42 ms·

Can 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 coup

Can 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 ago
No, 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 ago
As 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 ago
  I never actually knew that. My mental model for how this works was way off; I'll have to read more.
  - baq 2y ago
    Play 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 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. 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.
    - mr_toad 2y ago
      > 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). I think that’s probably a very optimistic timescale. If there’s heavy industry on the moon inside 50 years I’d be surprised.
- 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
    The 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.
    - 2y ago
hinkley 2y ago
Strictly 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 ago
My 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 ago
  The 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 ago
      Yes, 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 ago
  The 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 ago
Even 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 ago
Not 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).

Can 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 ago

No, 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 ago

As 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 ago
I never actually knew that. My mental model for how this works was way off; I'll have to read more.
- baq 2y ago
  Play 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 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. 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.
  - mr_toad 2y ago
    > 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). I think that’s probably a very optimistic timescale. If there’s heavy industry on the moon inside 50 years I’d be surprised.
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 ago

Yes, 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 ago
  The 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.
  - 2y ago

hinkley 2y ago

Strictly 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 ago

My 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 ago
The 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 ago
    Yes, 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 ago
The 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 ago

Even 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 ago

Not 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).