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NASA Shuts Off Voyager Science Instrument
- HenryBemis 2y agoI hope & wonder that if some spaceship find this space object a thousand or a million years from now (a-la Star Trek), the captain will tell with a stern voice (ofc like Patrick Stewart's) to the Science Officer "calculate the trajectory of the object, and give the coordinates to the Helm. then engage with Warp 9. I will be in my quarters getting some tea". EDIT: I hope it's Jean-Luc and not The Borg!!
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoIt's spooky to know that it will outlive Earth and likely be the last remaining physical evidence that humans were ever here.
- jacobgkau 2y agoWhy do you think it's particularly likely that two tiny objects running out of power will not only outlive Earth, but also any future objects sent from Earth to do the same things they're doing now? Or are you betting on the lack of future space exploration probes and relatively quick destruction of the Earth?
- f001 2y agoIf I were to guess it would be the latter. We seem to be heading for it rather quickly at least.
- misnome 2y agoThe chance of them hitting anything in the time it takes the sun to swallow the earth is probably tiny? As for more probes - getting more speed than these did efficiently is probably hard, let alone the fact that they don’t generate personal profit probably stops them being politically viable for a while…
- hackeraccount 2y agoI was just reading a book that touched on Ancient Rome. The author tried to convey the significance of the Council of Nicaea by comparing it to the furor over Global Warming. I only mention that to say that the motivations of people in the future will probably seem odd to us and it's possible ours may seem equally odd to them. Not odd in the sense that they are intellectually inscrutable but - like people getting excited over the matters theological - that they're emotionally inscrutable.
- linguaz 2y ago> I was just reading a book that touched on Ancient Rome. The author tried to convey the significance of the Council of Nicaea by comparing it to the furor over Global Warming. Could you please share the title of this book?
- jacobgkau 2y ago> getting more speed than these did efficiently is probably hard, A new probe wouldn't necessarily need to travel faster than these to not be on Earth when the sun dies. The idea of there being a minuscule chance the Voyager probes hit anything is fair, but even a third one of the exact same model launched in the exact same direction has just as much chance of surviving just as long, barring wild speculation that could easily go either way.
- misnome 2y agoRight, of course, I think I misread the parents’ > but also any future objects sent from Earth to do the same things As somehow saying something about the “furthest”
- floxy 2y ago>getting more speed than these did efficiently is probably hard Here is one approach using solar sails that would get up to 22 AU/year (~6 times faster than Voyager 1): https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?si=Ol20sGMnsEMhRVf1&t=883 https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?si=Ol20sGMnsEMhRVf1&t=883 ...and then further down in TRL: using laser pushed light sails to get over 10% of the speed of light: https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24/items/wikipedia-scholarly-sources-corpus/10.2514.zip&file=10.2514%252F3.8632.pdf https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...
- mystified5016 2y agoIIRC we've projected that there's nothing in their path for millions of years, as far as we can reasonably predict. Whether humans will still exist or our planet is a glowing radioactive waste by the time the voyagers encounter a new star is not a given.
- nyokodo 2y ago> It's spooky to know that it will outlive Earth and likely be the last remaining physical evidence that humans were ever here. Although eventually a rather obscure form of evidence as it'll gradually become a melted blob of constituent materials from cosmic rays.
- ars 2y agoActually that's pretty unlikely - Earth will last longer than Voyager. The Sun becoming a red giant is the risk for Earth. We're talking 5 billion years here. But the voyagers have interstellar particles and dust to contend with, 5 billion years of abrasion from particles will wear them away to nothing. On top of that they will eventually come near a random star which will eat them, or at least damage them. For example in 40,000 years they'll come pretty near some stars. In 5 billion years? Lots of stars. Earth will easily outlive them.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago> come near a random star which will eat them Not a physicist, but I thought this didn't really happen in orbital mechanics, instead they'll just orbit said star.
- wkat4242 2y agoDepends on their relative speed and angle.
- ars 2y agoIf they are far enough away from the star that's correct. i.e. if the star was a point source. But if they get close they'll slow down by interaction with the atmosphere of the star. Which is more likely than random chance because the star is attracting them.
- immibis 2y ago"We determine that previous generations of earthlings believed spacecraft could be powered by lumps of lead. Silly earthlings."
- smolder 2y agoUnfortunately the sort of exponential advance of technology we imagined through Star Trek seems to have been overoptimistic. If humans ever leave the solar system it'll be on something like a generational ship, or in some kind of freezedried/informational form where we're reconstituted much later at our destination.
- rob74 2y agoI assume you are aware of the plot of the first Star Trek movie (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur...)? Picard was not involved however...
- ilamont 2y agoVoyager 6!
- hackeraccount 2y agoWhat would be found here in a thousand years much less a million? My attitude is that it's something similar to getting ready for the end of the world by putting money in a savings account. If the money (or gold under your bed, cans of beans in the basement or even a pistol in your nightstand) does any good then it's not the end of the world. If the universe is so crowded or so good at finding things like voyager that it's found in a meaningful (i.e. before humanity goes extinct or joins the godhead) time frame then we would have that encounter if voyager existed or not.
- HankB99 2y ago> What would be found here in a thousand years much less a million? Possibly an advanced civilization that says "No, not ours."
- netsharc 2y agoHah.. "That belongs to the previous tenants. The probe is one of the few interesting things they did, otherwise they were terrible planet owners, they fought with each other and didn't appreaciate what they had, they wrecked the whole place."
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoIt might also be used by the Deceptions to record history in an attempt to prevent the Autobots from winning the war in Cybertron. (Assuming my hazy memories of Beast Wars are correct)
- outworlder 2y ago> calculate the trajectory of the object Easier said than done. The Earth will be nowhere near where it is today. I assume such advanced civilization would be able to do the calculations, but it's going to be tricky. I hope they share with us their ways to solve the n-body problem.
- ForOldHack 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#:~:text=The%20trajectories%20that%20enabled%20the%20Voyager%20spacecraft,reduced%20its%20velocity%20away%20from%20the%20Sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#:~:text=The%20...
- wkat4242 2y agoDon't forget we also included an engraved disk with our galaxy postal address so that isn't even necessary.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43274184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43274184
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- picafrost 2y agoI highly recommend "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022), a documentary about the team maintaining these spacecraft as the end of their mission draws nearer. It adds a tremendous amount of context to articles like this. The engineering involved in making these spacecraft durable for as long as they have been is truly awe inspiring. As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years. I wish it wasn't.
- CharlesW 2y agoTrailer: https://itsquieterfilm.com/trailer https://itsquieterfilm.com/trailer
- ListeningPie 2y agoLook like it's part of an Apple TV subscription https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/its-quieter-in-the-twilight/umc.cmc.1d5x2oojccd97k3va00gqwrla https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/its-quieter-in-the-twilight/um...
- ndiddy 2y agoThat documentary was fantastic. Another good resource is this paper from 2016 on what all the equipment/computing systems on Voyager do and what the team had done to keep the mission going as of that point. https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf
- procarch2019 2y agoAs an OT systems architect I am totally floored. We design and plan for systems lifecycle on a ~20yr scale, with OT hardware (not the controls hardware, that’s closer to 10-20) lifecycle much shorter (~5 yr). Obvious on Earth we can afford luxuries of adopting new things, which actually shortens a total system lifecycle since new tech drives new designs. I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.
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- bebefromsudan 2y ago[flagged]
- zettabomb 2y agoYou're trolling, right?
- rich_sasha 2y agoWhen I saw the headline, I was briefly worried this is DOGE...
- niwtsol 2y agoBoth voyagers have golden records on them - a copper disk that is gold-plated that has a bunch of images and messages from earth. Carl Sagan was the lead on picking what was on the disk. It shows some basic math, phoots, and has recordings of people saying hello from across the world in different languages- https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-record-overview/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
- Der_Einzige 2y agoReminds me of the opening to one of my favorite games of my childhood! https://youtu.be/dlBJaKSSOXU?t=31 https://youtu.be/dlBJaKSSOXU?t=31
- ForOldHack 2y agoCreated by NASA with consulting from Carl Sagen, and his wife, Ann Druyan, contained two culturally important works of music: Johnny B. Good, and The Well-Tempered Clavier - Bach, by Glenn Gould. There was a cartoon, in OMNI magazine, were two scientists look at each other after decoding the first S.E.T.I Message: "Send More chuck Berry."
- ListeningPie 2y agoTo motivate deep space travel we should decide these records are dangerous and try to track them down (after voyager is out of range for radio control).
- JackFr 2y agoLove everything about Voyager, but some lazy editing in the article. It opens with them "cruising through interstellar space for more than 47 years" and then later mentions that they only reached interstellar space in 2012 and 2018. The project deserves better, even in a puff piece!
- vzaliva 2y agoI wonder if they could use a time-sharing approach. Instead of permanently shutting down instruments, they could run different sets, with a maximum of three at a time.
- outworlder 2y agoTake a day for them to send commands. If anything goes wrong and they use too much power, that's it.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoCould the heat changes from being powered on/off multiple times not risk damage?
- rglover 2y agoIt's mind blowing that engineering that took place almost 50 years ago is still floating through space, giving us valuable data. It's depressing to realize that the style of engineering that accomplished such a feat is all but dead.
- bgirard 2y agoLook up golden age fallacy. Different projects have different requirements. You're selectively remembering the pieces of software that survived 50 years and forgetting the ones that didn't. I'm sure some projects written today will survive 50 years.
- me_me_me 2y agoyeah... but there is a counterargument. we can't go back to the moon. We did, now we can't.
- Bjartr 2y agoBut that's incorrect, we can go back to the moon any time, there just hasn't been a strong enough incentive to really make the cost worth it for either science or commerce until recently.
- me_me_me 2y ago[dead]
- redeux 2y agoWe can land robots on Mars and a private company just landed a craft on the moon, but we can’t go back?
- ForOldHack 2y agoThe Apollo program cost the United States $25.8 billion between 1960 and 1973, which is equivalent to about $318 billion in 2023 dollars. The Apollo 11 mission alone cost about $355 million in 1969 dollars, They had over 23,000 engineers on the ground. Now there are less than 3,000. We can, but ...
- aaroninsf 2y ago[flagged]
- tchbnl 2y agoNot sure if this is a joke, but it was powered off to extend battery life.
- amelius 2y agoCurious how many people were still working full-time on that mission.
- jedberg 2y agoI have a special place in my heart for the Voyagers. They were launched just a few weeks after I was born, so I never have to remember how long they've been flying. And when I was 9 or 10, I took a tour of JPL. They sent me home with an envelope of about 300 8x10 pictures, many of which were from the Voyager missions (but no Neptune pics because it hadn't gotten there yet!). Those pictures decorated my walls until I left for college. I'll be sad when they finally shut down the last instruments and the Voyagers go silent, speeding through space with a message of peace.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoYup, and “pale blue dot.” Knew I wanted to work in that field at ~7 and ~47, but somehow forgot at ~17. Guess I didn’t appreciate at the time how computers and internet would work their way into everything. Believe/thought I needed to become a physicist, an interesting subject but not as a career.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wkat4242 2y ago> The Voyagers are powered by heat from decaying plutonium, which is converted into electricity. Each year, the aging spacecraft lose about 4 watts of power. From the article. This is not really correct. The plutonium doesn't decay that fast. Its half life is about 87 years. So it's still way above half. I Unfortunately the thermoelectric converters that are losing efficiency too. Otherwise there'd still be enough power for a long time. Still pretty awesome they lasted so long of course.