9 ms·

‘Voyager on steroids.’ Mission would probe region beyond our Solar System

193 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
funstuff007 4y ago
How come the Oort Cloud is not considered part of the solar system?
mc32 4y ago
Heh it was that as “Voyager on Asteroids” I was intrigued! But this sounds even more interesting getting modern instruments aboard a new generation of voyagers to probe the heliosphere and beyond with better instruments.
jmyeet 4y ago
While I'm all for more of these space missions, my personal #1 priority is return missions to Uranus and Neptune in the next window for favorable planetary alignment to get there in reasonable time. That's the same window as this (mid-2030s). It would mean such probes wouldn't reach their targets until the mid-2040s. Time is actually rapidly running out to launch in this window because such a mission can easily take a decade to plan, design and build. Missions to Mars might be a few hundred million but Cassini or Juno style missions are in the billions. Getting such a mission funded is a far more onerous task. It's generally a flagship joint mission for ESA and NASA and then adds all the politics of that (eg using Ariana launch vehicles to mollify Europeans). We've only been to the ice giants once and it was the Voyager missions. I hope we go again in my lifetime.
- liotier 4y ago
  > using Ariana launch vehicles to mollify Europeans) "Ariane". I would rather have you mollify us with proper spelling.
- SicSemperUranus 4y ago
  "return to Uranus" sounds like a SpaceX kind of mission!
spicyusername 4y ago
One of the best knock-on effects of these kinds of missions is that they provide the rare chance for news outlets to feel like they can report on something optimistic, hopeful, and positive for a change. Something so desperately needed.
- Rebirth-0822 4y ago
  One can add "future oriented" to that. Seems like the only visions for the future in vogue these days involve harming crap tons of people for the sake of past imagery.
- jdsully 4y ago
  There’s a lot of good stuff to report on: Ozone Healing Acid Rain is not really a thing anymore There is 2.24 million more square kilometers of forestland than 35 years ago Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty and the trend is accelerating Renewable energy has finally become cost effective By most metrics we’re better off than the 90s except for people’s sentiment.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    “There is 2.24 million more square kilometers of forestland than 35 years ago” How can this be true when our rate of deforestation is accelerating? The state of deforestation is nothing to celebrate, it’s horrific as far as I understand it. “By most metrics we’re better off than the 90’s” Except for economic metrics and people’s material well being?? This sounds like Steven Pinker stuff.
    - nightshift1 4y ago
      Indeed. The rich countries are gaining forestland but it is only because everything is imported now. Including the deforestation. https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation Same thing for the acid rain. https://www.britannica.com/story/what-happened-to-acid-rain https://www.britannica.com/story/what-happened-to-acid-rain
crawshaw 4y ago
There is a detailed Mission Concept Report PDF linked on the probe's website: https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu. It looks like they're targeting being functional at 400 AU, though it will take 50 years to get there. Fun networking measurement: they describe the antenna bandwidth as ~150 Mbit/week at 400 AU.
- arriu 4y ago
  Thanks for this. When was the document published? It’s nearly 500 pages!
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  I think we should be trying to do this kind of thing, but... it does make you wonder whether in 30 years, we'll have the infrastructure (fusion, much larger LEO refueling capacity, etc) to put it there in 10 years instead.
  - simonh 4y ago
    5x faster is a spectacular improvement, the launch systems we have today are not much more capable than the ones we had 30 years ago. I don’t see any reason they will be all that much better again in 30 years, even with something like Starship. The problem is the rocket equation is brutal. The more propulsion system you add to increase the speed, the more of it you have to accelerate up to the original speed before you start getting any improvement. We do have some nice advances like hall thrusters, but they don’t actually help much for heavy duty payloads like this, and there are no huge multi-order of magnitude engine efficiency breakthroughs on the horizon.
  - feoren 4y ago
    Are these probes micro-accelerating the whole time with ion engines? You'd need 4 times the average velocity to cover the same distance*, which means 8 times the final velocity, which means accelerating from 0 to 8 over 10 years instead of 0 to 1 over 40 years. That means 32x more acceleration over the whole period. No: we won't have that technology in 30 years, nor in 100 years. Maybe, maybe, maybe if you were able to refuel in orbit and strapped a ginormous multi-stage chemical rocket onto the thing in orbit. Maybe. But we're not going to be doing that in 30 years either. * Higher velocities can mean shorter distances though, because your trajectory is less warped by the curvature of space. The biggest time saver would be avoiding time-consuming gravity assists, if there are any (I assume there are, but I didn't download the 500-page PDF).
DrBazza 4y ago
Not sure I like the "Voyager on steroids" - I strongly associate Voyager with the Grand Tour of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Seeing those pictures come back when I was a child made me do astrophysics at university. "Mission would probe the region beyond our Solar system" is fine though.
- mikro2nd 4y ago
  Yep! The only people I've ever known who were (literally) "on steroids" were uniformly and without exception psychopathic jerks. It's a stupid epithet, frequently used to describe the exact opposite of the sentiment it tries so pathetically to convey. Phrase ought to be retired. More on topic: I'd love to see a mission or more focussed on exploring interstellar regions. I'll bet there's a whole lot more we'll learn there, even though I'll be long dead by the time it rolls around.
  - DrBazza 4y ago
    > I'd love to see a mission or more focussed on exploring interstellar regions. Yes. I did like the article, eventually, buried in the details, was "twice the speed of Voyager", and "can't gravity assist past the Sun, no real saving and might go wrong".
  - mlindner 4y ago
    Steroids are used for a lot of medically important uses. I used steroidal inhalers to heal my throat/lungs after a flu-like something several years ago. Worked wonders.
    - mikro2nd 4y ago
      Yes, of course you're right, and I was in error thinking only of the people who use steroids for non-medical purposes, and forgetting that there are many legitimate applications. My bad, and I apologise for that oversight.
mchusma 4y ago
I would hope we actively plan for much cheaper launches with Starship coming online. It seems like we can do many more projects, at lower cost and higher risk than before, because launch costs are low. Instead of $1-$10B projects focus on things <$100M. Or at least focus on platforms to enable cheap probes without so much customization. It should be possible to pull off things like this soon without even government funding. Just buy a stock probe with some modifications and launch it cheaply in a direction you want.
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  Probes could be mass produced and then shipped to space once a year with a Starship launch. A thousand probes per year would be great. Most of them could use the same gravity assist routes and then take off from there in slightly different angles. Space is huge. Any billionaire looking for being remembered for millennia?
  - Lev1a 4y ago
    Maybe even some strategically placed [1] satellites as communication relays? [1]: Maybe on lagrange points?
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  > Instead of $1-$10B projects focus on things <$100M The entire mission budget for ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission/Mangalyaan probe was a mere US$74 million. Modi famously boasted that this was cheaper than the budget of the Hollywood film, Gravity (2014). There are countries in the world besides the US which can reliably and very cheaply place satellites in orbit. India has been a launch provider for many other countries in the region (Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, etc) which do not have their own launch capability, and their PSLV/GSLV rockets are workhorses, having launched hundreds of satellites for customers worldwide.
  - protomolecule 4y ago
    What is its scientific output, though?
scohesc 4y ago
Maybe someone with more knowledge/experience can chime in here since I'm fairly ignorant of the Voyager program - was a bit before my time. From what I understand the voyager probe(s) did some pretty crazy gravity assists to launch themselves out of the solar system - flying close enough to different planets in our solar system to build up great speed. Could we not throw a giant solar sail onto a probe and send it out? I guess the acceleration would be smaller and smaller when you get further and further out with the sun being further away, but at least you'd still be gaining velocity, right?
- thechao 4y ago
  This is directly addressed in the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03005 https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03005
  - scohesc 4y ago
    Thank you for mentioning this! I don't have the time and mental resources to browse through these research papers all the time but knowing that what I'm asking is actually in the paper, maybe I'll give it a browse. Thanks :)
- floxy 4y ago
  If you like solar sails, you might like: https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?t=858 https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?t=858
ghostpepper 4y ago
For anyone not familiar with the Voyager missions I highly recommend the 2017 documentary _The Farthest_
tusslewake 4y ago
I found this aside on one of the graphics rather surprising: > Sometime in the next 2000 years, the Sun is expected to leave a local cloud of gas and dust. After that, it may enter the G cloud. If it is denser, it would squash the protective magnetic bubble of the heliosphere, potentially exposing the Solar System to a barrage of cosmic rays. Mostly surprised that I hadn't heard more about this. 2000 years is practically tomorrow in cosmological time! A little more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Interstellar_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Interstellar_Cloud
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  Thanks for bringing this to our attention. "The G-Cloud contains the stars Alpha Centauri (a triple star system that includes Proxima Centauri) and Altair (and possibly others)" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-Cloud
- jorgesborges 4y ago
  Whoa. I’m assuming our solar system has moved through various interstellar mediums throughout history, and from reading above it sounds non-trivial. Is it? Do we know anything about how this may have influenced the development of Earth? Learning this gives me a very “oh my god we’re hurtling through space!” feeing that I haven’t felt in a long time.
- nuccy 4y ago
  Due to stochastic nature of interstellar magnetic fields, cosmic rays, trajectory of which are bent by those, are practically observed from all directions, so even if solar system distorts its own magnetic field this will have almost no effect on vosmic rays flux. Magnetic field is not a shield, for the charged particles it is rather a lens which converges or diverges their trajectories.
- Archelaos 4y ago
  > > If it is denser, it would squash the protective magnetic bubble of the heliosphere, potentially exposing the Solar System to a barrage of cosmic rays. That seems highly exaggerated. The Wikipedia article you mentioned is more sober: > The Local Interstellar Cloud's potential effects on Earth are greatly diminished by the solar wind and the Sun's magnetic field. A change in the density of the near interstellar medium would shift the heliopause, but it would require a massive increase in density to move it from where the Voyager probes are now to somewhere close to the inner solar system where it could have a noticeable impact.
makeitdouble 4y ago
Slight OT, but I wish “on steroids” wasn’t used in serious publications to refer to improvements and overall positive evolutions. I know it’s colloquially accepted, but we also wouldn’t express someone being very focused as “being on Adderall”, or a very creative idea as being “on shrooms” in a scientific publication.
- bseidensticker 4y ago
  IDK seems fine to me. > we also wouldn’t express someone being very focused as “being on Adderall”, or a very creative idea as being “on shrooms” in a scientific publication. We don't because nobody does, and many people might not know what you mean.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    Hmmm…but then, do you personally do steroids ? Or do you directly know people doing steroids ? It looks to me like most people’s knowledge of steroids come from pop culture/doping scandals and news report, and use in articles like this one.
kregasaurusrex 4y ago
What sort of instrumentation would be onboard? The last mission destined to leave our solar system was New Horizons[0] and its equipment was designed in the early/mid-2000s with the express goal of imaging the outer planets. Both Voyager probes have some instrumentation still sending data back to Earth[1] as well, though current projections estimate we may only be receiving data from them for until the end of the decade. Sending a probe out that only improves on a few areas such as ionized plasma detection and gas chromatography to determine what elements are in the heliosphere seem to arbitrary improvements on a short timeframe; but these are systems designed with a 50+ year lifespan. The 500 page report published by NASA[2] for a future insterstellar probe is a bit much for a layperson to understand, but such a program can also be done over a longer timeframe to justify its continued funding. It's been over 40 years since we last launched a probe with the express purpose of exploring interstellar space, and technology has improved to the point of enabling these missions to be multi-generational by planning further launches to create a networked constellation. When I was a kid seeing the 'Pale Blue Dot' image in the book Cosmos, it gave a perspective of looking at humanity's achievements on a cosmic timescale instead rather than only the human timescale, and I think setting long-term goals of exploring our universe are held by everyone regardless of nationality. Delivering tangible results to the public like JWST's fantastic images and the 'Pale Blue Dot' photo are arguably just as important as the scientific data gathered. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Science_payload https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Science_payload [1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ [2] https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Interstellar-Probe-MCR.pdf https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Interstellar-Probe-MCR....
ck2 4y ago
Whatever happened to those microprobes at like 10% speed of light? (or was it 50%)
- vkou 4y ago
  The same thing that happened to Khalessi (played by Emilia Clarke) and her dragons. Which is to say, nothing happened to them at all, because they are all fictional.
whatrocks 4y ago
I had a weird dream about a secret Voyager probe recently, the Voyager III, and wrote a short story about it, if anyone’s interested: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/ https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/ It’s fairly “Contact” by Carl Sagan inspired.
everyone 4y ago
The voyager mission was originally planned to be with a no-expense-spared Cadillac of a spacecraft, however they ended up going with the bargain bin absolute cheapest possible option.
ur-whale 4y ago
Is the speed vector of the solar system really inside (aligned to) the ecliptic plane as the graphic in the article seems to suggest? I find it unlikely unless it is a necessary consequence of how the solar system formed. Does anyone know the answer?

193 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

funstuff007 4y ago

How come the Oort Cloud is not considered part of the solar system?

mc32 4y ago

Heh it was that as “Voyager on Asteroids” I was intrigued! But this sounds even more interesting getting modern instruments aboard a new generation of voyagers to probe the heliosphere and beyond with better instruments.

jmyeet 4y ago

While I'm all for more of these space missions, my personal #1 priority is return missions to Uranus and Neptune in the next window for favorable planetary alignment to get there in reasonable time. That's the same window as this (mid-2030s). It would mean such probes wouldn't reach their targets until the mid-2040s. Time is actually rapidly running out to launch in this window because such a mission can easily take a decade to plan, design and build. Missions to Mars might be a few hundred million but Cassini or Juno style missions are in the billions. Getting such a mission funded is a far more onerous task. It's generally a flagship joint mission for ESA and NASA and then adds all the politics of that (eg using Ariana launch vehicles to mollify Europeans). We've only been to the ice giants once and it was the Voyager missions. I hope we go again in my lifetime.

liotier 4y ago
> using Ariana launch vehicles to mollify Europeans) "Ariane". I would rather have you mollify us with proper spelling.
SicSemperUranus 4y ago
"return to Uranus" sounds like a SpaceX kind of mission!

spicyusername 4y ago

One of the best knock-on effects of these kinds of missions is that they provide the rare chance for news outlets to feel like they can report on something optimistic, hopeful, and positive for a change. Something so desperately needed.

Rebirth-0822 4y ago
One can add "future oriented" to that. Seems like the only visions for the future in vogue these days involve harming crap tons of people for the sake of past imagery.
jdsully 4y ago
There’s a lot of good stuff to report on: Ozone Healing Acid Rain is not really a thing anymore There is 2.24 million more square kilometers of forestland than 35 years ago Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty and the trend is accelerating Renewable energy has finally become cost effective By most metrics we’re better off than the 90s except for people’s sentiment.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  “There is 2.24 million more square kilometers of forestland than 35 years ago” How can this be true when our rate of deforestation is accelerating? The state of deforestation is nothing to celebrate, it’s horrific as far as I understand it. “By most metrics we’re better off than the 90’s” Except for economic metrics and people’s material well being?? This sounds like Steven Pinker stuff.
  - nightshift1 4y ago
    Indeed. The rich countries are gaining forestland but it is only because everything is imported now. Including the deforestation. https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation Same thing for the acid rain. https://www.britannica.com/story/what-happened-to-acid-rain https://www.britannica.com/story/what-happened-to-acid-rain

crawshaw 4y ago

There is a detailed Mission Concept Report PDF linked on the probe's website: https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu. It looks like they're targeting being functional at 400 AU, though it will take 50 years to get there. Fun networking measurement: they describe the antenna bandwidth as ~150 Mbit/week at 400 AU.

arriu 4y ago
Thanks for this. When was the document published? It’s nearly 500 pages!
bpodgursky 4y ago
I think we should be trying to do this kind of thing, but... it does make you wonder whether in 30 years, we'll have the infrastructure (fusion, much larger LEO refueling capacity, etc) to put it there in 10 years instead.
- simonh 4y ago
  5x faster is a spectacular improvement, the launch systems we have today are not much more capable than the ones we had 30 years ago. I don’t see any reason they will be all that much better again in 30 years, even with something like Starship. The problem is the rocket equation is brutal. The more propulsion system you add to increase the speed, the more of it you have to accelerate up to the original speed before you start getting any improvement. We do have some nice advances like hall thrusters, but they don’t actually help much for heavy duty payloads like this, and there are no huge multi-order of magnitude engine efficiency breakthroughs on the horizon.
- feoren 4y ago
  Are these probes micro-accelerating the whole time with ion engines? You'd need 4 times the average velocity to cover the same distance*, which means 8 times the final velocity, which means accelerating from 0 to 8 over 10 years instead of 0 to 1 over 40 years. That means 32x more acceleration over the whole period. No: we won't have that technology in 30 years, nor in 100 years. Maybe, maybe, maybe if you were able to refuel in orbit and strapped a ginormous multi-stage chemical rocket onto the thing in orbit. Maybe. But we're not going to be doing that in 30 years either. * Higher velocities can mean shorter distances though, because your trajectory is less warped by the curvature of space. The biggest time saver would be avoiding time-consuming gravity assists, if there are any (I assume there are, but I didn't download the 500-page PDF).

DrBazza 4y ago

Not sure I like the "Voyager on steroids" - I strongly associate Voyager with the Grand Tour of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Seeing those pictures come back when I was a child made me do astrophysics at university. "Mission would probe the region beyond our Solar system" is fine though.

mikro2nd 4y ago
Yep! The only people I've ever known who were (literally) "on steroids" were uniformly and without exception psychopathic jerks. It's a stupid epithet, frequently used to describe the exact opposite of the sentiment it tries so pathetically to convey. Phrase ought to be retired. More on topic: I'd love to see a mission or more focussed on exploring interstellar regions. I'll bet there's a whole lot more we'll learn there, even though I'll be long dead by the time it rolls around.
- DrBazza 4y ago
  > I'd love to see a mission or more focussed on exploring interstellar regions. Yes. I did like the article, eventually, buried in the details, was "twice the speed of Voyager", and "can't gravity assist past the Sun, no real saving and might go wrong".
- mlindner 4y ago
  Steroids are used for a lot of medically important uses. I used steroidal inhalers to heal my throat/lungs after a flu-like something several years ago. Worked wonders.
  - mikro2nd 4y ago
    Yes, of course you're right, and I was in error thinking only of the people who use steroids for non-medical purposes, and forgetting that there are many legitimate applications. My bad, and I apologise for that oversight.

mchusma 4y ago

I would hope we actively plan for much cheaper launches with Starship coming online. It seems like we can do many more projects, at lower cost and higher risk than before, because launch costs are low. Instead of $1-$10B projects focus on things <$100M. Or at least focus on platforms to enable cheap probes without so much customization. It should be possible to pull off things like this soon without even government funding. Just buy a stock probe with some modifications and launch it cheaply in a direction you want.

coffeeblack 4y ago
Probes could be mass produced and then shipped to space once a year with a Starship launch. A thousand probes per year would be great. Most of them could use the same gravity assist routes and then take off from there in slightly different angles. Space is huge. Any billionaire looking for being remembered for millennia?
- Lev1a 4y ago
  Maybe even some strategically placed [1] satellites as communication relays? [1]: Maybe on lagrange points?
delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
> Instead of $1-$10B projects focus on things <$100M The entire mission budget for ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission/Mangalyaan probe was a mere US$74 million. Modi famously boasted that this was cheaper than the budget of the Hollywood film, Gravity (2014). There are countries in the world besides the US which can reliably and very cheaply place satellites in orbit. India has been a launch provider for many other countries in the region (Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, etc) which do not have their own launch capability, and their PSLV/GSLV rockets are workhorses, having launched hundreds of satellites for customers worldwide.
- protomolecule 4y ago
  What is its scientific output, though?

scohesc 4y ago

Maybe someone with more knowledge/experience can chime in here since I'm fairly ignorant of the Voyager program - was a bit before my time. From what I understand the voyager probe(s) did some pretty crazy gravity assists to launch themselves out of the solar system - flying close enough to different planets in our solar system to build up great speed. Could we not throw a giant solar sail onto a probe and send it out? I guess the acceleration would be smaller and smaller when you get further and further out with the sun being further away, but at least you'd still be gaining velocity, right?

thechao 4y ago
This is directly addressed in the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03005 https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03005
- scohesc 4y ago
  Thank you for mentioning this! I don't have the time and mental resources to browse through these research papers all the time but knowing that what I'm asking is actually in the paper, maybe I'll give it a browse. Thanks :)
floxy 4y ago
If you like solar sails, you might like: https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?t=858 https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?t=858

ghostpepper 4y ago

For anyone not familiar with the Voyager missions I highly recommend the 2017 documentary _The Farthest_

tusslewake 4y ago

I found this aside on one of the graphics rather surprising: > Sometime in the next 2000 years, the Sun is expected to leave a local cloud of gas and dust. After that, it may enter the G cloud. If it is denser, it would squash the protective magnetic bubble of the heliosphere, potentially exposing the Solar System to a barrage of cosmic rays. Mostly surprised that I hadn't heard more about this. 2000 years is practically tomorrow in cosmological time! A little more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Interstellar_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Interstellar_Cloud

stevenjgarner 4y ago
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. "The G-Cloud contains the stars Alpha Centauri (a triple star system that includes Proxima Centauri) and Altair (and possibly others)" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-Cloud
jorgesborges 4y ago
Whoa. I’m assuming our solar system has moved through various interstellar mediums throughout history, and from reading above it sounds non-trivial. Is it? Do we know anything about how this may have influenced the development of Earth? Learning this gives me a very “oh my god we’re hurtling through space!” feeing that I haven’t felt in a long time.
nuccy 4y ago
Due to stochastic nature of interstellar magnetic fields, cosmic rays, trajectory of which are bent by those, are practically observed from all directions, so even if solar system distorts its own magnetic field this will have almost no effect on vosmic rays flux. Magnetic field is not a shield, for the charged particles it is rather a lens which converges or diverges their trajectories.
Archelaos 4y ago
> > If it is denser, it would squash the protective magnetic bubble of the heliosphere, potentially exposing the Solar System to a barrage of cosmic rays. That seems highly exaggerated. The Wikipedia article you mentioned is more sober: > The Local Interstellar Cloud's potential effects on Earth are greatly diminished by the solar wind and the Sun's magnetic field. A change in the density of the near interstellar medium would shift the heliopause, but it would require a massive increase in density to move it from where the Voyager probes are now to somewhere close to the inner solar system where it could have a noticeable impact.

makeitdouble 4y ago

Slight OT, but I wish “on steroids” wasn’t used in serious publications to refer to improvements and overall positive evolutions. I know it’s colloquially accepted, but we also wouldn’t express someone being very focused as “being on Adderall”, or a very creative idea as being “on shrooms” in a scientific publication.

bseidensticker 4y ago
IDK seems fine to me. > we also wouldn’t express someone being very focused as “being on Adderall”, or a very creative idea as being “on shrooms” in a scientific publication. We don't because nobody does, and many people might not know what you mean.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Hmmm…but then, do you personally do steroids ? Or do you directly know people doing steroids ? It looks to me like most people’s knowledge of steroids come from pop culture/doping scandals and news report, and use in articles like this one.

kregasaurusrex 4y ago

What sort of instrumentation would be onboard? The last mission destined to leave our solar system was New Horizons[0] and its equipment was designed in the early/mid-2000s with the express goal of imaging the outer planets. Both Voyager probes have some instrumentation still sending data back to Earth[1] as well, though current projections estimate we may only be receiving data from them for until the end of the decade. Sending a probe out that only improves on a few areas such as ionized plasma detection and gas chromatography to determine what elements are in the heliosphere seem to arbitrary improvements on a short timeframe; but these are systems designed with a 50+ year lifespan. The 500 page report published by NASA[2] for a future insterstellar probe is a bit much for a layperson to understand, but such a program can also be done over a longer timeframe to justify its continued funding. It's been over 40 years since we last launched a probe with the express purpose of exploring interstellar space, and technology has improved to the point of enabling these missions to be multi-generational by planning further launches to create a networked constellation. When I was a kid seeing the 'Pale Blue Dot' image in the book Cosmos, it gave a perspective of looking at humanity's achievements on a cosmic timescale instead rather than only the human timescale, and I think setting long-term goals of exploring our universe are held by everyone regardless of nationality. Delivering tangible results to the public like JWST's fantastic images and the 'Pale Blue Dot' photo are arguably just as important as the scientific data gathered. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Science_payload https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Science_payload [1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ [2] https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Interstellar-Probe-MCR.pdf https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Interstellar-Probe-MCR....

ck2 4y ago

Whatever happened to those microprobes at like 10% speed of light? (or was it 50%)

vkou 4y ago
The same thing that happened to Khalessi (played by Emilia Clarke) and her dragons. Which is to say, nothing happened to them at all, because they are all fictional.

whatrocks 4y ago

I had a weird dream about a secret Voyager probe recently, the Voyager III, and wrote a short story about it, if anyone’s interested: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/ https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/ It’s fairly “Contact” by Carl Sagan inspired.

everyone 4y ago

The voyager mission was originally planned to be with a no-expense-spared Cadillac of a spacecraft, however they ended up going with the bargain bin absolute cheapest possible option.

ur-whale 4y ago

Is the speed vector of the solar system really inside (aligned to) the ecliptic plane as the graphic in the article seems to suggest? I find it unlikely unless it is a necessary consequence of how the solar system formed. Does anyone know the answer?