12 ms·

Seeing this news is a nice tribute to Ed Stone, who was one of the core project scientists for Voyager and recently passed [1] (and all those who work/worked on

Seeing this news is a nice tribute to Ed Stone, who was one of the core project scientists for Voyager and recently passed [1] (and all those who work/worked on the program). I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Stone at a public NASA event many years ago. I asked him, perhaps a silly question: "what does it feel like to know you built the furthest man-made known object in the universe?". He paused for a moment, after which he responded, with a smile: "Pretty darn good". RIP, Dr. Stone and go Voyager go! [1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ed-stone-former-director-of-jpl-and-voyager-project-scientist-dies https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ed-stone-former-director-of-jp...

yawpitch 2y ago
Not so silly, considering it’s almost certainly always going be the furthest man-made object in the Universe.
- mlyle 2y ago
  I hope not-- it may take a long time, but I hope we laser accelerate some probes really fast.
  - dmbche 2y ago
    Eh - to send it where? Even laser accelerated, even if it gets to 0.1c, where is it gonna go? Edit0:typo
    - robin_reala 2y ago
      Alpha Centauri. See Breakthrough Starshot and other such potential missions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
      - dmbche 2y ago
        Obviously, no need to answer further, I'm just being grumpy I imagine. Man - why go there? What are we looking to learn? Do they have the kilometer Gw phased array yet? The meterwide/gram weight sails? The chips that weight one gram with comms and cameras and all that? And just to clarify, they can't flip and slow down, so it's a 0.15c flyby of alphacentauri, entirely automated. So hopefully the code does't fuck up in this alien environnement without human help. What do they expect to learn at that speed and with such small sensors? Like a picture of the planet, like we get telescopes? I sure wonder the speed at which that's going to transmit data. I'm just seeing "proof or concept" but this is mostly concept and no proof. And if this is "step one" of interstellar travel, what's step two? Edit0: Just reading the wiki this is so absurd -atmospheric turbulence is a challenge to deliver te GW laserb- so were planning on building a km phased array in space to accelerate the swarm. Just this itself is way way beyond realistic. Doesn't this breakdown at napkin math levels?
        MagicMoonlight 2y ago
        Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and its code hasn’t broken. Construct a stack of starships in orbit and you would be able to get a probe there. It’s never about the technology, it’s about whether someone cares enough to spend the resources.
        dmbche 2y ago
        What do you mean about the starship stack? That's the array? For Voyager, I'll argue that it's mission is much simpler (doesn't need to aim forthe position of something 30 years in the future) and that we keep transmitting to it (the sheer distance will limit our involvement as the delays between transmissions grows). It's also not going at 0.15c, where it needs to do the calcs very quickly. I'm not sure how easy it would be to make a km wide Gw array on Earth, but building and powering it in space seems much, much harder. Just harvesting the GW takes 3 million solar panels. Just getting that to orbit seems unlikely. Even with very generous 1kg per panel we get 3 million kg to put in orbit, or 21 Falcon Heavy at max payload, or two years of putting nothing but solar panels up. It's so much. And then how much money is going to make the gram scale probe appear? Edit0: to clarify, the probe will have less time than the duration of the blink of an eye to take measurements. That's limiting what you can learn AND makes it very hard to aim correctly.
    - oneshtein 2y ago
      To the nearest interstellar object, when we will find one close to us. It's much more interesting than another star, because it may preserve the history of our galaxy in it deposits.
- cryptoz 2y ago
  A very cynical take. I expect we’ll pass it in 20-30 years.
  - dgrin91 2y ago
    Voyager 1 has had an almost 50 year head start, and it was launched with a series of gravitational assists that are only possible every few hundred years. There is 0 chance anything will catch up to it in the next 50 years, and probably for several hundred more years after that, if ever.
    - Sharlin 2y ago
      That’s a really pessimistic take. Voyager 1 moves at ~17 km/s (and slowing down but it doesn’t really matter). That’s on the order of 0.0001 c and indeed just a half of Earth’s orbital speed, so a part of the year the probe is actually getting closer in Earth’s frame. A one-kg nanoprobe attaining 0.001 c would be perfectly feasible with today’s tech and would overtake Voyager 1 within a decade. Breakthrough Starshot proposes laser sail acceleration of gram-scale probes to > 0.1 c, a thousand times faster than V1, and nothing in the design requires fundamentally new tech. Such probes would claim the distance record in a few weeks of travel, no matter whether they’re launched twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now.
      - adaml_623 2y ago
        What scientific return are we getting from a gram sized probe moving at 30,000 km per second?
        peterlada 2y ago
        Today: almost certainly nothing In a decade: almost certainly very little In a century: almost certainly more than the Voyager
        AlecSchueler 2y ago
- Simon_ORourke 2y ago
  "Always" is a pretty big leap (I hope).
  - chumanak 2y ago
    Yes, but it will always be like that
- hinkley 2y ago
  That’s the major problem with generation ships. Unless you have a propulsion lab and scientists on the ship, earth will just keep making faster ships and when you arrive at your destination you may discover it has been inhabited for generations by people who left a hundred years after you did. The power of procrastination is great.
  - financypants 2y ago
    I mentioned this point on a HN post a few months ago and someone said that the Voyager was launched at a very beneficial time, leveraging some gravitational pull of some celestial body, so it’s unlikely we can just make a faster ship and catch up/surpass it.
    - throwaway894345 2y ago
      Is there any reason that a new generation of ships couldn't leverage the same (or similar, if not better) gravitational pulls that benefited Voyager?
      - Rebelgecko 2y ago
        The "Grand Tour" alignment that Voyagers were initially intended to take advantage of only happens once every 175 years (although if the goal is just max speed I don't know if favorable conditions happen more often than that)
    - guidoism 2y ago
      That’s just a standard chemical rocket for the initial push and then a few gravity assists right? Couldn’t an ion engine with a nuclear reactor providing the electricity accelerate more over that period? I’m genuinely curious, I don’t know the answer.
      - Sparkyte 2y ago
        Even an ion engine needs fuel. We shot out Voyager 1 in 1977. It has traversed 47 years of distance. There has been the talk of solar sails as well, but gravity assist propulsion is already so much easier to achieve for satellites.
- cdelsolar 2y ago
  The nuclear launched manhole cover is likely further
  - cyberlurker 2y ago
    I think that burned up before exiting our atmosphere.
    - cdelsolar 2y ago
      I'm not sure about that. At its launch speed (lower limit 66 km/s) it would have taken under a second to get to where the atmosphere is no longer thick enough.. would that have been enough time to vaporize it?
      - bgirard 2y ago
        It's the other way around. Regardless of speed, it has the same number of particles to displace. At high speed these particles you're hitting are like hitting a concrete wall. The faster you go, the worse it is, and the less time you have to cool down the heat you're generating.
  - ornornor 2y ago
    Which one is that?
User23 2y ago
I’m interested in the biopic about the engineer that fixed this. Anyone know anything?

yawpitch 2y ago

Not so silly, considering it’s almost certainly always going be the furthest man-made object in the Universe.

mlyle 2y ago
I hope not-- it may take a long time, but I hope we laser accelerate some probes really fast.
- dmbche 2y ago
  Eh - to send it where? Even laser accelerated, even if it gets to 0.1c, where is it gonna go? Edit0:typo
  - robin_reala 2y ago
    Alpha Centauri. See Breakthrough Starshot and other such potential missions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
    - dmbche 2y ago
      Obviously, no need to answer further, I'm just being grumpy I imagine. Man - why go there? What are we looking to learn? Do they have the kilometer Gw phased array yet? The meterwide/gram weight sails? The chips that weight one gram with comms and cameras and all that? And just to clarify, they can't flip and slow down, so it's a 0.15c flyby of alphacentauri, entirely automated. So hopefully the code does't fuck up in this alien environnement without human help. What do they expect to learn at that speed and with such small sensors? Like a picture of the planet, like we get telescopes? I sure wonder the speed at which that's going to transmit data. I'm just seeing "proof or concept" but this is mostly concept and no proof. And if this is "step one" of interstellar travel, what's step two? Edit0: Just reading the wiki this is so absurd -atmospheric turbulence is a challenge to deliver te GW laserb- so were planning on building a km phased array in space to accelerate the swarm. Just this itself is way way beyond realistic. Doesn't this breakdown at napkin math levels?
      - MagicMoonlight 2y ago
        Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and its code hasn’t broken. Construct a stack of starships in orbit and you would be able to get a probe there. It’s never about the technology, it’s about whether someone cares enough to spend the resources.
        dmbche 2y ago
        What do you mean about the starship stack? That's the array? For Voyager, I'll argue that it's mission is much simpler (doesn't need to aim forthe position of something 30 years in the future) and that we keep transmitting to it (the sheer distance will limit our involvement as the delays between transmissions grows). It's also not going at 0.15c, where it needs to do the calcs very quickly. I'm not sure how easy it would be to make a km wide Gw array on Earth, but building and powering it in space seems much, much harder. Just harvesting the GW takes 3 million solar panels. Just getting that to orbit seems unlikely. Even with very generous 1kg per panel we get 3 million kg to put in orbit, or 21 Falcon Heavy at max payload, or two years of putting nothing but solar panels up. It's so much. And then how much money is going to make the gram scale probe appear? Edit0: to clarify, the probe will have less time than the duration of the blink of an eye to take measurements. That's limiting what you can learn AND makes it very hard to aim correctly.
  - oneshtein 2y ago
    To the nearest interstellar object, when we will find one close to us. It's much more interesting than another star, because it may preserve the history of our galaxy in it deposits.
cryptoz 2y ago
A very cynical take. I expect we’ll pass it in 20-30 years.
- dgrin91 2y ago
  Voyager 1 has had an almost 50 year head start, and it was launched with a series of gravitational assists that are only possible every few hundred years. There is 0 chance anything will catch up to it in the next 50 years, and probably for several hundred more years after that, if ever.
  - Sharlin 2y ago
    That’s a really pessimistic take. Voyager 1 moves at ~17 km/s (and slowing down but it doesn’t really matter). That’s on the order of 0.0001 c and indeed just a half of Earth’s orbital speed, so a part of the year the probe is actually getting closer in Earth’s frame. A one-kg nanoprobe attaining 0.001 c would be perfectly feasible with today’s tech and would overtake Voyager 1 within a decade. Breakthrough Starshot proposes laser sail acceleration of gram-scale probes to > 0.1 c, a thousand times faster than V1, and nothing in the design requires fundamentally new tech. Such probes would claim the distance record in a few weeks of travel, no matter whether they’re launched twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now.
    - adaml_623 2y ago
      What scientific return are we getting from a gram sized probe moving at 30,000 km per second?
      - peterlada 2y ago
        Today: almost certainly nothing In a decade: almost certainly very little In a century: almost certainly more than the Voyager
        AlecSchueler 2y ago
Simon_ORourke 2y ago
"Always" is a pretty big leap (I hope).
- chumanak 2y ago
  Yes, but it will always be like that
hinkley 2y ago
That’s the major problem with generation ships. Unless you have a propulsion lab and scientists on the ship, earth will just keep making faster ships and when you arrive at your destination you may discover it has been inhabited for generations by people who left a hundred years after you did. The power of procrastination is great.
- financypants 2y ago
  I mentioned this point on a HN post a few months ago and someone said that the Voyager was launched at a very beneficial time, leveraging some gravitational pull of some celestial body, so it’s unlikely we can just make a faster ship and catch up/surpass it.
  - throwaway894345 2y ago
    Is there any reason that a new generation of ships couldn't leverage the same (or similar, if not better) gravitational pulls that benefited Voyager?
    - Rebelgecko 2y ago
      The "Grand Tour" alignment that Voyagers were initially intended to take advantage of only happens once every 175 years (although if the goal is just max speed I don't know if favorable conditions happen more often than that)
  - guidoism 2y ago
    That’s just a standard chemical rocket for the initial push and then a few gravity assists right? Couldn’t an ion engine with a nuclear reactor providing the electricity accelerate more over that period? I’m genuinely curious, I don’t know the answer.
    - Sparkyte 2y ago
      Even an ion engine needs fuel. We shot out Voyager 1 in 1977. It has traversed 47 years of distance. There has been the talk of solar sails as well, but gravity assist propulsion is already so much easier to achieve for satellites.
cdelsolar 2y ago
The nuclear launched manhole cover is likely further
- cyberlurker 2y ago
  I think that burned up before exiting our atmosphere.
  - cdelsolar 2y ago
    I'm not sure about that. At its launch speed (lower limit 66 km/s) it would have taken under a second to get to where the atmosphere is no longer thick enough.. would that have been enough time to vaporize it?
    - bgirard 2y ago
      It's the other way around. Regardless of speed, it has the same number of particles to displace. At high speed these particles you're hitting are like hitting a concrete wall. The faster you go, the worse it is, and the less time you have to cool down the heat you're generating.
- ornornor 2y ago
  Which one is that?

User23 2y ago

I’m interested in the biopic about the engineer that fixed this. Anyone know anything?