26 ms·
Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
- palemoonale 3y agoThats so sad... Major Tom to Earth. I hope V1 keeps being a part of life to come.
- nocoder 3y agoThis is one of the things that makes me full of wonder and awe! When we humans put our heads to something we can kick ass. Unfortunately, off late our heads have been into kicking each other instead of building something.
- 29athrowaway 3y ago> Voyager 1 is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object from Earth.
- willcipriano 3y agoI wonder if we will ever pass Voyager 1. Might be the farthest for a long time.
- detourdog 3y agoI remember when the launching of voyager. I would rather be getting bad data than no data.
- SigmundA 3y agoI always like it in space simulation games when you can visit them: https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Voyager_1 https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Voyager_1
- floxy 3y agoHopefully in my lifetime we can do something like these lightsails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=883s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=883s ...which do a swing by the sun to get up to 22 AU/year.
- johndunne 3y agoI asked myself this same question when New Horizon sent pictures of Pluto back. I was surprised to learn that NH will never overtake Voyager because of the number of gravity assists Voyager 1 achieved. The planners had to race to achieve the 4 gravity assists in the 70's, the next time the 4 giants line up in such a way isn't until 2145. Perhaps some form of ion engine, one day, will help us overtake Voyager. Or more sci-fi fusion/nuclear rockets. Who knows, but it's interesting to ponder. https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/voyager-1-solar-system/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/voyager-1-solar-syst...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deely3 3y ago> farthest man-made object that we know about and actively track
- lagrange77 3y agowow!
- zamadatix 3y agoAre there other candidates outside those criteria or is this a "it's impossible to really know anything" response?
- DrBazza 3y agoThe manhole cover from Operation Plumbob? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
- rubyron 3y agoTIL about a 2,000 lb "manhole cover" (big armored plate they welded on the end of a pipe to contain (HA!) the explosion) that got launched into the atmosphere in 1957 by a nuclear explosion test, leaving ground at 150,000 mph (220,000 fps). Spoiler: it probably vaporized.
- fallingknife 3y agoLaunch velocity was estimated at 66km/s. 11 of that would be burned climbing out of Earth's gravity well leaving us with a velocity of 55 km/s relative to Earth. It will take another 42 km/s to escape the solar system, so that would be a velocity of 13 km/s at escape. Voyager 1 is traveling at 17 km/s, so would either be ahead of it or will catch it eventually. But this doesn't account for the earth's orbit at 30 km/s. So depending on the launch orientation to orbit, the manhole cover could either still be in orbit around the sun, or have a velocity of up to 43 km/s at escape. So it's possible, if it didn't get vaporized, that is.
- floxy 3y ago
- bee_rider 3y agoTrue, there are almost certainly alien spacecraft farther from Earth than Voyager.
- echelon 3y agoI hope so!
- deadbabe 3y agoI doubt it more and more these days. So many improbable things need to line up perfectly for this to happen. There may be alien civilizations, but they might be on worlds without the adequate resources or the right type of gravity to reach escape velocity. And there simply hasn’t been enough time in the universe for many space faring civilizations to have arisen yet. We might be really early.
- squidbeak 3y agoSo long as it isn't impossible, the improbable becomes inevitable at scales as vast as the universe.
- deadbabe 3y agoNot really. Very large improbabilities require a lot more time than what the universe has been around for.
- nerdbert 3y agoFrom our limited sampling, it happens with some measurable frequency. Going from zero to one of something tends to be a lot less likely than going from one to two or more.
- deadbabe 3y agoYea but we don’t know how many failed attempts there were that got stuck at zero. We only know our one existence. Could be trillions of dead universes before ours.
- smitty1110 3y agoA less alarmist and clickbait article can be found here: https://www.popsci.com/science/voyager-computer-issue/ https://www.popsci.com/science/voyager-computer-issue/ NASA press release here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-to-resolve-issue-with-voyager-1-computer/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-... TL;DR - Voyager is sending back bad data, they're working on it.
- passwordoops 3y agoThank you. Didn't want to tap a CNN link for anything involving science P.s. I also wouldn't go to Fox, before you think this is left/right bias. My bias is against regular media reporting on anything scientific. It's either rendered alarmist, so simplified it's wrong, or some combination of the two
- leptons 3y agoCNN is now owned by a right-wing nut, so CNN and Fox news are about the same now.
- pengaru 3y ago> CNN is now owned by a right-wing nut Who's that in a "Warner Bros. Discovery" world? Glancing at the wikipedia page I see no clear single owner anymore. Edit: not intending to come to CNN's defense in any way here, just genuine curious who's pulling the strings now in the new ownership structure.
- passwordoops 3y agoFirst, I think you got it right already. The "person" pulling the strings is the same "person" pulling the strings at every other quasi-monopolist multinational. Just another Senior VP, likely Ivy League MBA doing whatever they can to ensure they hit this quarter's financial goals. Second, I just stop engaging when someone says a company/org is run by a right-wing nut/left-wing Communist
- 3y ago
- pjot 3y agoVoyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response. I’m guessing “hotfix” commits don’t exist in this domain
- bee_rider 3y agoI guess it is nitpicking, but I hate the word choice they’ve selected there. The “additionally” makes it look like the 22.5 and 45 hour problems are two different things, instead of the natural result of a round trip.
- huytersd 3y ago[flagged]
- NoToP 3y agoI hold this comment in contempt
- bee_rider 3y agoI disagreed with the comment but I’m surprised somebody bothered flagging it.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoI don't think you should use the phrase "viscerally hyperbolic", I think it overstates the degree to which their comment communicates an excess of emotion. Instead, consider saying "I don't hate it, but I don't love it" to express agreement with the sentiment, but disagreement with the degree.
- idonotknowwhy 3y agoEveryone's experience is subjective. Maybe they really hated it. I also hate the wording, it threw me off for a few seconds and made me lose min train of thought until I realized the author simply doesn't know what the word "additionally" means.
- SN76477 3y agoI would love to see a Voyager 1 simulator.
- malfist 3y agoThis is an absolutely terrible headline. Voyager is communicating with Earth, full stop. The data from it's scientific instruments is coming back in a fixed, repeating pattern, meaning we aren't getting anything meaningful from it, but it is absolutely still communicating with Earth.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoNo, it’s an accurate headline for the general population. It’s sending nothing useful.
- mholt 3y agoThe headline doesn't say useful though. Just that it stopped communicating, which is false.
- h2odragon 3y ago"im still here" is useful. if it had hit the wall and gone totally silent, that would be a different thing entire.
- disconcision 3y agobad news everybody, grandmas dead where by dead we mean that the entropy of her current utterances is failing to move extant priors
- lukeschlather 3y agoIt's the most distant transmitter we're receiving anything from. Just the signal itself is useful and communicates that the probe is still powered.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> the signal itself is useful and communicates that the probe is still powered It also tells us that ca. 1970s kit can survive past the termination shock, i.e. in interstellar space.
- 3y ago
- lordnacho 3y agoHow is it possible to still be able to get a signal from a spacecraft that's so far away? How can the antenna be directional enough while still being pointed right at the Earth? How do we remove the noise?
- laweijfmvo 3y ago[flagged]
- HenryBemis 3y agoMITM attack? Well they won't get away with this! Some humans are super-intelligent - they already discovered that the Earth is flat, and sitting on the bank of a giant turtle (yes it's turtles all the way down)
- rcthompson 3y agoMITM, of course, stands for Martian In The Middle.
- munificent 3y agoVoyager 1 has a large 12-foot diameter directional radio antenna that it keeps pointed at Earth. If you look at photos of Voyager, the antenna (the big dish) basically is most of what you see: it's bigger than everything else on craft. There are radio antennas across the Earth listening to its very weak signal. More details: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calculate-data-rate-of-voyager-1 https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calcu...
- freeqaz 3y agoThat post is awesome. Thank you for sharing! There are some truly brilliant humans on this planet with us.
- WJW 3y agoSignal processing algorithms can pull out a signal from well below the noise floor these days. Even the small and nondirectional antennas on your phone are good enough to receive GPS signals even all the way down at -125 dBm, which is WAY less than your phone receives in interference from random radio stations and faulty LED bulbs nearby. The tech used to receive Voyager signals is not really different, just more sensitive and sophisticated (and expensive).
- squarefoot 3y agoAlternate link if you get a "browser blocked" error message. https://archive.is/YnzAR https://archive.is/YnzAR
- ssl232 3y agoObligatory: https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/
- _air 3y agoAlso: https://xkcd.com/1189/ https://xkcd.com/1189/
- gmuslera 3y agoVger will come back, eventually.
- WJW 3y agoIt would be cool if we eventually develop the technology to send out a probe to go out there and fetch the Voyager probes, so that we can put them in a museum. (Presumably with one of the siblings of the fetching probe going further and faster than the Voyager probes ever managed)
- snuxoll 3y agoThat would be rather defeating their purpose. We put golden records on the Voyager probes, which included instructions for reading them, so that should another intelligent civilization be in their flight path they can learn of our existence and some of our culture.
- renewiltord 3y agoA time when we were too young to conceive of the Dark Forest.
- giantrobot 3y agoIf aliens are sending a battle fleet to destroy Earth because there's life here, they were on the way long before we emitted and radio waves. Earth has been broadcasting the existence of life for a billion years.
- renewiltord 3y agoI knew there was a reason to hate cyanobacteria. Those fuckers gave it away with the O2 in the first place.
- eichin 3y agoAlternatively, preserve the mission and build a museum in-place around it :-)
- byyoung3 3y ago[flagged]
- liampulles 3y agoMaybe our simulation has not been implemented so robustly at that distance...
- jvm___ 3y agoThe 13the floor is a movie for you.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoIn the Black Mirror episode U.S.S Callister, the game development firm is located on the 13th floor :)
- jasongill 3y agoThat movie was so good but was entirely overshadowed by the release of The Matrix, which released just 2 months earlier - I think people assumed that The 13th Floor was just a Matrix knock-off, which it wasn't. Both were great, of course, but 13th Floor just got a bum deal with it's release date I think.
- 15457345234 3y agoThere are limits to floating point precision; should have used FP64
- doubloon 3y agoonce it starts skipping the integers you can really see the glitch in the matrix
- jacknews 3y agoThe simulation is fine, we just hit the 'Truman sphere' surrounding the solar system.
- oobuffet 3y agoStars are just breathing holes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- uticus 3y agoTangentially related, just watched Star Trek the Motion Picture (director's cut) for first time as an adult. One of the best tie-ins between NASA and scifi I can think of. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_P...
- ygmelnikova 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- efitz 3y agoI was just a tad young to care when the voyager spacecraft were first launched, but I have followed the adventures of these spacecraft since the mid 80s. I remember being a little disappointed in the “Neptune all night” TV special during the flyby as the whole night they only received one photo and didn’t have time to colorize it :-D But I have always been inspired by the ingenuity of the engineers in first designing spacecraft that have lasted so long and gone so far beyond their original mission parameters, and secondly keeping these two machines operational across so much time and distance in such a hostile environment. Thank you Voyager team present and past; you’ve helped inspire so many young people to STEM careers, and you’ve done so with a project that shows the very best of the curious and inventive side of humanity.
- gedy 3y ago> I remember being a little disappointed in the “Neptune all night” TV special during the flyby as the whole night they only received one photo I remember waiting for the next month's National Geographic to include the next planet Voyager visited. Joys of the pre Internet era.
- palijer 3y agoHere is my favorite article about the engineers and team behind the mission still. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engineers-steering-nasas-voyager-probes-across-the-universe.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engine...
- efitz 3y agoThat was a great article. Archive here: https://archive.ph/QftwM https://archive.ph/QftwM
- andrewstuart 3y agoYou'd think they'd build them to be more reliable. Planned obsolescence that's the problem with today's engineering.
- voytec 3y agoI always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we were able to send a space probe, designed and built to be so robust that it's still doing its thing and sending us postcards after 46 years(!!!) of flying away from us in an extremely harmful environment, while we still fuck simple stuff up back home.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoWhat the US accomplished from 1950-1980 is incredible.
- nemo44x 3y agoIndeed. A group of people went through 15 years of financial hardship and horrific war and it made them so strong willed and determined to do something with surviving that. I’m grateful to not have to have gone through all that but also accept that they formed a certain wisdom we can’t appreciate fully. That era should be looked on like we do the renaissance, etc. Just a remarkable era that we still are building on today. The springboard.
- layer8 3y agoThe atomic bomb triggering large investments in physics education and research has a lot to do with it.
- dimator 3y agoSo true. NASA's achievements are the highest of human accomplishments, imo. Sometimes I picture being on the team that built these triumphs, I think I would be overtaken with pride forever.
- mycologos 3y agoThere's a nice 2017 documentary about Voyager called The Farthest [1]. It includes interviews with many of the now very old team members, and they do exude (deserved) pride, and a still fresh sense of wonder that they pulled it off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farthest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farthest
- atq2119 3y agoIn a nice coincidence: The end of vger.kernel.org (https://lwn.net/Articles/954783/ https://lwn.net/Articles/954783/)
- Dig1t 3y ago>The last time Voyager 1 experienced a similar, but not identical, issue with the flight data system was in 1981 I would love to read about specifically what went wrong in 1981. The closest I could find was this old article from 1981: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-still-misbehaving.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-stil... But there isn't nearly enough detail in it. Is there an analysis anywhere online of that event?
- sho_hn 3y agoI don't know if the 1981 issue is covered, but you can read some very fun examples of bugfixing and OTA updates on the Voyager spacecraft in this article: https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf Including a 20 year wait for a pro-active fix to pay off in prod! "A CCS FSW patch was developed and implemented in 1995, and linked on the spacecraft in 2006 for V1 and 2005 for V2 to automatically restart some of the critical functions in the event of an Error entry. This patch was exercised in flight in 2014, nearly 20 years after it was installed, when one of the CCS processors went into an error entry on V1; the patch worked as designed."
- anonymous_sorry 3y ago> Initially designed to last five years NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was designed to? Is it a political thing: they set their success criteria low just in case something goes wrong, but actually intend a much longer lifespan? Sorry if this seems an incredibly cynical way of looking at the world. I actually love all this stuff - I'm just curious if there is a pattern here and what the reason is if so.
- gutnor 3y agoI guess the problem is lead time. You want overspecced because you get one shot every 10-20 years between design, launch windows and the all too present political angle.
- sebzim4500 3y agoThere is certainly a political element, when they tried doing cheaper missions they had two failures in a row which was really embarassing, even though probably if they had stuck with it it would have still worked out cheaper than using the low risk approach. Mainly though if you design a spacecraft to have a 99% chance of lasting five years it ends up with a pretty high chance of lasting 30 years.
- photonbucket 3y agoI think the intended lifespan specification is quite real in that they advertise success as A, B, and C when they initially asked for funding. It looks really really bad for NASA when it's a mission failure in terms of what its was funded for, the politicians start talking about budget cuts.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoIf you design so that it has a 99.9999% chance of working for 5 years it's going to work for much longer. It'd be very hard to design it in a way that it didn't.
- mulhoon 3y agoI find it interesting how they use “aging spacecraft” and “exceptionally long lifespans” of these devices. In terms of the age of the universe, or the time that light from a star has travelled to us, it’s minute. Aging in relation to human life maybe.
- decremental 3y ago[dead]
- xcv123 3y agoIn terms of expected mission duration and the durability of its components.
- ciroduran 3y agoLOL @ CNN blocking Firefox! "Browser Blocked We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region. We recommend you use a different browser or disable the “EasyList Cookie” filter from your “Content Filtering” settings (found under “Settings” -> “Shields” in the Brave Browser)."
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoI thought it was just me. What is causing that?
- gsa 3y agoIf I had to guess, it's phrased like this since it's blocking their third-party cookie banner.
- jacquesm 3y agoWhich they do not need.
- xyproto 3y agoYeah, that's silly. Passing it through Google Translate works, though: https://www-cnn-com.translate.goog/2023/12/13/world/voyager-1-computer-issue-scn/index.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=no&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-cnn-com.translate.goog/2023/12/13/world/voyager-...
- Udo 3y agoI suspect you're using some plugin that's blocking cookies (whether they correctly detect that as EasyList or not). Due to that, it's possible that CNN can't store your response to their privacy popup and so they have decided to limit their liability by preventing access. If this turns out true, it would be quite ironic: they can't show you a legally mandated cookie selector intended to increase your privacy because you're running a piece of blocking software that's intended to increase your privacy.
- Legion 3y ago> While the spacecraft can still receive and carry out commands transmitted from the mission team, a problem with that telecommunications unit means no science or engineering data from Voyager 1 is being returned to Earth. A probe going further in space than any other that suddenly starts sending back incomprehensible science data is a pretty killer start to a sci-fi movie if you ask me.
- giantrobot 3y agoBetween this and the occultation of Betelgeuse, 2023 is ending with very Cthulhu-y vibes.
- sho_hn 3y agoThere's a nice recent documentary about the team that keeps these spacecraft working and developing software updates, "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022): https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
- dekhn 3y agoI mean, even if they can't recover it at this point, it's still been far more reliable and useful than any program I've ever written or hobby electronics project I've built. Along with Apollo it's really a testament to the phenomenal productivity of American science in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
- smudgy 3y agoIf NASA can't contact it again and it has bravely gone into the great darkness alone with a piece of us, let's hope it's eventually found by a race capable of understanding the fragment of memory it carries. If you're lost V'ger, safe travels.
- miah_ 3y agoThe Voyagers also carry the Golden Records, which are full of information about Earth, its species, humans, samples of different languages, and music. It also has a description of our solar system, and details how to listen to the record. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
- saalweachter 3y agoSo we're going to end up in an Awesome Mix Tape situation, with our lost V'ger rocking out to the music of its homeworld?
- nonethewiser 3y ago> If NASA can't contact it again and it has bravely gone into the great darkness alone Perhaps not now, but this is definitely the case.
- shiroiuma 3y ago>let's hope it's eventually found by a race capable of understanding the fragment of memory it carries. Star Trek: The Motion Picture showed the danger posed by your wish.
- devnullbrain 3y agoMovies aren't real
- infinitedata 3y agoA race?
- Pigalowda 3y agoIn case anyone was curious Both Voyager probes power themselves with radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. The continual decay process means the generator produces slightly less power each year https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-will-do-more-science-with-new-power-strategy https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-will-do-more-sci...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kristianp 3y agoThe time to think of replacements has long passed, not to fly by the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity than the Voyagers and continue exploring the interstellar medium. Some other comments here mentioned the tech to do that: - ion propulsion - light sail And also nuclear fission might be an option, I like the fission fragment idea for its simplicity. [1][2] [1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core-fission-fragment-rocket-engine/ https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core-fission-fragment-r... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket
- svachalek 3y agoThis is a fun option too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
- praveen9920 3y agoI guess this is what started “space laser weapon” conspiracy.
- science4sail 3y agoA nuclear salt-water rocket[3] made using weapons-grade uranium should easily have a delta-V of 1.5% lightspeed and an acceleration above 10G; it would be great for exploring the Kuiper belt and/or performing another Grand Tour on a human timescale. [3] https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#id--Nuclear_Thermal--Gas_Core--Open_Cycle--Nuclear_Salt_Water https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.ph...
- kibwen 3y ago> The time to think of replacements has long passed, not to fly by the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity I wouldn't quite go that far, we'll have another chance at the grand tour in another 129 years, and those planetary flybys (and the associated gravity assists) are precisely what gave the Voyagers all that speed to begin with.
- schiffern 3y ago
- Waterluvian 3y agoI imagine being born, growing up, falling in love with science and engineering and space, going to college, getting a job at NASA, joining the Voyager team, and remotely troubleshooting a spacecraft that had left the Earth before being born.
- japhyr 3y agoMy favorite graph of all time is the one that demonstrate Voyager 1 had left the solar system. I was a high school math and science teacher at the time, and I spent the whole day sharing this graph with students. It was so much fun watching everyone's faces and seeing the moment they realized what it really meant. https://phys.org/news/2012-10-voyager-left-solar.html https://phys.org/news/2012-10-voyager-left-solar.html
- alain94040 3y agoWhy isn't it linear?
- Macha 3y agoBest guess: You get particles orbiting the sun, until you pass a point where the sun's gravity is too weak to hold them, and from that point you basically only see things who's escape trajectory intersects with yours
- pdonis 3y ago> You get particles orbiting the sun The particles hitting Voyager aren't orbiting the Sun; they're from the Sun, the solar wind. The heliopause is the point where they are stopped by the interstellar medium. That point is what Voyager passed as shown in the graph.
- dredmorbius 3y agoAmong my increasingly prized possessions is an original copy of Nasa's "Voyager Encounters Jupiter* report, detailing mission findings, and featuring some of the image highlights. Internet Archive, bless them, have this online: <https://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19800025809/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19800025809/mo...>
- manicennui 3y agoLooks like NASA provides it too: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19800025809 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19800025809
- dredmorbius 3y agoThanks! Just noting: the Nasa download appears to be a scan of the same original as IA are offering, based on stamps and pencilled notations on the cover.
- jsrcout 3y agoI have the same one, from way back in like 7th grade! Someone from NASA gave a talk about the agency's work including planetary science and Voyager at our school. They also did a memorable demo involving heating a handheld Space Shuttle thermal tile with a blowtorch :-) The booklet on Jupiter was outstanding. I had it pretty much memorized.
- metatheorem 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 3y agoCriminy. Why aren't we launching more of these probes? With Musk's cheap rockets, we could launch a fleet of them.
- coding123 3y agoWise words here
- MeImCounting 3y agoVoyager took advantage of a specific alignment of planets that allowed it to make many consecutive gravity assists.
- WalterBright 3y agoI know. But still, just flying around the solar system can be endlessly productive. Does anyone think we've learned all we can about the solar system?
- refulgentis 3y agoThere's plenty of things flying around the solar system :) though: ear hear, I second the sentiment
- bagels 3y agoIntentional eggcorn?
- MeImCounting 3y ago"To provide a comprehensive and precise list of space probes launched in the past 10 years (from 2013 to 2023), it's essential to highlight that space probes are designed for various missions, including planetary exploration, solar observation, and astrophysical studies. Here's a structured overview of notable space probes launched during this period: 2013 MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution): Launched by NASA, this probe is aimed at studying the Martian atmosphere to understand how it lost its water and atmosphere over time. 2014 Hayabusa2: Launched by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, this asteroid sample-return mission targeted the asteroid Ryugu. 2015 DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory): A joint mission by NASA, NOAA, and the U.S. Air Force, DSCOVR studies the solar wind and its impact on Earth. 2016 OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer): NASA's mission to asteroid Bennu for a sample return to Earth. 2017 Parker Solar Probe: Launched by NASA to study the outer corona of the Sun. 2018 BepiColombo: A joint mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) and JAXA to Mercury. InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport): A NASA lander to study Mars' interior. 2019 Chang'e 4: A Chinese lunar exploration mission that achieved the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon. 2020 Mars 2020 (Perseverance Rover): NASA's rover to explore Mars, seeking signs of past life and collecting samples for possible return to Earth. Tianwen-1: China's mission that includes an orbiter, lander, and rover to Mars. Hope Probe: The United Arab Emirates' mission to study the Martian atmosphere. 2021 James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): An international collaboration led by NASA, with significant contributions from ESA and the Canadian Space Agency, JWST is designed to observe the earliest galaxies and stars formed after the Big Bang." -ChatGPT Space exploration is definitely still a thing.
- vimr 3y agoIf someone is wondering about this, it has taken 46 years for voyager 1 to travel 22 light hours. fascinating.
- omeid2 3y agoI wonder in how many years from now, we can do the 46 years in 22 months? 22 days? 22 hours?
- fshafique 3y agoFYI, 22hrs would be about light speed, or a little over. Voyager 1 is at 162AU distance from Earth. 1AU takes about 8.3mins. 162AU would take about 1344.6mins, which is 22.41hrs. So yeah, I'm eagerly looking forward to that day.
- dylan604 3y agoto do it in 22 hours means moving at the speed of light, so never.
- fl7305 3y agoYou can theoretically do the 22 light-hour trip in 1 hour of subjective time if you travel at 99.9% of light speed. At least if my math is correct (?) Now, if the time is measured from standing still, it will take a lot longer. At least at accelerations that a human can survive.
- zmgsabst 3y agoI think that’s roughly 0.00005c, which at least to me sounds pretty fast.
- rkagerer 3y ago~16,000 m/s (mean) is pretty fast
- rkagerer 3y agoSo it takes about 22 hours for a signal to get from or to it?
- slackfan 3y agoALIENS.
- Avelina10 3y ago[dead]
- manicennui 3y agoI was curious how Voyager 1 is powered. The answer is radioisotope thermoelectric generators (nuclear batteries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... Seems we believe that they will last until 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power
- luxuryballs 3y agoOk so it says online it’s going at almost 40,000 mph so what is stopping us from sending one at say 400,000 mph, then couldn’t we catch up with it eventually? and travel the same distance in like 5 years?
- dylan604 3y agoand do what? at that speed, all you'll be able to do is wave as it sails by. you're not stopping at anything at that speed. however, even at 400k mph, that will not reach the next anything of interest before humans are extinct. here's some logic on why even getting to the closest star isn't likely: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33274/how-long-could-it-take-us-to-reach-alpha-centauri-with-current-technology https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33274/how-long-cou...
- darig 3y ago[dead]
- nb_key 3y agoPhenomenal things like Voyager, always reminds me of how far we humans have come and where we will be in the future.
- 1-6 3y agoIt’ll come back online. There’s probably some geomagnetic storm.
- gzer0 3y agoOne of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this event and restablish communication. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
- fieryskiff17 3y ago[flagged]
- ddingus 3y agoI like the simple, humble message. My own take is similar. Truth is, we are young, we shit where we eat, we spend considerable resources killing one another, we do not take good care of our own, and we reproduce like rabbits. For all we know there is a signpost some parsecs out there that reads: Do not yet approach. These things have not yet become ready for what contact could likely mean. We must pass tests to come. Tests that arise as an artifact of our current human condition. Trying to survive our time is so damn spot on too! Real as it gets, and for that record, real as it needs to be. Once we do get to really living, thriving on a scale we imagine others farther along in their journey as beings could maybe be, we might look back in awe that we managed it! Others may look toward us with some hope and anticipation of a meeting being worth it one day, should we succeed. Maybe, just maybe that scrappy little world and it's people some how grow enlightened enough to endure through and become peers of a sort, likely young, but maybe ready sort. A whole lot went into those short phrases. Damn good stuff.
- vasco 3y agoWe don't even have a world government yet! It's very disorganized still at home to receive guests, I agree.
- 3y ago
- boringg 3y agoAlways enjoyed this bit below about Voyager 1 a good reminder of how vast the universe is not too mention just to the oort cloud! "Even though Voyager 1 travels about a million miles per day, the spacecraft will take about 300 years to reach the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the far side." I have to hope that in the distant future we will hopefully have spaceships that will pass voyager still traveling along in space, doing its thing as a relic to us early space traveling humans.
- whalesalad 3y ago1 million miles per day is an insane figure
- ta8645 3y agoAnd yet it's a vanishingly small distance on the scale of the universe. Mind bending.
- boringg 3y agoExactly - that's the part thats truly amazing. 30000 years to the outside of the oort cloud - thats still in our system (border of it) - not even scratching the universe in the faintest.
- zamfi 3y agoYou do it every day! The Earth itself moves faster than Voyager -- 1.6 million miles per day.
- paxys 3y agoThe tiny difference here is that we made Voyager.
- isolli 3y agoAnother difference is that we sent Voyager traveling orthogonally to Earth's orbit. Well, not exactly, but you get the point... > Voyager 1 is now leaving the solar system, rising above the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 35 degrees at a rate of about 520 million kilometers (about 320 million miles) a year. Voyager 2 is also headed out of the solar system, diving below the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 48 degrees and a rate of about 470 million kilometers (about 290 million miles) a year. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/fact-sheet/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/fact...
- keepamovin 3y agoBut Voyager 1’s flight data system now appears to be stuck on auto-repeat, in a scenario reminiscent of the film “Groundhog Day.” A long-distance glitch The mission team first noticed the issue November 14, when the flight data system’s telecommunications unit began sending back a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, like it was trapped in a loop Poor little guy voyager! must’ve hit the age of our little historical diorama. Very Truman show.
- drmpeg 3y agoFor up to the minute information. https://twitter.com/nascom1 https://twitter.com/nascom1
- ck2 3y agoIt's a shame deep space probe budgets aren't useful towards war on other countries or population-wide domestic surveillance or we'd have spacecraft at 10% the speed of light already.
- akokanka 3y agoFinally found aliens!
- apitman 3y agoOne of my favorite tech legends is that apparently Voyager 1 launched with a Viterbi encoder, even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it. After a number of years Moore's Law caught up and they remotely switched over to Viterbi for more efficient transmissions.
- nemo44x 3y agoI don’t know how well it holds today but for some time it was known that running certain computations on existing hardware would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running when available.
- seeknotfind 3y agoIf hardware next year is X times better (e.g. even 1.01 or 1% better) than this year, and you have a computation that takes T time today, then next year, it'll take T/X time. So waiting will take 1 + T/X years if time unit is years. So the condition you want is 1+T/X < T. This equation has solutions for given X where X is an improvement, so as long as there is any improvement, it's always true waiting to start large enough computations will be faster. Though even faster will be doing part of the computation now and then switching to new hardware later, so it's a false dichotomy.
- MaulingMonkey 3y ago> Though even faster will be doing part of the computation now and then switching to new hardware later Not necessairly. This still costs: • Programmer/development time to implement save/restore/transfer • Time on new hardware, bottlenecked by old hardware, restoring a partial computation from old disks or networks You're not going to waste time restoring partial calculations for anything from an Amiga cluster for time saving purpouses. Additionally, this scheme ties up hardware that then can't be used for "cost effective to finish on current hardware" calculations.
- LegionMammal978 3y ago> This equation has solutions for given X where X is an improvement, so as long as there is any improvement, it's always true waiting to start large enough computations will be faster. Though this does assume that X is a constant, or at least bounded below by a constant. If hardware performance improved up to an asymptote, then there would still be nonzero improvement, but it might not be enough for waiting to ever be worth it.
- eastern 3y ago"Mission control on Earth receives that data in binary code, or a series of ones and zeroes." That's a relief.
- deafpolygon 3y agoMaybe it's gone beyond the reach of space-time!
- smm11 3y agoVoyager 2, where are you now?
- beltsazar 3y ago> Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response. It's like when you write a program and you have to wait for almost two days to compile the code, run the program, and see its output. Meanwhile programmers these days complain when the build time is more than a few minutes.
- FredPret 3y agoIs there any chance we can zap its general direction with a radio beam and then listen with a huge radio telescope to get an accurate radar fix on where it is?
- GeorgeTirebiter 3y agoNo. It's simply too far away for that, because d*4 gets you. Now, if the zapper were Big Enough, when received it didn't destroy the probe, AND that there was a big enough receiver, they maybe...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- FredPret 3y agoAccording to [0] we can do 0.000012 arc seconds with interferometry. At 22.5 light minutes, that works out to about half a meter (!) if my trig is correct. We’d probably have to absolutely blast it with energy though. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution#:~:text=The%20highest%20angular%20resolutions%20for,resolutions%20at%20x%2Dray%20wavelengths https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution#:~:text=T....]
- ezconnect 3y agoThe software is running since 1977.
- lmpdev 3y agoVale
- darig 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- natas 3y ago"Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth" -- hollywood is working on a movie
- BrianB 3y ago> The Voyager team sent commands over the weekend for the spacecraft to restart the flight data system, but no usable data has come back yet, according to NASA. I like how their attempted solution is to restart it
- yawpitch 3y agoOh no! What did we say? Have we apologized?
- piokoch 3y agoVoyager is the highest technical achievement of humankind to this day. Amount of knowledge we gained from that shuttle, run by a computer having a power of the computer that we have today in our car keys, is invaluable. Let it fly in peace, maybe, some day, it will be only reminiscence of our civilization and planet Earth, crossing the universe... There is a great documentary about Voyager- The Farthest - highly recommended.
- codeulike 3y agoInteresting article from the launch in 1977 and some gyroscope problems they had early on https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/21/archives/voyager-heads-toward-planets-despite-snags-after-its-liftoff.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/21/archives/voyager-heads-to...
- kar1181 3y agoI feel like the voyager spacecraft are a part of me, growing up in the 80s marvelling at all the images they sent back it was a magical time. The idea of voyager going dark feels like losing a part of myself. It's proven to be a hardy spacecraft and has defied a lot of seemingly terminal problems before, fingers crossed she can overcome this one too. God speed Voyager.
- rex_lupi 3y agoI was wondering, if at this moment an "alien" probe similar to Voyager passes by our solar system in close proximity to earth, how likely is it that with our radio telescope arrays etc (as they are currently set up), we, a "sufficiently advanced civilization", will be able to detect it? How much radio power do the probes emit? Will our scanning radio telescopes be able to pick up any trace of the signal, given the tx antennas are oriented away from the earth?
- wortelefant 3y agoas I am approaching my 46th anniversary, I also experience a desire to stop communicating with earth and fly my own ways
- awestley 3y agoRIP little dude
- Vaslo 3y agoOh no, someone is going to be looking for Vger soon
- lelag 3y ago> Initially designed to last five years. I imagine that it was only sold like this in order to be able to call the mission a success after 5 years. I imagine that the engineers that created the probes, designed them to last as long as possible and were targeting a much longer lifespan from the get go.
- dudeinjapan 3y agoIt hurts to be ghosted, but you just have to remember there are other interstellar space probes in the galaxy.
- frellus 3y agoVoyager 1 idea dead. Long live, V'ger! "V'ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve." – Spock
- nullhole 3y ago@dang - could you change the title of this? It is factually wrong. The spacecraft is still communicating with Earth. This gives information (and may be a better link anyway): "Engineers Working to Resolve Issue With Voyager 1 Computer" (Dec. 12, 2023) https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-to-resolve-issue-with-voyager-1-computer/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...
- owenversteeg 3y agoHow sad to lose contact, but how wonderful that we seized our opportunity to send out this beautiful messenger into the great unknown. This reminds me of something I have been curious about for some time now. The Voyager Golden record depicts the world at 1.5b years, 4.5b years, and 4.51b years. The image of the continents at 1.5b seems realistic with Pangea, 4.5b looks to be the world accurately today, but 4.51 is unrecognizable- with Oceania featuring many new islands, new islands around Madagascar, and a large gap between Northern Africa and Eurasia. What is this image? It’s especially confusing given that the earth is 4.54B years old and the ten million years time between the two images isn’t enough for any continental drift of that magnitude in any projections I’m aware of. See Diagram 39 here: https://www.lost-painters.nl/atlas/ https://www.lost-painters.nl/atlas/
- HocusLocus 3y agoHey, if there's any NASA folk here or if you can drop a line to them... I'm kind of MIFFED at the regularity with which this issue is reported in the press as a "repeating pattern of ones and zeroes" and no one it seems, has any desire to divulge the actual pattern that is being received. If we're not in the Cold War surrounded by State Secrets, it is time to crowd-source this mystery and that means provide actual dumps of the repeating data along with examples of recent correct data... and perhaps a complete dump of instruction and data memory to the extent of which it is known... so armchair enthusiasts (who aren't all 'armchair' as some of them might have actually worked on Voyager or be familiar with its instruction set) can spot any real pattern or peg the origin of the repeated data. Of course the objective is to create a fault in emulation that at least partly mirrors reality, so we can devise strategies against it. When I was a tech fixing S-100 bus memory cards and to a great extent today for some systems, identifying faulty chips from diagnostics or observed behavior was the same as fixing the problem, because they were in sockets and could easily be replaced. I even had a hilarious fault in memory-map days where spelling of a word processing document was flipping on the display (bit 1) but printed properly. This sounds as if a conditional instruction has suffered a bit flip changing the condition and trapping it in a loop from which it should escape. The nature of the 'gibberish' (contemptible term in this context) might yield clues to the nature of the problem or to knowledgeable persons, where the data came from if it is a bit flip in a pointer. Whether crowd sourced persons are capable to actually solve the mystery or not, they might at least offer good suggestions for devising diagnostics to narrow down the cause. We owe Voyager all our efforts, as the most inaccessible computer system in human history.