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Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
- TechRemarker 11mo agoNo, not "About to". It's this time "next year".
- troupo 11mo ago> No, not "About to". It's this time "next year". 48 years in space and a light-day from Earth? I think it qualifies for "about to" :) (At this point 1 year is ~2% of total time in space)
- chrisweekly 11mo agosure - but this time next year is obv more relevant
- knorker 11mo agoChristmas also starts earlier every year. I guess ScienceClock wanted a "first!".
- mlmonkey 11mo agoI've been reading such posts for years. Every few months, "Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object ever!" or "Voyager 1 about to leave the Solar System!" Well duh!
- jmclnx 11mo agoKind of a dup, but the article linked here is different https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046260
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- homarp 11mo agoalso discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908483
- NooneAtAll3 11mo agonovember 202 6
- jesprenj 11mo ago> Error establishing a database connection
- uyzstvqs 11mo agoSite is down? Archive: https://archive.is/55yNp https://archive.is/55yNp Headline is also misleading. It will do so in November 2026, about a year from now.
- croisillon 11mo agowell, that's only about 30 light-minutes left
- firefax 11mo ago>Site is down? They got Slashdotted ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
- tonyhart7 11mo agocant wait when Voyager 6 reach earth
- nntwozz 11mo agoV'ger, was looking for a Star Trek reference and HN delivered.
- SAI_Peregrinus 11mo agoV'ger raises the question of how Starfleet missed it for so long, given how slow the Voyager probes were and how near-future the Star Trek timeline is.
- chistev 11mo agoWrote about the Voyager probes two days ago in my blog - The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void. Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
- Sharlin 11mo agoVoyager 2 was the real beneficiary of the rare outer planet alignment, as it went on the famous Grand Tour, visiting all four of the giants. It did gravity assists at Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. [1] shows the rough velocity of V2 over time. Voyager 1 was directed to perform a flyby of Titan, at the cost of being thrown out of the ecliptic and being unable to visit the ice giants like its sister. But this was deemed acceptable due to Titan's high science value. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_-_velocity_and_distance.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_-_velocity...
- creata 11mo agoTo save someone two seconds of searching, NASA animation of Voyager 2's trajectory (time in the bottom-left corner): https://youtu.be/l8TA7BU2Bvo https://youtu.be/l8TA7BU2Bvo
- snowwrestler 11mo agoThis is great. I did not realize Voyager 2 also left the ecliptic at the end of its tour.
- vikingerik 11mo agoThat happened because Voyager 2 went over Neptune's north pole rather than an equatorial trajectory. Both to get a look at a giant planet's polar regions, and because that would get it closest to the moon Triton. So Voyager 2's trajectory got bent southward out of the ecliptic plane as a result of that. While I'm here: why didn't Voyager 2 continue to slingshot to Pluto? The answer is that its trajectory would have had to bend by about 90° at Neptune, which would have required an apex closer to Neptune's center of mass than the planet's own radius - it would have crashed into the planet instead.
- Mistletoe 11mo agoWhen I read stats like this I realize how stuck in this solar system we are. I wonder if billionaires would care for the planet more if they knew that Earth is honestly just it for humans, for maybe forever.
- im_down_w_otp 11mo agoNah, the whole second-Earth, terraforming nonsense is pure rationalization for whatever they want to do. If they weren’t using that as a post hoc justification, they’d just land on something else.
- lm28469 11mo agoIt gets even better when you think about all the damage we've done in ~200 years of industrial revolution. We can't keep our perfect home in working order after so little time but they believe we'll transform dead rocks with no atmospheres in paradise...
- mr_toad 11mo agoI’m not aware of any organisation or individual that has actual plans (backed with actual investment) for terraforming anything. This is a straw man argument.
- lm28469 11mo agoDork in chief always delivers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_progr... > "We bring you Mars", a rendering of a terraformed Mars at SpaceX Headquarters
- astroflection 11mo agoCarl Sagan's reflection on the Pale Blue Dot( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot ) image seem relevant: "From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. "
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- iberator 11mo agoThis is an absurdly simplified article :/ Wikipedia is way better and more technical.
- snowwrestler 11mo agoAt current pace, Voyager 1 will have taken 49 Earth years to reach one light-day. That means it will reach a light year in approximately the Earth year 19,860.
- acec 11mo ago50 years for 1 light day... so to arrive Alpha Centauri that is 4.2 light years far away... 76549 years and 364 days :-)
- pjerem 11mo agoLess than that is you are constantly accelerating.
- malfist 11mo agoLonger than that if you are constantly decelerating.
- SAI_Peregrinus 11mo agoAnd exactly that if you're talking about Voyager 1, which is on a ballistic trajectory.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jandrese 11mo agoIf you can figure out a way to apply thrust that doesn't require you to lug mass with you and throw it out the back of your spacecraft you will open up the stars to exploration. If not the rocket equation will wreck your plans every time.
- deadbabe 11mo agoWhy? 75k years in geological timescales is nothing. If there are creatures who could live longer than that, perhaps by hibernating or just having really long lifetimes, space exploration is feasible with slow craft.
- jandrese 11mo ago75k years of reliable operation for complex machines operating in a hostile environment is a different story. This includes organic life. You can't just bottle everything up and wake up thousands of years in the future, you will be under constant bombardment by high energy particles, micrometeorites, and the relentless cold vacuum of space with no access to new raw material or energy for almost the entire trip. If you can make that kind of trip the question becomes why bother? You could have used the same technology (actually a much easier version of the tech since you will have access to external resources and don't need to attach enormous engines to get it moving and then stopping at the destination) to use the almost unlimited space in your home solar system instead. Unless your sun is literally about to explode it is hard to make the argument for the incredibly difficult and long journey to a neighboring solar system.
- dtgriscom 11mo ago"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
- vee-kay 11mo agoThis old video is a beautiful and astounding demonstration of just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big the Universe is, and where in all this endless space our dear favourite little Pale Blue Dot (Earth) resides: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-3Oq_82XNA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-3Oq_82XNA We all Earthlings are extremely lucky to be alive and thriving (or trying to) in such a beautiful bountiful rarest-of-rare ecosystem that somehow survived and thrived despite all the vagaries and vastness of spacetime.
- chistev 11mo agoWHAT! I've read a ton about immense distances and time, but still get wowed when I read analogies or see visualizations like this. Crazy stuff, man. https://youtu.be/rWp5ZpJAIAE?si=UKIfhAlrz0IcXAZa https://youtu.be/rWp5ZpJAIAE?si=UKIfhAlrz0IcXAZa
- dtgriscom 11mo agoThe classic, from 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
- vee-kay 11mo agoAwesome, thanks. I think the video I had linked was Google's tribute to this Power Of Ten video that you have linked, a classic video that demonstrates the scale of the Universe from the micro to the macro perspectives in a scaling increase by a factor of ten for each scene. Another relevant video (thanks to user christev for sharing the link): A Brief History of Geologic Time: https://youtu.be/rWp5ZpJAIAE https://youtu.be/rWp5ZpJAIAE Absolutely humbling to realise how infinitesimally small and irrelevant our existence is, in the grand scheme of theme. Nature and science are amazing.
- glenstein 11mo agoNot that we would literally do this with Voyager, but it makes me wonder at the potential utility of a string of probes, one sent every couple of [insert correct time interval, decades, centuries?], to effectively create a communication relay stretching out into deep space somewhere. My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit from a relay and (b) they benefited from gravity slingshots due to planetary alignments that happen only once every 175 years. So building on the Voyager probes is a no-go. But probes sent toward Alpha Centauri that relay signals? Toward the center of the Milky Way? Toward Andromeda? Yes it would take time scales far beyond human lifetimes to build out anything useful, and even at the "closest" scales it's a multi year round trip for information but I think Voyager, among other things, was meant to test our imaginations, our sense of possible and one thing they seem to naturally imply is the possibility of long distance probe relays. Edit: As others rightly note, the probes would have to communicate with lasers, not with the 1970s radio engineering that powered Voyagers 1 and 2.
- Aperocky 11mo agoNot useful, because the signal are too weak to be picked up probe to probe. On earth, the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the size of a football field; same with sending of the signal.
- nntwozz 11mo agoWhat if the probes carry smaller probes left behind at specific intervals that act as repeaters? These baby probes could unfold a larger spiderweb antenna the size of a tennis court.
- jandrese 11mo agoThe problem is each relay needs its own power source so it's not going to be as light and small as you would like. Solar power doesn't work very well outside of the solar system, or even really in the outer solar system. On the plus side your big probe could push off of the small probe to give itself a further boost, also necessary because otherwise the small probes need thrusters to slow themselves to a stop.
- elashri 11mo agoWow, this gives a reflection about our future. The nearest potentially habitable planet known is Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri about 4 light‑years from Earth (at least it is in a habitable zone of its star) [1]. So we don't have a choice actually except protecting and make sure our planet survives. That's regardless if it really would be able to support life as we know or not (probably not). [1] https://science.nasa.gov/resource/proxima-b-3d-model/ https://science.nasa.gov/resource/proxima-b-3d-model/
- onethought 11mo agoOr we learn how to make uninhabitable planets habitable. Would also help us “save” this one. (Funny how we say “save the planet” when we really mean “save people/complex life”).
- mindslight 11mo agoGiven that there is very little interest in developing commons here on earth (especially new types of commons from whole cloth), the shape that "making uninhabitable planets habitable" would likely take is that of living in bubbles rather than some kind of broad-scale terraforming. This would intrinsically shape society towards top-down authoritarian control, rather than allowing for distributed individual liberty. In this light, Earth's bountiful distributed air, water, and wildlife should be viewed as a technological-society-bootstrapping resource similar to easily-accessible oil and coil stored energy deposits.
- onethought 11mo agoSome handwavy logic there, both on why bubbles instead of terraforming and also why authoritarian control given bubbles.
- mindslight 10mo agoIt's not "handwavy logic". It called reasoning based on heuristics developed from many observations (ie wisdom). From what I've seen here now on Earth, large scale coordination of projects where the benefits end up mostly diffuse is effectively impossible, especially in the modern environment. Thus private ownership of scaled back projects, organized by corporate authoritarianism as we see for most businesses here now on earth. Could we possibly have an Earth country/company developing open-space terraforming, investing with the idea they will develop owned colonies, but then a popular revolt throws off the authoritarian control and institutes distributed rights (ala the American Revolution) ? Sure, that's possible. But that also just seems unlikely to be given modern information systems facilitating large scale surveillance, sentiment control, and promoting singular authoritarian perspectives. Like we're currently in the process of rolling back those hard-won distributed rights here now on Earth ("slowly at first, then all at once").
- turbonegrofa 11mo ago[dead]
- zkmon 11mo agoHow is the link with earth maintained at this distance? Is it really a powerful transmitter that sends signals without attenuation?
- ferguess_k 11mo agoI hope the Voyagers are not the furthest man-made item that we send into the universe in the whole civilization.
- gattr 11mo agoOnce we develop more efficient propulsion (fission, fusion, light sails, etc.), would you like for someone to catch the Voyagers and bring them back into a museum? I myself am not sure. (Perhaps a "live museum" instead, keep them on their trajectories, but surround with a big space habitat with visitor center and whatnot.)
- firefoxd 11mo agoNow the question is, what time is it in voyager 1? With time dilation, the "now" on Voyager is out of sync with our now. I was watching star wars recently and when Han Solo casually say "we should be in Alderaan at 0200 hours", I paused for a second. What does that even mean [0]? Traveling through space is challenging today, but after we figure that out, we will have to face the problem of time keeping across the galaxy. [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/galactic-timekeeping https://idiallo.com/blog/galactic-timekeeping
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> With time dilation, the "now" on Voyager is out of sync with our now A couple minutes [1]. > we will have to face the problem of time keeping across the galaxy Not really. Barring relativistic travel, it’s not dissimilar from the problem seagoing voyagers faced on long trade routes. Ship time is set based on the convenience of the passengers and the route. [1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/56055/if-voyager-1-were-to-return-to-the-earth-now-how-much-younger-it-would-be-tha https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/56055/if-voyager-1...
- chistev 11mo agoWhy a couple minutes?
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> Why a couple minutes? …because that’s what the math says? Based on Voyager’s relative velocity it’s expected to be about 2 seconds younger than it would have been had it stayed on Earth.
- udev4096 11mo agoThe article points that by 2030, we will lose comms with voyager. Is there a way to avoid it?
- dgrin91 11mo agoHere is a funny thought experiment - the distance from Voyager to Earth varies by approximately 16 light minutes throughout the year. Why? Because it takes ~8 minutes for light to go from the Sun to the Earth, so presuming the Voyager is roughly planar with the Sun/Earth (I'm just assuming yes), that gives a variance of ~16 minutes depending on where the earth is on its orbit. Now I'm presuming they aren't using the actual Earth position, but rather an average Earth position (which is basically just the Sun's position). Since Voyager is ~30 light minutes away from being 1 light-day away, that means this ~16 minute change can affect our 1 light-day mark by up to ~6 months!
- jamesgill 11mo agoIf Voyager could stay operational and keep its speed of ~61,000 km/hr, it would reach the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) in about 72,000 years. My mind understands the numbers, but can't grasp them.
- generic92034 11mo agoNo, it would no reach that star. It is not aimed at it but at the constellation Ophiuchus.
- jamesgill 11mo agoYou're right; I was thinking of distance traveled, not direction.
- ksymph 11mo agoFor reference, the oldest cave drawings we know of were made by neanderthals around ~70,000 years ago [0]. [0] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2018/02/neanderthals-art.page https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2018/02/neanderthals-art....
- trenning 11mo agoPróxima Centauri is about 250 million years older than our sun. Makes it not-impossible their earth like planet had advanced entities capable of sending their own voyager towards earth. Possibly it flew by while we were still in our Mesozoic Era and all they saw were dinosaurs.
- chistev 11mo agoI love thinking about things like this, but we will never know! Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I traveled back in time to the days of the Dinosaurs and just observed how the world was back then. But I wonder if I'd be able to survive. The atmosphere, environment, microbes, etc, would be drastically different from what we've evolved to handle. Millions of years ago is a very long time! Edit: Apparently microbes from millions of years ago would be so evolutionary distant that they might not regard me as host.
- sgt 11mo agoTrump will turn this into "American spaceships, the best in the world, world class probes, now light years away from Earth to find who knows what treasures lie there."
- throwaw12 11mo agoWhat happens if Voyager decides to go back home?
- _trampeltier 11mo agoWe are flying "faster" on earth. You often hear about the fatality rate per 100 million or 1 billion passenger miles in transportation statistics, but over the last 15 years, U.S. airlines have averaged less than 1 fatality per passenger light-year traveled https://x.com/RyanRadia/status/1764868263903723874 https://x.com/RyanRadia/status/1764868263903723874
- jquery 11mo agoTechnically when tweeted for the given selective timespan, but no longer true since the crash this year in DC. Still, mind blowing. When fact checking this I learned we went over 2 passenger light years worth of airline travel with no fatalities during that time frame. Incredible safety record. Real shame this year has been so terrible for our reputation.
- _trampeltier 11mo agoYes, when I saw the tweet, I thought the next crash might be near, and then happened DC soon after.
- jquery 11mo agoEven if you include that crash in the numbers, the safety numbers are still incredible. Something like 10 passenger-light-days per fatality. Quite lumpy though, with the median deaths per year being 0, and the average number of deaths being 5-10. Good news is that air travel is getting radically safer. If you do the "flight passenger light year" math for 1980-2000, you only make it a few light-hours per fatality, and for the 20 years prior to that, it was about 50 light minutes per fatality. Still safer than cars, on average (although some cars are much safer than others, and a lot of your risk depends on driving habits).
- Vinnl 11mo agoI'm kinda interesting in the same statistics for trains, although I wouldn't be surprised if we don't travel near that distance with trains.
- AbraKdabra 11mo ago"is about" "On November 2026" I know it's like a nanosecond in astronomical time, but come on...
- theoldgreybeard 11mo agoWe're never getting out of this solar system, are we?
- chistev 11mo agoHaha, never doubt science! You never know. Centuries ago, humans then would have regarded today's technological feats as impossible. But, yeah, I don't think we are ever leaving the Milky Way. Lol
- redox99 11mo agoUnless we go extinct, I would assume eventually it will happen. Maybe in tens of thousands of years.
- steve_taylor 11mo agoIf we don't wipe ourselves out in the next 1000 years, I think we'll launch manned missions to other star systems that make it to their destination hundreds and even thousands of years into the future, with their original crew still alive.
- snickerer 11mo agoPhysics are not so bad for interstellar travel. We just need a an engine that accelerates our space ships with 1g constantly. With that, we would reach something like 80% lightspeed after one year. Exactly in the middle between start and destination, we would turn the ship around and start accelerating towards earth again. A trip to Alpha Centauri could be done in less than 4 years ship-time. Earth-time would be some years longer. 1g constant acceleration would be quite comfy for humans. The only thing we need for this plan is the constantly running engine. I propose to bend space-time in front (or behind) the ship, for it to keep falling forwards.
- GMoromisato 11mo agoThe Voyagers are just the beginning. We can't see it yet, stuck as we are, in the present moment, filled with strife, failure, and disappointment. But the years and centuries to come will see us colonize the solar system, bringing new opportunities for millions, while easing the drain on Earth's ecosystem. How can I be so sure? Because in the long arc of history that is what we've always done. We went from Africa to Asia to Europe and all the way to the Americas, founding cities and developing technology every step of the way. We launched into the Pacific, exploring island after island, eventually finding a new world in Australia. We have outposts on Antarctica and in low-Earth orbit. And I'm certain that, this decade, humans (Americans, Chinese, or both) will once again walk on the moon. The people who launched the Voyagers believed that the future would come--they built a machine that would last for decades, knowing that people would benefit from its discoveries. Without that belief, they would have never tried it. That's my lesson from the Voyagers: we have to believe the future will be better than the past, so that we can build that future. That what we've always done. We are all voyagers, and always have been.
- GalaxyNova 11mo agoThat colonization was primarily driven by the need to obtain resources. Today and in the future, there is no reason to should send humans to gather resources when we can send robots to do it instead.
- GMoromisato 11mo agoPast colonization happened because individuals made choices they felt would benefit them. Even if the only goal of colonization is getting resources (which I dispute), some individuals will risk colonization to get resources that they can't obtain at home. Resources are not evenly distributed across a population and, and every piece of land is owned by someone, but not everyone owns land. The cost of space travel will continue to drop, and at some point it will make sense for people to seek their fortune there. Moreover, we didn't land on the moon in 1969 to get resources, and we're not going to land in the 2020s for resources. The reasons are complex, and not always logical, but they are definitely not about resources. I don't see any reason why that would change in a hundred years.
- j_walter 11mo ago> Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation. Compare that to the Moon (1.3 seconds), Mars (up to 4 minutes), and Pluto (nearly 7 hours). These numbers aren't right...Mars is 4 minutes MINIMUM, but could be up to 22-ish minutes at the maximum distance between Earth and Mars. This is also one way, double that for communication and a response.
- tomasphan 11mo agoRight, that also caught my eye. There is no way Mars is closer than Sol (~8 minutes) when it’s on the other side of Sol. This article has some problems.
- danishSuri1994 11mo agoIt’s wild how Voyager forces two truths to sit together: Technically, what we’ve done is almost boringly modest. ~17 km/s ~1 light-day in ~50 years No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now On cosmic scales it’s… basically still on our doorstep. Psychologically, it’s still one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done. We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it would never see the end of the story. We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that the future would exist and might care. I keep coming back to this: Voyager isn’t proof that interstellar travel is around the corner. It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective. Whether we ever leave the solar system in a serious way probably depends less on physics and more on whether we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in centuries without collapsing every few decades. Voyager is the test run for that mindset more than for the tech.
- jwpapi 11mo agoU made me cry on HN
- thebruce87m 11mo agoThe comment wasn’t made by a human.
- alexose 11mo agoWell now I'm crying too
- ricardo81 11mo agoAgree. Voyager is probably considered by many to be one of our greatest achievements. It makes me wonder when we'll have anything set foot in another star system. I would guess realistically after 2100, but then we went from the Wright brothers to landing on the moon in under 70 years... so I may be proven wrong.
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- rncode 11mo agovoyager isn't proof we can reach the stars, it's proof we can't and we launched it anyway. that's the most human thing we've ever done
- pfdietz 11mo agoMusk is now talking about near term putting servers in space, because that's where power will be cheapest. Should this happen, we'll see many gigawatts of power in space. A spinoff of this would be large solar-electric spacecraft, or even large lasers for beam powered spacecraft. Either case should allow considerably higher delta-V than chemical rockets.
- flanderizedNed 11mo ago[dead]
- temptemptemp111 11mo ago[dead]
- ck2 11mo agomoon ping time 2.6 seconds voyager ping time 172,800 seconds 1000+ years from now a ship will take off from earth or orbit and pass Voyager in a few hours (assuming the planet is not turned into one huge radioactive, forever-checmical ocean before then)
- Crontab 11mo agoIf obtaining speed was the only goal, how fast could we get something traveling in space with our current technology? That would include using gravity assists.
- blondie9x 11mo agoHave we ever fully realized the lessons of the "Pale blue dot" photo? When will we stop the wasteful fighting and over-consumption and finally embrace a cohesive sustainable lifestyle together to protect the only life we know of in the universe.
- p-e-w 11mo agoIt has always surprised me that this is the lesson so many people see in that photo. The lesson I see is that absolutely nothing humans do (including “wasteful fighting” and “over-consumption”) matters at all. We could colonize the solar system, or we could die out, and the Pale Blue Dot would remain the same either way. It seems to me that people are desperately trying to squeeze a distorted message of hope from an image that fundamentally signifies the exact opposite of hope, namely indifference.
- ohyoutravel 11mo agoYes, we fully realized the lessons and have stopped wasteful fighting and overconsumption and have embraced a cohesive, sustainable lifestyle to protect the only life we know of in the universe. It is wonderful.
- shevy-java 11mo agoWell - you gotta hurry up, buddy! > After nearly 50 years in space I mean, in the future this record will be broken, but right now this is quite epic. Go Voyager 1, go! Show that the movie a space odyssey was wrong about what's out there.
- jb1991 11mo agoVoyager’s record time in space will actually be broken tomorrow.
- didgetmaster 11mo agoWhere is the Earth in its orbit around the sun when this event happens? For half of each year, the sun is closer to Voyager 1 than is the Earth. Also, does anyone know how long communication with the probe is disrupted when the sun is directly between them?
- thombat 11mo agoBoth Voyagers left the ecliptic plane with their final gravitational slingshots (Voyager 1 went north, Voyager 2 went south so only the Canberra radio dishes can communicate with it) so even when Earth is further from them than the sun there's 35 degrees of separation.
- ronbenton 11mo agoCan we talk about how awesome NASA's visualizations are for this? https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_voyager_1 https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_voyager_1
- kachapopopow 11mo agoI love how 3 years/second seems slow at this time scale.
- N_Lens 11mo agoThat old tech was so solid and reliable, I'm always amazed.
- smallmouth 11mo agoHow long would it take to catch up with Voyager using the latest rocket technology and some highly optimized gravity assistance?
- selcuka 11mo agoThis question is the premise of Far Centaurus by A. E. van Vogt [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Centaurus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Centaurus
- novoreorx 11mo agoSeeing systems used in the most advanced areas of human civilization never fails to amaze me. They have been created half a century ago yet still functioning flawlessly in the autonomous, harsh environment of space. Meanwhile, I consider it a win if my Python API server survives a month without breaking. I'm always wondering, how did those engineers create something so robust, while I, despite standing on the shoulder of decades of software engineering progress, seem unable to avoid introducing bugs with every commit?
- 0xCMP 11mo agoManagement then cared that their one chance would work. Today management just wants it to mostly work. Incentives and goals are very different between the two. We could very much build even more incredible things today; and would argue that we actually do. Just only in the places that seem to matter enough to do that type of special effort for.
- Willish42 11mo ago> Communicating with Voyager 1 is slow. Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation. I found this a bit silly given the headline: "well duh, that's the theoretical limit barring fancy quantum entaglement nonsense or similar!" TIL all electromagnetic waves, including radio which Voyager 1 [uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Communication_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Communication_system), travel at the speed of light. For some reason I always thought we had satellites doing some slower process or needing to somehow "see" light photons coming back from the probe to achieve near-lightspeed communication.
- almosthere 11mo agoIs there a way to bypass Voyager with a new craft in some reasonable amount of time if we put enough thrust on it
- swapnilt 11mo agoThe real mind-bending part isn't the distance, but the implications for deep space exploration. We've essentially hit the practical limit of real-time control from Earth.
- AliAbdulKareem 11mo agoI am curious, how are we communicating with it? like how do we know where it is right now, and how are we sending signals to communicate with it? won't our signal affected by noise or the like. When it is this far, how are accurately sending our signals to it.
- JacobThreeThree 11mo agoPer Wikipedia: It has a 3.7-meter (12 ft) diameter high-gain Cassegrain antenna to send and receive radio waves via the three Deep Space Network stations on the Earth. The spacecraft normally transmits data to Earth over Deep Space Network Channel 18, using a frequency of either 2.3 GHz or 8.4 GHz, while signals from Earth to Voyager are transmitted at 2.1 GHz.
- voidUpdate 11mo agoWe know where it is right now, because we know which way it's going, how fast and that it isn't currently thrusting anywhere. its just going in a (straight?) line, so it's pretty easy to keep track of. You can measure the speed of something towards/away from you by measuring the doppler shift of the signal (how much the frequency is increased or decreased compared to the expected frequency), and since the radio receivers will have to be very precisely pointed to get a good signal, you can also probably fine tune any estimates of position by wiggling the receivers around a little bit until you get the best signal. The signals are definitely getting degraded by noise etc, since it's so far away. That's why the communication speed is so slow, so they can make sure they got one bit before getting the next one. Some more mathsy details here https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calculate-data-rate-of-voyager-1 https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calcu... But by having a very big antenna, and knowing exactly what you're looking for and where, it can help to filter out all the noise and get out the proper data
- icetank 11mo agoI wonder how long it will take for someone to get rich enough to be able to send their own private interstellar space missions. America's super wealthy are getting very rich. At this rate we will have multiple people with a trillion dollars by the end of the century. What is stopping someone from building and launching interstellar probes instead of buying another few super yachts.
- ensocode 11mo agoThe scale gets surreal fast: 8 minutes for sunlight, a day to ping Voyager 1, and then it would take Voyager 1 another 75000 years to reach the nearest star. Our entire technological reach is basically a rounding error at interstellar distances.
- rwky 11mo agoAstronomers often have an error margin of an order of magnitude or two. 1 billion or 100 billion. Close enough either way!
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- _hu6p 11mo ago"About to reach" - read 1 year from "now".
- torcete 11mo agoIt is going to be difficult to service the probe at that distance, and probably they won't be able to find spare parts anyway.
- CarlitosHighway 11mo ago"I write code therefore space exploration interests me" - not me
- paulwetzel 11mo agoI think Voyager is not just a space exploration project, but more a demonstration of technical ingenuity. Sure, the probe probably collected great data just by being where no other probe was before, but to be real: I don't know nearly enough about space exploration research to get excited about the results and mostly just looked at the pictures. What amazes me about the device and the mission as a whole is the sheer challenge of operating a device that is so far away, you have to use the prefix light to make the scale understandable. I like devices, that have been engineered to something close to perfection. I think aircraft a cool because they so very rarely fail. I think that pacemakers are amazing, because they can not fail. This is another example, and perhaps one of the greatest: a spacecraft that is running for 40+ years in the harshest environments and still works. And that's not even touching the emotional and somewhat existential thoughts that comes with the scale and distance this little guy has traveled.
- ColinWright 11mo agoToo late for anyone to see this comment, and it's just a trivial bugbear of mine, but the article has this: > "... meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours—a full light-day—to reach it." They don't mean "a full light-day" ... they mean "a full day". They're talking about the time it will take, and "light-day" is the distance it's travelling. A trivial type error that a compiler would barf on, that people will gloss over and not notice, but which niggles at me. Sorry ... I now return you to your regular programming.
- le-mark 11mo agoSo about 50*364 more years until it’s travelled a light year!
- leo_e 11mo agoIt really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective. We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone. It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more vCPUs at an unoptimized Python loop. If Voyager had been built with today's "move fast and break things" mindset, it would have bricked itself at the heliopause pending a firmware update that required a stronger handshake.
- arealaccount 11mo agoI mean entirely different use cases, right? Borking a space mission vs someone’s breakfast status update can be optimized differently
- nick238 11mo agoYou're breezing past the labor cost quite deftly. I'm reasonably sure that developing the Voyager probes required a few more people and hours than your average microservice.
- sillyfluke 11mo agoNot that it would change your point, but as a separate matter I'm curious what the ratio of government employees to private contractors was back then when they were building the thing compared to now.
- conradev 11mo agoSpacecraft require more 9s of reliability than microservices. Their engineering processes are very different, even today. We still build new spacecraft today, even though we don’t launch them into interstellar space.
- bearjaws 11mo agoI am certain if I had the estimated $4,000,000,000 it took to get Voyager 1 launched, I could get some microservices to function regardless of all scenarios. The reality is, its only worth it to build to 99.9999% uptime for very specific missions... There is no take-backsies in space. Your company will survive a microservice outage.
- AstroNutt 11mo agoOnce we develop a technology that will allow us to do a tour around our solar system within a day or so, catching up to Voyager 1 and 2 would be a neat way to wrap up the sightseeing trip before heading home. Too bad none of us will get to experience it.