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Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
- 31337Logic 2y agoTruly amazing!!
- iamgopal 2y agoCan we send a voyager 3 with much advance battery and sensor, and at much faster speed so that it may reach farther than voyager 1 and 2, in let’s say just couple of years ?
- HWR_14 2y agoNo, we cannot. We could make a Voyager 3, but I don't think there is any way to expect it to catch up with currently feasible technology. And it could only be launched at specific times. It certainly could have more advanced sensors and batteries. I don't know if the battery improvement would really matter on a decades long mission.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rlpb 2y agoAs far as I understand their speed mostly comes from gravity assists from Jupiter, so you'd have to wait for suitable orbital alignments and the basic technology for "much faster speed" doesn't exist.
- dnh44 2y agoI never actually knew that. My mental model for how this works was way off; I'll have to read more.
- baq 2y agoPlay Kerbal Space Program (the original, not the sequel). You’ll become an orbital mechanics pro in a couple days.
- skissane 2y ago> and the basic technology for "much faster speed" doesn't exist. Various forms of nuclear propulsion have been investigated. None of them are anywhere near ready for missions, but that seems to be more due to lack of investment in their development (and environmental/legal/regulatory/geopolitical/etc concerns) than any scientific obstacle. If NASA/etc were really serious about it (as in willing to spend multiple billions a year on it), it could probably be made to work in only a few years.
- ivan_gammel 2y agoThis probably can happen as soon as there’s some manufacturing and mining capacity beyond LEA, so that it’s safe to use nuclear technology without any environmental impact. Moon is an option here, so likely it’s 5-15 years after first Moon base is established (I‘d expect exponential growth of it).
- skissane 2y ago> This probably can happen as soon as there’s some manufacturing and mining capacity beyond LEA, so that it’s safe to use nuclear technology without any environmental impact The idea pursued nowadays is you launch using chemical propulsion and then only turn on the nuclear propulsion once you reach a safe distance from Earth. This is different from the original 1950s Project Orion which proposed to use nuclear pulse propulsion (i.e. repurposing nuclear weapons for propulsion) from the surface to orbit, which would have produced enough fallout to likely kill a handful of people per launch (in the long-run through higher cancer rates). The question then is - is it safe to launch nuclear material to orbit using chemical propulsion? Yes, we can secure it in containers designed to survive catastrophic loss of the launch vehicle. But, will the general public believe it is safe, even if it actually is? Possibly not-which is a political obstacle rather than a technical one. The other issue is that nuclear propulsion systems can be too large/heavy to launch on a single chemical rocket, but you could launch them as multiple modules assembled together in orbit. I don’t think this need or should depend on off-Earth manufacturing or mining capacity. I think it is going to be a long time before the highly complex manufacturing supply chains needed to turn raw materials into cutting edge technology like nuclear space propulsion systems exists off Earth. But we should be able to manufacture them modularly on Earth, such that in space we’d be doing module assembly rather than manufacturing.
- FriedPickles 2y ago> the basic technology for "much faster speed" doesn't exist. …but we’re very close. The next technique will be flying near the sun then deploying a solar sail for a huge speed boost. Voyager goes 3 AU/yr, solar sail boost with todays technology will enable 7-9 AU/yr. Highly recommend watching Slava Turyshev discuss his work on an SGL telescope, which employs this technique. https://www.youtube.com/live/lqzJewjZUkk?si=57VS4oqbaKEXmyOR https://www.youtube.com/live/lqzJewjZUkk?si=57VS4oqbaKEXmyOR
- gruturo 2y agoYes, but mostly no, also no, and, frankly, why would we. Yes: we could lift off a much heavier spacecraft, give it plenty of fuel, and many of its parts would be lighter than their 1970s equivalent, giving us lots of room for modern sensors No: the "battery" in the old ones is nuclear and it's going to be difficult to beat that (but not impossible: a nuclear stirling engine, either powered by fission or by decay, e.g. https://www.nasa.gov/technology/rps/stirling-convertor-sets-14-year-continuous-operation-milestone/ https://www.nasa.gov/technology/rps/stirling-convertor-sets-...) Also no: the old Voyagers benefited from a lot of gravity assists from half the solar system, thanks to an alignment which won't happen again until 2151 (https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5075/when-is-the-next-outer-planet-lineup-voyager https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5075/when-is-the-n...), so unless you're not in a hurry, we won't have that. Why would we: the _point_ of the Voyager crafts was to do close flybys and collect plenty of data from the outer planets, not to go as far away and as fast as possible. You want to be as slow as possible near them, so you have science time. You're rushing this part in order to get right away to the centuries of nothing which follow?
- voytec 2y ago> the "battery" in the old ones is nuclear and it's going to be difficult to beat that Newer atomic batteries can theoretically last centuries instead of decades. V'ger 1 atomic battery is based on Plutonium-238 which has a halflife of ~88 years. It's down to ~210W output from initial 470W at launch time. Americium-241 has a half-life of over 400 years.
- gruturo 2y agoThe longer the half life, the lower the power output, no free lunches. But by putting the same suitable radioactive lump in a stirling engine you can extract 4 times as much electricity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_radioisotope_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_radioisotope_generato... So yes maybe with Americium-241 we could have something which lasts 4 times a much _and_ gives us the same amount of power thanks to a SRG.
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- hinkley 2y agoStrictly speaking, the voyager missions already are the faster space craft that caught up with another spacecraft - Pioneer 10 and 11. Looks like we lost contact with 10 and 11 in 1995 and 2006 respectively. They both ran out of power and shut down. The voyager missions used a rare planetary alignment to get boosts. And a radioisotope thermal engine that has gotten pushback in later spacecraft designs, although they have ceramic versions now meant to address most of the issues. That said, New Horizons, which gave us those lovely shots of Pluto, was launched in 2006. But it is traveling faster than the Pioneers but slower than Voyagers, so it’ll be the third farthest away at some point.
- NikolaNovak 2y agoMy understanding is that 1. Our rocket / propulsion technology today may be cheaper (thx largely to SpaceX), but it doesn't really necessarily provide MUCH more delta V. Meanwhile 2. Voyager launches relied on a once-in-a-blue-moon (not quite once in two centuries) alignment of various planetary bodies to give a spectacular orbital slingshot boosts. So my limited understanding is that we can't really overtake voyagers very easily. Whether our current technology coild be made more reliable in the long term is another good point of discussion :-)
- vikingerik 2y agoThe alignment isn't what matters for overtaking Voyager. Jupiter alone is enough, and New Horizons nearly did. Jupiter accounts for the vast majority of any gravity-assist plan. Saturn has 30% the mass and 2/3 of the orbital velocity, so it could only add 20% more over what you get from Jupiter alone, and the ice giants are smaller and slower yet.
- Denvercoder9 2y ago> New Horizons nearly did. New Horizons didn't nearly overtake Voyager. It's currently traveling about 4 km/s slower, and as it's still closer to the Sun, it's also decelerating more.
- vikingerik 2y agoYes, I wrote that short for brevity. If you must have the full thing spelled out: New Horizons nearly got enough velocity at Jupiter to eventually overtake Voyager. 4 km/s is "nearly" in astronomical terms. New Horizons wasn't really trying to optimize for speed at Jupiter (its closest approach was over 10m km), and a spacecraft that did could easily overtake Voyager using Jupiter alone and not need an alignment with Saturn or anything else.
- pavon 2y agoThe alignment was important in that it allowed Voyager 2 to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus in a single mission using gravity assists. The final velocity of Voyager could be matched in other ways, but not exceeded by so much that a probe could catch up to the Voyagers any time soon.
- jfengel 2y agoEven if we could there isn't much point. There just isn't very much out where the Voyagers are, and there won't be for a long time. We're shutting down sensors on Voyager because there just isn't much to see. It's just vacuum. If we had something capable of getting to Voyager in a year that might be worthwhile, because it would stand a chance of getting somewhere interesting in a few decades. But we are absolutely nowhere near that level.
- Denvercoder9 2y ago> We're shutting down sensors on Voyager because there just isn't much to see. That's not why Voyager's sensors are being shut down, they're being shut down because the probes no longer have the power to run them.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- downrightmike 2y agoNot in our lifetimes
- vlovich123 2y ago> at much faster speed As others have pointed out, the speeds for Voyager 1 were because of gravity assist of Jupiter and Saturn while Voyager 2 was a gravity assist of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Jupiter & Saturn line up relatively often enough so we could try to outdo Voyager 1 speeds a bit with a lighter air craft due to various advancements. But it's unclear we'd learn anything really new from having sensors that reached further out and our technology for propulsion really hasn't meaningfully advanced to outdo gravity assists from Jupiter + Saturn. There's some proposals to use nuclear explosions behind a probe to achieve speeds of ~10k km/s which would be substantially faster but there's numerous obstacles (cost + international treaties banning the use of nuclear in space).
- grvbck 2y ago> let’s say just couple of years ? Not a couple of years. The Voyagers have been doing around 38 000 mph since the late 1970's. That is rougly 17 km/s. The proposed Interstellar Probe mission aims to do 20 km/s or slightly more. It will take it decades to overtake any of them (no actual overtaking will probably take place though, as its trajectory most likely will be different).
- heresie-dabord 2y ago> scientists and engineers back on Earth have increasingly had to deal with age-related maintenance issues There is perhaps unintended irony in that sentence, but it does evoke some Asimov stories in which human characters age while supporting technology.
- mannykannot 2y agoI like this quote: “We didn’t design them to last 30 years or 40 years, we designed them not to fail,” John Casani, Voyager project manager from 1975 to 1977, says in a NASA statement.
- jfengel 2y agoThat doesn't seem helpful. Nothing lasts forever, and if you don't figure out when it's going to fail, it's going to be sooner rather than later.
- sumeno 2y agoMaybe the guy who helped launch the two manmade objects furthest from earth knows more about how to build space probes than you
- KennyBlanken 2y agoShhhh, this is HN, where just like on reddit, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than a professional in said professional's field.
- pvaldes 2y ago> this is HN, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than <figure of authority> And they are correct At least on the programming part, having in mind the huge advances in computers since the Voyager was built. Any professional computer programmer here knows more in their field than a programmer from 70's. A Voyager built today with similar resources would be much better, 100% guaranteed. Voyager 1 was a fantastic machine done by a terrific team, but lets not pretend that the state of the art hasn't changed. Anybody with computer skills polished towards building a machine in 1977 would be basically unemployable for building a machine in 2024.
- metalman 2y agoIt's too bad this cant qualify as some sort of world record
- that_lurker 2y agoCould be the start of space records :-)
- metalman 2y agoI was struggling trying to think up any other plausible scenario, where one unit in a continiously operating piece of electronic /hard/soft ware was rebooted after such a long time and Voyager most likely has no competition in this regard or in a number of others sure speaks volumes for how well the nasa crew ,knew there stuff, and got it right durring that era,on budget,on time, and now doing inter generational space research making the actual designs and blue prints of the space craft, very much worth re examinining
- gruturo 2y agoWe have to way to know it it's actually the fastest and farthest object: A 1957 nuclear test was conducted underground, but the scientists decided to cap the borehole with a sizable concrete and metal plug. The nuclear explosion may or may not have caused said plug to reach space - the data from the cameras indicate it had at least 6 times the needed escape velocity, but it is difficult to estimate whether it would completely disintegrate or if enough of it would survive the atmosphere and whether it would "count" https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html (look for Pascal-B)
- ianburrell 2y agoCalculations show that it was completely destroyed in the atmosphere. Which makes sense, cause meteorites of similar size don't make it to the ground. It was also slower, 150,000 mph, than Parker Solar Probe, which reached 430,000 mph.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
- pupppet 2y agoI didn’t realize the Voyagers relied on a once in a 175 year planetary alignment. What a lucky break technology had advanced to the point we could make use of it.
- jmclnx 2y agoAnd I remember the "crazies" saying the world will come to an end due to that alignment. That belief was reported in the main stream media. When it did not happen, I think they moved on to 2012 :)
- timthorn 2y agoAh, yes - The Jupiter Effect: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3400930-the-jupiter-effect https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3400930-the-jupiter-effe...
- fwipsy 2y agoForward by Isaac Asimov? I'm surprised he would have his name associated with this.
- harrisi 2y agoNot just any foreword, a pretty big endorsement. You can borrow the book from the internet archive to read the full foreword, but here's the last bit: And in the end, it turns out that something will happen in 1982 that just may— No, no, read it for yourself. Read it carefully and you'll find it far more fascinating than the tale of any millionaire found stabbed in any library, locked or otherwise. And far more important, too especially if you live in California. ISAAC ASIMOV 17 April 1974
- akira2501 2y agoI think fascination with apocalypse is the fear of our individual mortality combined with the fear of missing out.
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- jonplackett 2y agoWere engineers 50 years ago just much smarter than we are now? It’s pretty unbelievable that these things still work. Or is there something systemic about how they were able to achieve so much so long ago with basically no computers to help.
- arcbyte 2y agoThere was much less overall complexity (and capability). These engineers interacted directly with capacitors and circuits to accomplish their tasks. Integrated circuits enable a lot of modern society, but it also segregates engineering between fabrication time and everything afterwards.
- jonplackett 2y agoI find that more analogue / mechanical type machines even more amazing in someways. Like how they say it ‘decided’ to switch to its backup radio. How are those decisions made on such basic hardware? I guess thinking mechanically is just a very foreign concept for me mostly making software
- avereveard 2y agoThey had lot less resources and knowledge to estimate the right amount of resilience for achieving the mission goals and erred on the side of cautions. You can see something similar happening in bridges, weight per meter load has come down considerably since the 60s because material understanding is much more advanced and they meed less margin for the same safety factor.
- soulofmischief 2y agoOur understanding of physics has also gotten much better, for example our understanding of tensegrity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurilpa_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurilpa_Bridge > The Kurilpa Bridge is a multiple-mast, cable-stay structure based on principles of tensegrity producing a synergy between balanced tension and compression components to create a light structure which is incredibly strong.
- kvemkon 2y agoDiscussed earlier: "NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause" (30.10.2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41992394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41992394
- Tempest1981 2y agoWorth a watch, imo: It's Quieter in the Twilight https://www.space.com/nasa-voyager-mission-engineers-documentary https://www.space.com/nasa-voyager-mission-engineers-documen... Interesting trying to manage their declining power budget. And decipher docs written 40+ years ago.
- gdubs 2y agoI'm reading Pale Blue Dot to my kids at night currently so this is really awesome. (The Voyager missions are described in excellent detail in ways that I never appreciated fully before.) It blows my mind that these are machines from the 8-track era. And they have fallbacks and redundancies that were completely ahead of their time.
- leobg 2y agoCool! I do the same thing with books like Asimov’s Earth and Space (science) or Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (fictional history). What other books can you recommend?
- Salgat 2y agoNASA loves to downplay expectations in case something goes wrong, but people really underappreciate just how overengineered these things are, which makes sense when a bad mission can be political suicide for their future funding.
- gdubs 2y agoIt was also incredibly on budget. I think Sagan says in the book it cost the individual American taxpayers in the single digit dollars.
- noselasd 2y agoSingle digit dollar sounds more like the Appollo program. I think it's been a long time since the entire NASA budget was more than a penny per tax dollar. NASA says the voyager mission cost 865 million dollars from the start in 1972 to Neptune encounter in 1989, and currently runs at 7 mllion dollars per year.
- ghoomketu 2y agoIt's fascinating how Voyager 1, despite my lack of space knowledge, utilizes a nuclear power source for 40+ years, offering steady and reliable power without any moving parts that could degrade over time. In contrast, India's decision to rely on solar panels led vikram lander to be dead in just 14 days due to lack of sunlight (afaik). I'm curious about the rationale behind this choice when nuclear power seems like a far superior option. Can someone shed light on this decision?
- selectodude 2y agoUsing plutonium works great but there are two issues. 1) they don’t output that much power. Few hundred watts at most, and they decay at a fixed rate. 2) you need to get your hands on a decent amount of plutonium. Great for dirty bombs, hard to source.
- floatrock 2y agoIsn't it something like space-reactor plutonium is a waste product from nuclear weapons production, and since we don't really make nuclear weapons at scale anymore, we aren't really making (refining?) plutonium anymore. And NASA has some amount on reserve, but they're rationing it out carefully. So the Clipper probe had to go with a massive solar array (100ft, the length of a basketball court) because they would rather save their plutonium for some future rover mission.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nick__m 2y agoit don't make sense to stock hot plutonium to use it later, it loose power and decays overtime wherever you use it or not!
- TkTech 2y agoBoth Canada and the US have restarted production specifically to produce RTGs for NASA, but the process takes time to scale up and automate. It's gone up 4x in 4 years and continues to increase, so this is a problem that will eventually be "fixed".
- ck2 2y agoImagine 100 years from now they come up with a probe engine that can get to 10% the speed of light, it would only take a month to reach Voyager. Even at only 1% it would take under a year, but lots of breakthroughs needed for even that.
- WalterBright 2y agoNow that we've got SpaceX cheap launches, it's time to launch a fleet of solar system probes and space telescopes. Why isn't this happening?
- teruakohatu 2y agoSee Three Body Problem (the books)
- tliltocatl 2y agoAFAIK launch vehicle cost were never the problem for deep space probes. Launch windows still are - Voyager was extremely lucky in this regard. And then there is probe design and construction - SpaceX made launches cheaper, but that just shift most of the cost into the payload. And then there is no point in having such a fleet if you there isn't enough funding for scientists to process the results.
- WalterBright 2y agoMost of the probes would be identical. Building two identical probes would cost only marginally more than 1, perhaps 10% more. > but that just shift most of the cost into the payload It reduces the cost, not shift it. > And then there is no point in having such a fleet if you there isn't enough funding for scientists to process the results. Plenty of funding would become available if the funding for junk science stops, such as: "In 2021, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $549,000 to a Russian lab performing experiments on cats, including removing part of their brains and seeing if they could still walk on treadmills, according to the Washington Times." https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/us-news/where-elon-musk-can-start-cutting-federal-spending/ https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/us-news/where-elon-musk-can-st...
- mmooss 2y ago> Most of the probes would be identical. Is there some existing plan? A paper that supports this idea? It's not clear to me that the probe we send to one place for one purpose is the same we'd send to another. > Building two identical probes would cost only marginally more than 1, perhaps 10% more. I've read from experts - somewhere here on HN - that isn't how the costs work. > Plenty of funding would become available if the funding for junk science stops, such as > "In 2021, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $549,000 to a Russian lab performing experiments on cats, including removing part of their brains and seeing if they could still walk on treadmills, according to the Washington Times." https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/us-news/where-elon-musk-can-st https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/us-news/where-elon-musk-can-st... $500k is not enough to matter for a space probe, and I don't see why that brain research is junk science. If you truly think the research was about half-brained cats, then you really should appreciate that research. :D
- tunnuz 2y agoThis stuff will never not blow my mind.
- renegade-otter 2y agoThat thing just won't die!
- bilsbie 2y agoI’m not saying it’s true but I really feel like I see this article once or twice a year. I’m not sure what’s going on.
- xanderlewis 2y agoI think there’ve been at least two recent episodes of trouble, including this one. I feel like I’ve seen more than two articles about it though.
- ethagknight 2y agoWould there not be some kind of benefit to send a chaser after the probes in order to act as a relay as the signal gets further away? Or is the ground based array just as good as anything we could put in space at this time?
- ta988 2y agoWouldn't it be difficult as one would need large antennas and excellent alignment? Voyager to earth is "relatively" easy it "just" beams toward the sun. And earth can afford to get big antennas scanning.
- wkat4242 2y agoNo, their RTGs are almost exhausted anyway so soon they won't have enough power to run anything.
- TylerE 2y agoThe voyager probes were built in an incredible hurry to take advantage of a once-in-a-few hundred years optimal gravitational boosting path. Something launched later would never have been able to keep up, plus the antenna would be so, so much worse. The ground reptilian networks have effective antenna lengrhs of miles.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoWhenever such an announcement is made, I keep asking myself something along the lines: "Just how much stuff did they put on board that thing, that there is always some way of using something differently or something different, to get back a working connection???" Incredible engineering.
- aardvarkr 2y agoI remember learning about Hubble telescope losing its gyroscopes in one axis so it couldn’t balance and was effectively dead until someone clever figured out you could use the pressure from the sun to act as a third axis of motion to keep the craft stable. Sometimes it’s not just the stuff onboard but the ingenuity of the engineers that saves the day
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sdmike1 2y agoWorking in the government space sector, generally speaking, you're given a mission lifetime which is seen as a minimum. your payload/spacecraft/instrument needs to last at least this long. some things end up being limited by the physics of the system (See the RTG on the Voyager probes for a common example, or CEMs on plasma spectroscopy instruments for a more obscure example). However, in pretty much all cases where the physics doesn't put a hard cap on the thing you're building, nobody wants the thing building to be the first thing, or critical point of failure of the whole system. jval43's quote puts it pretty well. It's not just that you're designing something to last, you're designing it not to fail. It also tends to help when you have a bunch of really smart folks from a number of disciplines working on the same problem. With that said, you need to walk a fine line as far as the level of redundancy and fallbacks you put in place versus the overall SWaP (Space Weight and Power) of the system. I can go somewhat deeper into SWaP issues if you would like.
- ad-astra 2y agoPlease do :)
- johnklos 2y agoI think the Voyager probes teach us lots about what's wrong with corporate America. Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, or that isn't built by committee where they just keep shipping requirements around from one department to another. Imagine if it weren't all proprietary and if it didn't have no public or even complete documentation. Think of all the problems we have instead: Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. It's like we've ceded control of our ability to do things to "methods" that corporations insist upon, even though they've been proven worse. Heck - if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running? It's nice to see when science takes priority to everything else, and the hardware reflects that.
- cmonreally123 2y agoWhat's wrong with the Boeing case on needing to be rebooted. It doesn't seem much worse then memory leaks in missle guidance tracking systems that exceed flight time. We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm?
- NL807 2y ago>We have finite resources So design systems that does not exceed those resources.
- cmonreally123 2y agoWhy? You increase cost for what? The Boeing example I believe related to this defect which occurs after 51 days of operation: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycle_51_days_stale_data/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04... This seems sane given that the planes don't operate for 51 days constantly (I'm not in aerospace so please correct me, it seems a reboot could occur with refueling without issue)
- jwpapi 2y agoDebugging must be fun
- bargainbot3k 2y agoFor the HN ultra-nerds: is there a book that details the voyager 1 construction including sensors, PCBs, materials compositions manufacturing processes and all that? I’m looking for something so dense I’ll need a therapist to find my way back to society afterwards. Truly curious thank you.
- AlexDragusin 2y agoThis PDF (101 pages) should get you started: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19660011758/downloads/19660011758.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19660011758/downloads/19...
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago>so dense I’ll need a therapist to find my way back to society afterwards Well, at least you are self enlightened to recognize your flaw...
- cryptozeus 2y ago"So much universe and so little time" - Terry Pratchett
- darwin11 2y agoIt's just amazing how little progress in space flight has been since then and since the Apollo missions. I was just looking at some newspapers from 1969 (saved by my mother-in-law) and it was all about the Moon mission, and what awaits us - they talked about settlements throughout the Solar system, flying cars and so on and so on. Given what happened since, it was a huge disappointment. And now ancient Voyager is our last best hope to explore the outer rim.
- andyp-kw 2y agoHow much value are the Voyager's providing us at the moment, in terms of scientific data?
- rebolek 2y agoIt's invaluable as we don't have any other probe at that distance.
- peter_retief 2y agoI still get a thrill everytime I hear that Voyager 1 is sending us messages. I would rate it as the greatest experiment of modern times.