

enriquto 4y ago
Notice that today you can download all the raw data sent by the voyagers and create your own mosaics and false color composites (each image was taken with a separate multispectral filter). This is a very beautiful and inspiring project for tech students. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/data-access/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/data-access/

GekkePrutser 4y ago

It's the half life of the RTG that is limiting them, right? Because they're way too far to use any kind of solar power. Ps I always thought that record was a bit funny. I mean it's a good method of initiating communication. Just strapping it to a can of poison is kind of a mixed message. "Hey buddies we're peaceful humans, ps here's a can of instadeath" :) Though I suppose little radioactivity would be left by the time it ever reached an alien civilization.

lazide 4y ago
Eh, if they can’t deal with a little shielded can of death they’re not likely to have made it to space anyway. For anyone spacefaring, it’s about as hard to deal with or unexpected as a can of gas gas in an old car.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  True but they might not know what it is. And radiation is something that's pretty unversally poisonous (instead of biological poisons which tend to be only poisonous to certain species). I don't think there's a single species on earth to which radiation isn't deadly. I just think the records would have been better launched on their own (and hundreds of them in different directions of potentially life-sustaining systems). That'd have been cool (even though it's still a total long shot).
  - lazide 4y ago
    It seems pretty implausible to me that a species has managed to bridge interstellar space (pretty much required to run across the probe before the RTG has decayed to harmlessness) and has no idea that plutonium (or whatever their name is for it) or radiation is harmful. Hell, they’d be getting harmful cosmic ray doses without some kind of shielding even worse than they’d likely get from the RTG unless they cracked it open to feast on the chewy pellets inside.
  - knorker 4y ago
    > True but they might not know what it is. With a half life of 87.7 years there won't be any left by the time it's found. They'll have to know nuclear science to even propose a hypothesis about what was in that container. If they don't then they'll scratch their heads about how this thing was even powered. The nature of unstable (and therefore radioactive) elements is that they'll decay until they are stable elements.

TrueDuality 4y ago

Rest now sweet explorers. You've given us more knowledge than we asked for and inspired untold numbers. Even in your final dreams you give us beautiful gifts and prove to the universe that we exist.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
When was the launch date? It's been out there for almost my whole life. Maybe it will turn up in the 23rd century in female form with a shaved head and calling herself Vega.
- ingsoc79 4y ago
  ...or suffer a more pedestrian fate of getting vaporized by bored Klingons.

bullen 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o

dharmaturtle 4y ago
StrangeLoop talk: "Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager" by Aaron Cummings

rozab 4y ago

This is a good overview of the Voyager program, but did they just slap that headline on it to try and make it news? I was expecting some sort of announcement. But there isn't even any definite plans to shut down any instruments in the near future.

perlgeek 4y ago
The title is also very weird, considering that Voyager 1 and 2 have been shutting down instruments since 1990 and 1991, respectively: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/thirty-year-plan/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/thirty-year-pla...
- Aardwolf 4y ago
  The Voyager crafts generate a never ending supply of news articles about leaving the solar system or shutting down, because there plenty of different moments that are considered "leaving the solar system" or shutting down, and there are multiple Voyager crafts as well...

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago

They are the first human-made objects to do so, a distinction they will hold for at least another few decades. Uhh...won't they still be the first?

333c 4y ago
Not once we invent time travel in a few decades.
- _0ffh 4y ago
  We told you, no spoilers! Stop messing with this time line, or we'll have to start over again!
  - RedShift1 4y ago
    Should we give them another chance to avoid the dark timeline and reset them to pre-Harambe?
hourago 4y ago
> They have traveled farther and lasted longer than any other spacecraft in history. And they have crossed into interstellar space, according to our best understanding of the boundary between the sun's sphere of influence and the rest of the galaxy. They are the first human-made objects to do so, a distinction they will hold for at least another few decades. They will be the ones that have traveled the farthest until faster objects catch up and surpass them. It may take time until we send anything faster, and it's going to need time to catch up, so it will take decades.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  But when they do catch up and surpass them, they won't unseat the first ones at being first.
  - hourago 4y ago

JoshuaJB 4y ago

Very nice overview of the Voyager program. I love the words from the President included on the spacecraft: “We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

hansjorg 4y ago
That's a nice sentiment. Suprisingly humble, coming from Reagan.
- boulos 4y ago
  Except it was Carter...
  - diogenes_of_ak 4y ago
    People inexplicably hate Carter - not only was he a fantastic president… albeit unlucky but good, but also a genuinely amazing human.
    - mc32 4y ago
      Carter is a really nice man. He was not a good president though. Granted much of the badness was out of his control, but such is life.
      - Ma8ee 4y ago
        How was he a bad president?
        cpuguy83 4y ago
        Mainly record high inflation and the gas crisis (which was way worse than today's). Whether or not anyone could have stopped that doesn't matter, ppl attribute this to him.

funstuff007 4y ago

epgui 4y ago
That’s called an “opinion piece”, it is editorial content. Scientific American is a popular science publication. Most people read it for the scientific journalism, not for the opinion pieces. Editorial content is always going to be hit or miss.
- jgalt212 4y ago
  True, it's an opinion piece. On Anthropology and Sociology (at best), not Science.
  - epgui 4y ago
    Anthropology and sociology are both sciences.
    - ddingus 4y ago
      It is not generally possible and or ethical to apply the scientific method to these topics to arrive at greater understanding. People who understand science also understand the method is the basis for science. It's a simple thing, and when applied yields understanding. Understanding isn't knowing in some absolute sense either. It's in the predictive sense. We do A and get B. Degrees of confidence, and scope of applicability are relevant here too. Old understanding is as valid today as it was upon realization, for example. It's that we understand more and or the outcome of that greater understanding puts the scope necessary to get things done, or improve on our body of understanding, well outside what older understanding can do for us. General Relativity works well, until it doesn't, in which case we must use Special Relativity, for example. The basic problems we've got with these two areas of interest is an inability to roll back the clock and repeat experiments. Secondly, people are unique entities, unlike atoms and other things we encounter and want to study, and given we are discussing people here, subjecting them to experiments has numerous ethical and legal concerns. What we can do is work with the data we do get as an artifact of the people and their agency as well as the machinery of society and apply rational, and people who are experienced in these areas would argue inferential thinking as well as deductive type thinking, post fact and arrive at something like understanding[1], but the nature of all that means confidence is low, repeatability for all but supremely exceptional circumstances, and most definitely not on any sort of demand, is off the table. Add all that up, and it's not really science in the basic sense applying the scientific method can add to our body of scientific understanding.[0] It can't be! We are denied the use of the method! [0] Ideally, our body of scientific understanding is all rooted in the scientific method. What we get from our study of these two won't be rooted in the scientific method. [1] This is not to say these areas of study have no value! They absolutely do have value. Please do not take my argument here as anything other than an attempt to clarify why they are not science.

srvmshr 4y ago

> Flandro calculated that the repeated gravity assists, as they are called, would cut the flight time between Earth and Neptune from 30 years to 12. There was just one catch: the alignment happened only once every 176 years. To reach the planets while the lineup lasted, a spacecraft would have to be launched by the mid-1970s. How many of such startling discoveries get noticed by bureaucracy/administration nowadays? Back then, it seems ideas percolated to execution stage pretty fast. I wonder if a part-time working grad student's serendipitous finds will be taken seriously to action in today's environment.

antihero 4y ago
The amount of companies I’ve worked in where they’d just be like can we push back on the solar system a bit
- samstave 4y ago
  SOL-utions...
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samstave 4y ago

divbzero 4y ago

Two bits of history I learned from the article: 1. The last human to touch the spacecraft was a physicist inspecting two detectors — probably part of the low-energy telescope system (LET). Although many scientists have worked on the Voyagers over the decades, Cummings can make a unique claim. “I was the last person to touch the spacecraft before they launched,” he says. Cummings was responsible for two detectors designed to measure the flux of electrons and other charged particles when the Voyagers encountered the giant planets. Particles would pass through a small “window” in each detector that consisted of aluminum foil just three microns thick. Cummings worried that technicians working on the spacecraft might have accidentally dented or poked holes in the windows. “So they needed to be inspected right before launch,” he says. “Indeed, I found that one of them was a little bit loose.” 2. Carl Sagan not only commented on the “Pale Blue Dot” but also persuaded NASA to take the photograph in the first place. Sagan urged NASA officials to have Voyager 1 transmit one last series of images. So, on Valentine's Day in 1990, the probe aimed its cameras back toward the inner solar system and took 60 final shots. The most haunting of them all, made famous by Sagan as the “Pale Blue Dot,” captured Earth from a distance of 3.8 billion miles. It remains the most distant portrait of our planet ever taken. Veiled by wan sunlight that reflected off the camera's optics, Earth is barely visible in the image. It doesn't occupy even a full pixel. Sagan, who died in 1996, “worked really hard to convince NASA that it was worth looking back at ourselves,” Spilker says, “and seeing just how tiny that pale blue dot was.”

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exhilaration 4y ago
The Pale Blue Dot picture for those that want a reminder: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-b...

whartung 4y ago

This is one of my favorite reasonably recent Voyager anecdote, from a recent special about the program. Paraphrasing, the person said "You carry more computing power in your pocket than what we have on Voyager. And by that, I don't mean your smart phone. I mean you car key fob."

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linsomniac 4y ago
The one I often think about is: Your USB-C charger is more powerful than the Apollo 11's computer. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a30916315/usb-c-charger-apollo-11-computer/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a30916315/usb-c-...
- ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
  This blew my 12 year old mind when someone said this about that Furby toy back in the late 90s.
- verisimi 4y ago
  ... and yet its travelled 12 billion miles from Earth
  - elevaet 4y ago
    The power of persistence!
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      and radioisotope thermoelectric generators... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
      - 4y ago

TheChaplain 4y ago

I find the space-age to be super fascinating! The Venera program is one favourite, where they managed to put a lander on Venus more than 50 years ago and send back data. Just imagine the skills and knowledge with the technology at the time, to figure out how to land something safely in an unknown environment. Love it!

pcrh 4y ago
Curious that you refer to the "space age" in the past tense. Though it might be because the enthusiasm for humans traveling between planets and stars has been somewhat tempered since the 1960's-1980's.
- pixl97 4y ago
  I mean, we say industrial age as in past tense even though we have more industry than ever. We are doing more space launches than ever right now, it just doesn't define this time. The birth of the internet and rise of computing technology sent us into the information age.
- jhugo 4y ago
  We still have Bronze, Iron, Industry, Machinery, Atomic technology, Space technology... The so-called "ages" are named for what is new within them, there's no implication that the technology is lost when the next supposed "age" starts. We're usually now referred to as being in the Information age, which puts the Space age in the past.

iJohnDoe 4y ago

Great article. Learned something new. The satellites were larger than I thought. Coincidentally, randomly the other day, I thought how much more advanced our computing would be today as a species if we worked within the constraints of the computing of available at the time of Voyager or even the 90s. I think we would favor information and communication vs. cruft and entertainment. Working within constrained computing environments forces us to make tough decisions about what is important or pushes us to innovate and be creative with what we have to work with.

pvg 4y ago
Our 'computing' is many orders magnitude more 'advanced' than what was available at the time. There's no technology that's advanced faster in the history of technology, a completely unprecedented rate of innovation even in the industrial era. It would be very odd indeed if it somehow became more advanced by not advancing it.

dry_soup 4y ago

If I could decide, I would happily scrap all human missions and launch one massive science robot with a huge visible light camera on it per year. Idlewords convinced me of this: https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

bergenty 4y ago
I’m glad you can’t decide. I want my kids or grandkids to be able to live on other planets.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Why?
  - kyriakos 4y ago
    Colonisation of space is going to make us a more resilient species.
    - roflyear 4y ago
      Why do you care about this?
      - kyriakos 4y ago
        Isn't it the same as asking why do we pro create?
        roflyear 4y ago
        Possibly.

jftuga 4y ago

When will Voyager 1 become 1 light-day distance away?[1] * 1 LD from Earth = November 18, 2026 -- 1,614 days from today * 1 LD from Sun = Feb 03, 2027 -- 1,691 days from today https://www.quora.com/When-will-Voyager-1-become-1-light-day-distance-away https://www.quora.com/When-will-Voyager-1-become-1-light-day...

emmelaich 4y ago
Yeh it's "only" 2/1000ths of a light year away.

tomohawk 4y ago

> if the models were correct, should have pushed the heliopause farther out than 120 AU. “It was unexpected by all the theorists,” Krimigis says. “I think the modeling, in terms of the findings of the Voyagers, has been found wanting.” Uncalibrated and/or unfalsifiable computer models should never be trusted.

sydthrowaway 4y ago

This frustrates me. How far are we from relativistic travel?

grogenaut 4y ago
about 9995 basis points https://theconversation.com/have-we-made-an-object-that-could-travel-1-the-speed-of-light-170849 https://theconversation.com/have-we-made-an-object-that-coul...

hoten 4y ago

I recently[1] learned that you can telnet to a NASA machine to query various information about astronomical bodies, including man-made satellites. > telnet horizons.jpl.nasa.gov 6775 The interface is pretty difficult to use, but there is a python wrapper for it. I forced myself to stumble through the telnet interface. > Voyager (no semicolon–othewise it'd look up in the small-bodies table) That tells you Voyager 1 is ID 31, and Voyager 2 is ID 32. > 31 > E > <Enter> x2 (take defaults) > 2022-06-18 > 2022-06-19 > 1h > <Enter> > A Spits out this data: https://gist.github.com/connorjclark/de205ce62a7f1d4fda6d8fa74acb2958 https://gist.github.com/connorjclark/de205ce62a7f1d4fda6d8fa... I'm not knowledgable enough to know how to utilize this data in an interesting way, but I assume this "Ephemeris" data can be utilized to determine where to point your telescope for any given object. [1] https://twitter.com/cjamcl/status/1536609292572184576 https://twitter.com/cjamcl/status/1536609292572184576

basementcat 4y ago
You can also point your browser to it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- woliveirajr 4y ago
  Point telescope x point browser: this one was funny :-)
mct 4y ago
Very interesting telnet site, thank you for sharing! FYI, though, I think this may be looking at the wrong object ID. It selected "31", which appears to be the entry for one of the Lagrange points. Voyager 1 and 2 appear to have negative ID numbers, "-31" and "-32".
_petronius 4y ago
Horizons is also available as a web interface (as another commenter mentioned), and if the orbital elements output (which is what you have there and is basically this data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements) is a bit opaque, you can also request it in Cartesian coordinates ("Vector table" under "Ephemeris type" in the web ui). Apparently it also has an email interface, which is neat. The web UI is here: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/ https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/ I once did a hobby project doing 2-body orbital simulations, and was able to use this data to set up a model of the solar system, and satellites orbiting the Earth. It's quite a fun dataset!

FloatArtifact 4y ago

If Voyager had the equivalent of a modern cell phone, worth of compute. What would have been the power requirements for the mission for the same duration?

WalterBright 4y ago

The problem with getting a gravity assist from Jupiter is that it causes Jupiter to slightly slow down. Now, you might imagine that Jupiter is very big, and the slowdown is infinitesimal. But these things add up, and as more and more craft get a boost from Jupiter, Jupiter will lose orbital velocity and spiral inward to get sucked into the sun. And then what?

cdelsolar 4y ago
lol
nine_k 4y ago
If Jupiter starts going significantly downwards by the time when it'll be just a fem million years until Sun goes supernova, we (whoever that will be) will have to hurry and flee anyway. It it involves crashing Jupiter into the Sun, and likely wreaking complete havoc in the inner planets' orbits, so be it; the system will become unusable anyway. But until starfaring is developed enough, we should be careful with any gigaton-scale spacecraft doing gravity assists!
bergenty 4y ago
You answered your own question. I’m not going to do the math you you would probably need trillions of flybys before anything observable happens.
_zywo 4y ago
xkcd did a What-If on this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/146/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/146/ TL;DR: It will not happen. You would need to throw on the order of a thousand Earth-masses to even get close to neutralizing Jupiter's orbit. All processes in this world are unsustainable, but only some matter.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Seems only one person got the joke :-)

gorgoiler 4y ago

Space navigation is amazing. If I throw a rock into the lake I can barely see where it is until it hits the water. When we fling these craft into the void how do we know where they are and where they are going? I can think of three ways: (1) get the direction right in the first place and just assume the craft is where we calculate it should be; (2) watch it from afar somehow; or (3) have it tell us where it is. These seem like three quite different options and I would love to know how it’s actually done.

StellarScience 4y ago
Votager 1 hasn't changed its trajectory much since 1980, so just modeling its trajectory from there would be fairly accurate. However, they also calculate range precisely by sending it pings and timing its response. They calculate velocity precisely by looking at the Doppler shift of that return signal (https://geekswipe.net/technology/aerospace/how-nasa-calculates-the-distance-velocity-and-position-of-the-voyager-spacecrafts https://geekswipe.net/technology/aerospace/how-nasa-calculat...). Measuring those over time provide a fairly precise location.
- gorgoiler 4y ago
  Thanks for engaging! Do the pings return a location, or are these range and velocity (and orientation from onboard sensors?) values used for dead reckoning, with Earth as the starting point? When external forces impart a force on the craft (eg exciting new moons!) how is that taken into account?
  - hydrogen7800 4y ago
    I've read about determining the "state vector" on the Apollo missions, and I would imagine it's similar for voyager. The ping delay and Doppler shift should be enough to determine 3D position and velocity with respect to some coordinate sysem. I know JPL ( and/or perhaps other agencies like ESA) have a computer model of the solar system where you can run a spacecraft's trajectory forward through time. It can also account for gravitational anomalies if the distance to a planet/moon is close enough where it matters. Assuming they have gravitational anomalies modeled for that body. I'm pretty sure at least Jupiter has a decent anomaly map. In voyagers case, using the sun as a point mass, combined with its state vector at any known time, any undergrad student who knows the vis viva equation can determine voyager's position at any time.

WalterBright 4y ago

I remember when Voyager was swinging past Jupiter for the first time. Caltech set up monitors all over campus, where we got to see the pictures as they arrived. We'd check the monitors before class, after class, etc. A popular joke was if one of the moon pictures showed a giant Death-Star-like hatch on it, how fast we'd be putting together a manned mission to investigate. It was fun watching the scientists boiling over with excitement when all their theories were trashed by each new picture, and they had to reinvent them from scratch.

WalterBright 4y ago

Carl Sagan is mentioned in the article. He was quite a treasure. He came by our dorm once for conversation and dinner. The conversation was about whether life could be based on silicon rather than oxygen. I.e. living rocks! Very fun.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
Did you go to Cornell?
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Caltech
mongol 4y ago
Was it not whether it would be based on silicon rather than carbon? I think that is usually where the similarity lies.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Oh, you're right, it was carbon.

_HMCB_ 4y ago

Amazing writing. And what a feat.

kristianp 4y ago

45 years in space. About time for another set of probes to go beyond where they went and explore the border of the solar wind with more modern instruments.

qayxc 4y ago
The New Horizons probe is still out there.

sytelus 4y ago

What is astonishing is how little these space crafts have travelled. They go at 38k mph and it would have still taken them 40,000 years to reach nearest star to the earth! The fastest space craft so far is Parker Solar Probe which was about 10X faster but even that would have taken 4000 years to get to nearest star. There are huge problems increasing speed beyond this because even a tiny particle can seriously damage the space craft at higher speed. The expanse of space is truly mind blowing. If physical requires that for a body to move from point X to Y it must travel through all points in-between then we are screwed.

michaelcampbell 4y ago
Even light is pretty slow compared to the size of space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qKOpvDa82M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qKOpvDa82M

doingtheiroming 4y ago

Probably because it’s so disappointed at how Scientific American has declined.

kbelder 4y ago
I am terrifically saddened by the fate of Scientific American. That magazine was formative to me in my teens; now I won't even bother browsing a copy left in the breakroom. The only other magazine that I miss as much is old-school Byte.
- ddingus 4y ago
  Same. Both great publications. I would add Nat Geo to that list, given one has an interest in our planet, peoples, culture. I had subscriptions to these given to me as a kid and enjoyed reading every one of them. It was like a part time general education course that I really did not appreciate until roughly a decade after it was all over.

SyzygistSix 4y ago

Thanks, Jack. Looks like you gave birth to your magical child after all.

mrtri 4y ago