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Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Science Data
- NotSammyHagar 2y agoAre Voyager 1 & 2 the greatdst scientific achievement of the human race? I think it's an easy argument to make. I'm very impressed about figuring out this problem and working around it. It would take 50 years to repeat, because it would take so long to send another mission that far out (47 years, depending on how much delta-V we could give it), and the odds that it survives that long is low anyway. We are too poor, too involved in arguing about other stuff to come close. There are the interesting ideas to send tiny specs of space ships using lasers to another solar system.
- cbanek 2y agoWell it's not just how much delta-V but all the gravity assists. The planets were in a "grand tour" alignment which happens every 175 years, so voyager would have an even longer lead. But doing something like that with an ion drive, on some of our more powerful rockets, and another hundred years of space tech, that thing would be amazing!
- ethbr1 2y agoNuclear pulse engines for 2151-2154!
- dylan604 2y agoNew Horizons was launched without being part of the alignment used for the grand tour, but it is moving much faster than Voyagers. The Parker Solar probe is moving even faster. These are just examples showing the gravity assists work very well. It would be interesting to see how long it took Parker to get up to speed, and then add that to the time to the Voyager distance and compare that to the nearly 50 years of Voyager as the baseline.
- nwiswell 2y ago> Are Voyager 1 & 2 the greatdst scientific achievement of the human race? I think it's an easy argument to make. I can't really agree. Voyager 1 & 2 have been extraordinarily successful machines but that's aided by the simplicity of their mission and their design. The core scientific purpose of the missions (visit and survey the outer planets) has been repeated many times over by other craft (Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini–Huygens, New Horizons, Juno) with greatly improved instruments. Compare Voyager to the Large Hadron Collider, the Manhattan Project, sequencing the genome, or even the Opportunity rover. All of these projects were successful despite being massively more complex undertakings. It's comforting to know that the human race will leave a trace beyond the gravity well of our own star, but hurling a chunk of metal away from the sun is not an inherently great achievement.
- booi 2y ago[flagged]
- vikingerik 2y agoHN rules: please don't intentionally take an uncharitable interpretation of the post you're replying to. The personal attack isn't necessary either. Nowhere did he say the Voyagers weren't great. He cited other projects that were/are greater, which was the original question. Including other space probes that have delivered thousands of times more data.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aplummer 2y agoIt's up there, but for the greatest, also hard to beat vaccines and a couple others.
- Retric 2y agoSmallpox vaccine is by far the most impactful scientific achievement. Imagine something deadly enough that the first solution variolation killed 1-2% of those who took it and people still lined their kids to take such lifesaving medicine. Historically, Smallpox killed ~1/3 of the infected and the survivors were often blind and or horrifically scared and it was literally doing this for thousands of years. And yet it’s been almost completely forgotten about today. Something like a billion lives saved and counting.
- nxobject 2y agoNot just the vaccine – the complete _eradication_ of smallpox, too. One of humanity's finest moments.
- Retric 2y agoThe eradication was a major achievement, but not strictly a scientific achievement IMO. I find it hard to imagine 300-500 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century. Yet we both eliminated it May 8, 1980 and had drastically reduced the number of cases well before that point. The last US case was in 1949 and the vaccine was being administered starting in 1796.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago"The printing press" has got to be up there. No single invention caused a faster shift in the knowledge level of humanity. It's tempting to suggest the latin alphabet, too. Thank the Phoenicians.
- zeroimpl 2y agoWhile great inventions, neither of those are "scientific achievements" IMO. The silicon transistor on the other hand is a good example of an invention that came directly as a result of science.
- ethbr1 2y agoMechanical engineering and paper science are sciences too. That we're had them for so long shouldn't diminish the fact that they have specific physical characteristics that need to be discovered and optimized.
- mikestew 2y agoAntibiotics: less than 100 years ago, you could die from a splinter in your finger. (I read an article in the past month or two with the title "My Grandmother Died of a Splinter", but damned if I can find it.)
- jgalt212 2y agoI think that's pretty bold, but in my mind I have trouble ranking Apollo, Voyager, and Hubble. They are all just so darn impressive.
- ngcc_hk 2y agoThat is what I call “or” thinking. Sometime ther is a tendency to rank because like the other post we all naturally want to rank and compare. And even worst may have to say one is the best, in exclusion of others. Market, government, community, public goods, knowledge …. Down to these 3 you have mentioned. Can all good? Have they have their different impact and their contribution? And can we have all, as we have them all already. As said it is interesting to have you with us. All of you.
- jgalt212 2y agoThis is the most obtuse comment I've read in quite some time.
- nxobject 2y agoI’ve tooted this horn before, and I would love to toot this again: I’d love to see a Fabien Sanglard style breakdown of Voyager’s hardware - or even some sort of simulation. If we want to aspire to build things with as much longevity, it behooves us to know the details…
- tedd4u 2y agoRight, I want to know what metals were used for the chassis and why, how many layers the PCBs have, if solder or crimping was used for connectors, the chip packages - ceramic? plastic? - what kind of ROM and RAM are used, the CPUs, what kind of shielding there is, what protection against cosmic rays is there (apparently not enough to prevent the recent issues), and then on the software, lets see some code walkthroughs, comparison to Apollo computer and operating systems, etc. 4k video of the innards of the engineering model still present in the lab at JPL (I think they have one of those, right?)
- Anarch157a 2y ago>4k video of the innards of the engineering model still present in the lab at JPL (I think they have one of those, right?) They don't, this is why the recent fix took so long and was so risky, they were testing in production. They didn't make engineering models for that mission, the Voyagers were their own prototypes, which makes them more amazing.
- dylan604 2y agoEven more so seeing the recent indefinite delay of Starliner, again. The Voyager team(s) had 1 shot, similar to JWST, to get it right. They did it twice. All of these kinds of examples make it that much more insulting that Starliner is such rubish.
- tedd4u 2y agoMakes the recent "saves" all the more amazing.
- idkdotcom 2y ago[dead]
- guidedlight 2y agoVoyager 1 is on borrowed time. It’s expected that over the next decade it won’t have enough power for a single scientific instrument, and by 2036 it will be out of range of the deep space network. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/
- dylan604 2y agoWhich are all further accomplishments in my opinion.
- gavinsyancey 2y agoDoes anyone know if there's an article that explains the technical details of how they fixed the problem?
- gnabgib 2y agoThe NASA post a month ago described it [0] (780 points, 206 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117599
- frognumber 2y agoSerious question: Are we learning anything new from this now? Or is this merely a novelty?
- dylan604 2y agoWe're receiving real readings of the interstellar medium instead of just hypothesizing it's make up. So, I'd consider that new
- bimguy 2y agoYou would assume that, yes, we will learn lots from the only spacecraft that is continually travelling further and further into unexplored space...
- aixpert 2y agoyes even lack of data is new data: The outer space behaves exactly as we predicted is still valuable information and then there is always the faint hope of unexpected surprises
- frognumber 2y agoI would not assume that. You could equally well assume that: 1) There are diminishing returns on investment, as we go further out. We'd need to go exponentially further out to get useful information. 2) The sensors on the craft are old, and modern methods can tell us more from far away then ancient sensors from deep space. ... and so on. I'm not going to argue about which assumption is best, because intuitions will differ. I was hoping to get a concrete answer from someone who might know rather than was speculating. Ergo, the question. I was hoping for an answer of the form "Nope. It's not worth throwing it away, but it's pretty obsolete now." or "Yup. We recently learned that ____" (fill in the blank).
- dylan604 2y agoIn my life time, we've gone from having no imagery of the outer planets to what we have now. For people born after Hubble, this is probably hard to understand how fast we've moved in imaging our own solar system. With all of the data available now at the click of a button, it is sometimes even hard for me to remember that the Voyager crafts were the first images and were essentially "hot off the press" when I was seeing them in school.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ngcc_hk 2y agoStill wonder why we have emulator for lunar module but not voyager. It is important step to understand and if we send more again about remote operation like that until we can’t.