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Voyagers are the greatest technical achievement of human kind. Keeping in the space a piece of hardware run by a computer with power of today's car keys, in the
by piokoch 2y ago
Voyagers are the greatest technical achievement of human kind. Keeping in the space a piece of hardware run by a computer with power of today's car keys, in the hostile environment, outside freaking solar system is something that is the most amazing thing we have witnessed so far.
Kudos to all the people who made it happen and kept going this project, we owe them, as a humanity, really a lot.
Voyagers will keep flying across Milky Way, maybe they will last longer the the Earth itself, as the witnesses of our civilization.
- GuB-42 2y ago> Voyagers will keep flying across Milky Way, maybe they will last longer the the Earth itself Will they? Good thing I am tired and going to sleep right now, you almost nerd-sniped me. What will happen on the scale of millions to billions of years? Will it collide with something? Will it be slowly eroded by particles? Will it lose material by outgasing?
- pfdietz 2y agoIf I understand correctly, dust particles with a size of 0.1 microns are estimated to survive against sputtering or collisions with other grains for ~ 10^8 years. This suggests the spacecraft could survive trillions of years before substantial erosion, or more if the rate of supernovas in the galaxy declines with age. A competing process over the very long term is repeated close encounters with stars and stellar remnants. This tends to add kinetic energy to lighter objects. So, one would expect the spacecraft to gradually acquire more kinetic energy by random close encounters and eventually be ejected from the galaxy.