8 ms·

Voyager 1 spots new region at the edge of the Solar System

167 points by Reltair 14y ago

jlgreco 14y ago
>Researchers suspect it may take several years for Voyager 1 to clear this area entirely, after which it will finally reach interstellar space. The RTGs in Voyager 1 are only good until about 2025 iirc, ~12-13 more years. Here's hoping it makes it through in time.
- Wingman4l7 14y ago
  Strictly speaking, the RTGs will continue generating power past that time -- it just won't be enough to power any of the instruments or the radio; the thermocouples also degrade, which further impacts the power produced. (tomato, tomahto) Attitude propellant is also an issue. Around 2020, they'll start to turn off instruments until they don't have enough power to run any of them anymore. Apparently, they haven't picked the shutdown order yet -- but they have 10 years to decide, so no rush. =) NASA's timeline for the Voyager lifetimes: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html
  - giulianob 14y ago
    It would be cool if they could shut it down for a long time then have it wake up and send some data back with the remaining power.
    - Wingman4l7 14y ago
      Neat idea, but I don't think there were any onboard batteries -- AFAIK power was just fed straight from the RTG thermocouples, more or less. Batteries would have just added weight, would have had a crappy recharge capacity after a while, and wouldn't have made much sense for a deep space probe which relied on an RTG instead of solar panels. Also, the RTG might be powering instrument heaters, keeping them at warm enough temperatures to prevent failure. If that's the case, once those are shut off, there's no turning those instruments back on. EDIT: It appears that Voyager 1's ultraviolet spectrometer instrument, at least, is pretty tough: as of January 2012, it has survived having its heater shut off for power conservation: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20120117.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20120117.ht... That's one hardy spacecraft! =)
- jtchang 14y ago
  Should have went with the extended extended-battery.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Ha, true. From what I can find, each of Voyager 1's RTGs is about 5% of the total mass of Voyager 1, so about 15% of it's mass total. Seems surprisingly low to me, considering they are basically trashcans full of plutonium. I'm not sure how many more you would have to add to keep Voyager 1 operating longer, but the more you add the slower it would ultimately be going (well, the harder it is to get it going the speed the mission required). My guess is that additional/larger RTGs couldn't be justified or technically pulled off at the time.
    - jevinskie 14y ago
      I wonder what the expected lifetime of the crafts were when they were designed back in the 70s. Maybe they thought the RTGs would outlive the other components?
      - Wingman4l7 14y ago
        My thoughts exactly -- they probably didn't bother putting a whopping big 100-year RTG on there because they didn't figure the electronics would last long enough, or they figured they'd run out of attitude propellant long before then. You could look up the planned mission duration, but all this would tell you would be the duration that they were absolutely designed to work for -- kind of like how the Mars rover missions were 90 sols, but in actuality they've gone over 2,000 (albeit with solar panel dust issues, busted wheel motors, etc).
        bigiain 14y ago
        I'm guessing they figured there'd be other much more advanced and capable space probes overtaking the Voyagers well before the power got this low…
ra 14y ago
Oh man I get so excited every time I hear news from the Voyager program. What an amazing achievement to do what those guys did back in the 1970s.
- CodeCube 14y ago
  No kidding. When I saw the headline, my heartrate spiked a noticeable amount while I waited for the link to load.
- justincormack 14y ago
  Don't diss the 70s. The 50s went to space. The 60s went to the moon. The 70s left the solar system. Progress...
  - btilly 14y ago
    The 70s went to space. The 80s shifted right.
    - rdl 14y ago
      The 1970s essentially carried on from the 1950s and 1960s. The Vietnam war, resource shocks, etc. seem to have killed any real innovation during the 70s (in government/aerospace -- obviously it was better in other fields like microcomputers), and then the shift toward military in the 80s went even farther. (there was a shift right overall, but it was mostly just a shift down in space funding, I think)
- znowi 14y ago
  Yes, same here. It's an inspiring craft for me. I was enchanted by the program as a kid. Distant voyage, golden records, Carl Sagan... almost a romantic sci-fi novel :) I was a bit sad to know that it'll never be seen again. But now I think it's likely that one day we'll find it and put in a museum. Possibly on Mars :)
xyzzyb 14y ago
So instead of a hard delineation between solar wind and cosmic rays we're seeing something more like velcro?
speedyrev 14y ago
Maybe it's V Ger! Look out Capt Kirk!!!
brador 14y ago
How fast is Voyager travelling? Could we send out a Voyage X at a faster speed and with better tech to catch up and surpass it?
- mylittlepony 14y ago
  Sure, but even at x2 speed it will take decades.
- randomaccount5 14y ago
  You can go look it up, but IIRC, the slingshot method (using a rare alignment of planets) produced a higher "speed" (so to speak) than would be reasonable to produce even with today's technology. (i.e taking the same budget today and doing everything we can to get a probe out at the same "speed" would be impossible).
  - kibwen 14y ago
    I'm not sure if it's actually impossible. IANA physicist, but if your singular all-consuming goal was to get out of the solar system as fast as possible you could probably get a better gravity assist from a single pass of the sun than Voyager got from the entire grand tour. (Feel free to correct me, physicists!) The bigger issue is convincing someone to hand you millions of dollars to literally throw away faster than anything in prior human history.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Well, technically most of the mission cost would be spend on Earth (paying Earth engineer salaries, and Earth factory bills), so the money never leaves Earth. The only money you are literally throwing is the material cost of the rocket and probe, which would be fairly low (the cost of a bunch of titanium (or whatever the rocket/probe is made of), silicon not worth measuring, the rocket fuel (which is surprisingly cheap), etc.
    - ars 14y ago
      > get a better gravity assist from a single pass of the sun No. The gravity assist is because of the motion of the planets around the sun. The sun isn't moving relative to itself. There are some other things you can do where the sun can help, but not a slingshot.
ghubbard 14y ago
> A few models did have a feature like this, but it was only a transient one that appeared at certain times of the solar cycle. How transient is transient? 30 days is not a large fraction of an 11 year solar cycle.
- ggchappell 14y ago
  I'm wondering about that, too. Shouldn't the article say something like, "The new data lend support to models predicting that a region with the observed properties will appear during certain parts of the solar cycle." Is that statement not true?
- aptwebapps 14y ago
  Perhaps they didn't predict it at this particular point of the solar cycle?
mylittlepony 14y ago
I had to double check when I read that the Voyagers started their mission 35 years ago, it's hard to believe. Why aren't we sending more of these, in every direction?
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Well the ESA is going to send one, but the answer is simply budget. It takes money to run one of these missions, it competes with other missions. Not only is there the space craft cost, the launch cost, and the team cost, since its going to take a long time to get out there you've got to have 50 years of time reserved on the deep space network etc etc. A good question would be "Why are the space sciences so under funded?" and that policy question is best addressed with your legislators. Lately I've been positioning space as a 'back up plan' [1] for the Global Warming crisis. [1] Motivating politicians is hard, especially if they can't point at what they've done and say "See how impressive is that!" Space sounds like a 'waste' to a lot of voters, so I've been taking the tack, "Global Warming is a crisis, and we don't yet know how to control the climate on our planet, we may get to a point where we are seriously thinking about moving off planet and this information will be invaluable, there is also the asteroid threat which space craft "out there" where the most likely earth killing asteroids are hiding (the Ooort cloud) would be a tremendous early warning, you might be saving the entire human RACE by funding these projects at NASA, how cool is that?!"
  - avar 14y ago
    It's not just budget ,the Voyager program took advantage of a favorable planetary alignment that wouldn't recur for 175 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Grand_Tour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Grand_Tour I have no idea how favorable this was, i.e. whether you could get the same effect today with more propulsion, but it's quite possible that we don't have the technology to do this in any reasonable timeframe today.
    - abecedarius 14y ago
      They do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
felideon 14y ago
I was trying to visualize the so called 'magnetic highway' and found this along with further explanation. http://phys.org/news/2012-12-voyager-encounters-region-deep-space.html http://phys.org/news/2012-12-voyager-encounters-region-deep-...
JoeAltmaier 14y ago
Could it be instruments degrading? 35 years in the cosmic wind is a long time.
bobsoap 14y ago
> Today's announcement clarifies that the confusion was caused by the fact that nature didn't think much of physicists' expectations. LOL
rdl 14y ago
I wonder how hard it would be to do purely private (or maybe university-consortium) deep space probes. I assume almost any of the standard rockets could accommodate an extra stage to do escape, especially if you just need earth escape and can steal mv from other bodies to escape the solar system. The expensive part would be operating it indefinitely, right? I assume you could outsource to a satellite TT&C facility.
wiradikusuma 14y ago
I have mixed feeling every time I read this kind of news. I envy those people who made it happen 35 years ago, they produced stuff that's still sophisticated by today's standard, while I'm here writing crappy websites. Man, I feel small.
laacz 14y ago
What I find most interesting about Voyager-1 and 2, that these crafts went to the outskirts of our Solar system because of funding cuts for Mariner program (Venus and Mars research). Marvelous what you can achieve even when you are given less money.

167 points by Reltair 14y ago

>Researchers suspect it may take several years for Voyager 1 to clear this area entirely, after which it will finally reach interstellar space. The RTGs in Voyager 1 are only good until about 2025 iirc, ~12-13 more years. Here's hoping it makes it through in time.

Wingman4l7 14y ago
Strictly speaking, the RTGs will continue generating power past that time -- it just won't be enough to power any of the instruments or the radio; the thermocouples also degrade, which further impacts the power produced. (tomato, tomahto) Attitude propellant is also an issue. Around 2020, they'll start to turn off instruments until they don't have enough power to run any of them anymore. Apparently, they haven't picked the shutdown order yet -- but they have 10 years to decide, so no rush. =) NASA's timeline for the Voyager lifetimes: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html
- giulianob 14y ago
  It would be cool if they could shut it down for a long time then have it wake up and send some data back with the remaining power.
  - Wingman4l7 14y ago
    Neat idea, but I don't think there were any onboard batteries -- AFAIK power was just fed straight from the RTG thermocouples, more or less. Batteries would have just added weight, would have had a crappy recharge capacity after a while, and wouldn't have made much sense for a deep space probe which relied on an RTG instead of solar panels. Also, the RTG might be powering instrument heaters, keeping them at warm enough temperatures to prevent failure. If that's the case, once those are shut off, there's no turning those instruments back on. EDIT: It appears that Voyager 1's ultraviolet spectrometer instrument, at least, is pretty tough: as of January 2012, it has survived having its heater shut off for power conservation: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20120117.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20120117.ht... That's one hardy spacecraft! =)
jtchang 14y ago
Should have went with the extended extended-battery.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Ha, true. From what I can find, each of Voyager 1's RTGs is about 5% of the total mass of Voyager 1, so about 15% of it's mass total. Seems surprisingly low to me, considering they are basically trashcans full of plutonium. I'm not sure how many more you would have to add to keep Voyager 1 operating longer, but the more you add the slower it would ultimately be going (well, the harder it is to get it going the speed the mission required). My guess is that additional/larger RTGs couldn't be justified or technically pulled off at the time.
  - jevinskie 14y ago
    I wonder what the expected lifetime of the crafts were when they were designed back in the 70s. Maybe they thought the RTGs would outlive the other components?
    - Wingman4l7 14y ago
      My thoughts exactly -- they probably didn't bother putting a whopping big 100-year RTG on there because they didn't figure the electronics would last long enough, or they figured they'd run out of attitude propellant long before then. You could look up the planned mission duration, but all this would tell you would be the duration that they were absolutely designed to work for -- kind of like how the Mars rover missions were 90 sols, but in actuality they've gone over 2,000 (albeit with solar panel dust issues, busted wheel motors, etc).
      - bigiain 14y ago
        I'm guessing they figured there'd be other much more advanced and capable space probes overtaking the Voyagers well before the power got this low…

ra 14y ago

Oh man I get so excited every time I hear news from the Voyager program. What an amazing achievement to do what those guys did back in the 1970s.

CodeCube 14y ago
No kidding. When I saw the headline, my heartrate spiked a noticeable amount while I waited for the link to load.
justincormack 14y ago
Don't diss the 70s. The 50s went to space. The 60s went to the moon. The 70s left the solar system. Progress...
- btilly 14y ago
  The 70s went to space. The 80s shifted right.
  - rdl 14y ago
    The 1970s essentially carried on from the 1950s and 1960s. The Vietnam war, resource shocks, etc. seem to have killed any real innovation during the 70s (in government/aerospace -- obviously it was better in other fields like microcomputers), and then the shift toward military in the 80s went even farther. (there was a shift right overall, but it was mostly just a shift down in space funding, I think)
znowi 14y ago
Yes, same here. It's an inspiring craft for me. I was enchanted by the program as a kid. Distant voyage, golden records, Carl Sagan... almost a romantic sci-fi novel :) I was a bit sad to know that it'll never be seen again. But now I think it's likely that one day we'll find it and put in a museum. Possibly on Mars :)

xyzzyb 14y ago

So instead of a hard delineation between solar wind and cosmic rays we're seeing something more like velcro?

speedyrev 14y ago

Maybe it's V Ger! Look out Capt Kirk!!!

brador 14y ago

How fast is Voyager travelling? Could we send out a Voyage X at a faster speed and with better tech to catch up and surpass it?

mylittlepony 14y ago
Sure, but even at x2 speed it will take decades.
randomaccount5 14y ago
You can go look it up, but IIRC, the slingshot method (using a rare alignment of planets) produced a higher "speed" (so to speak) than would be reasonable to produce even with today's technology. (i.e taking the same budget today and doing everything we can to get a probe out at the same "speed" would be impossible).
- kibwen 14y ago
  I'm not sure if it's actually impossible. IANA physicist, but if your singular all-consuming goal was to get out of the solar system as fast as possible you could probably get a better gravity assist from a single pass of the sun than Voyager got from the entire grand tour. (Feel free to correct me, physicists!) The bigger issue is convincing someone to hand you millions of dollars to literally throw away faster than anything in prior human history.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Well, technically most of the mission cost would be spend on Earth (paying Earth engineer salaries, and Earth factory bills), so the money never leaves Earth. The only money you are literally throwing is the material cost of the rocket and probe, which would be fairly low (the cost of a bunch of titanium (or whatever the rocket/probe is made of), silicon not worth measuring, the rocket fuel (which is surprisingly cheap), etc.
  - ars 14y ago
    > get a better gravity assist from a single pass of the sun No. The gravity assist is because of the motion of the planets around the sun. The sun isn't moving relative to itself. There are some other things you can do where the sun can help, but not a slingshot.

ghubbard 14y ago

> A few models did have a feature like this, but it was only a transient one that appeared at certain times of the solar cycle. How transient is transient? 30 days is not a large fraction of an 11 year solar cycle.

ggchappell 14y ago
I'm wondering about that, too. Shouldn't the article say something like, "The new data lend support to models predicting that a region with the observed properties will appear during certain parts of the solar cycle." Is that statement not true?
aptwebapps 14y ago
Perhaps they didn't predict it at this particular point of the solar cycle?

mylittlepony 14y ago

I had to double check when I read that the Voyagers started their mission 35 years ago, it's hard to believe. Why aren't we sending more of these, in every direction?

ChuckMcM 14y ago
Well the ESA is going to send one, but the answer is simply budget. It takes money to run one of these missions, it competes with other missions. Not only is there the space craft cost, the launch cost, and the team cost, since its going to take a long time to get out there you've got to have 50 years of time reserved on the deep space network etc etc. A good question would be "Why are the space sciences so under funded?" and that policy question is best addressed with your legislators. Lately I've been positioning space as a 'back up plan' [1] for the Global Warming crisis. [1] Motivating politicians is hard, especially if they can't point at what they've done and say "See how impressive is that!" Space sounds like a 'waste' to a lot of voters, so I've been taking the tack, "Global Warming is a crisis, and we don't yet know how to control the climate on our planet, we may get to a point where we are seriously thinking about moving off planet and this information will be invaluable, there is also the asteroid threat which space craft "out there" where the most likely earth killing asteroids are hiding (the Ooort cloud) would be a tremendous early warning, you might be saving the entire human RACE by funding these projects at NASA, how cool is that?!"
- avar 14y ago
  It's not just budget ,the Voyager program took advantage of a favorable planetary alignment that wouldn't recur for 175 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Grand_Tour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Grand_Tour I have no idea how favorable this was, i.e. whether you could get the same effect today with more propulsion, but it's quite possible that we don't have the technology to do this in any reasonable timeframe today.
  - abecedarius 14y ago
    They do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

felideon 14y ago

I was trying to visualize the so called 'magnetic highway' and found this along with further explanation. http://phys.org/news/2012-12-voyager-encounters-region-deep-space.html http://phys.org/news/2012-12-voyager-encounters-region-deep-...

JoeAltmaier 14y ago

Could it be instruments degrading? 35 years in the cosmic wind is a long time.

bobsoap 14y ago

> Today's announcement clarifies that the confusion was caused by the fact that nature didn't think much of physicists' expectations. LOL

rdl 14y ago

I wonder how hard it would be to do purely private (or maybe university-consortium) deep space probes. I assume almost any of the standard rockets could accommodate an extra stage to do escape, especially if you just need earth escape and can steal mv from other bodies to escape the solar system. The expensive part would be operating it indefinitely, right? I assume you could outsource to a satellite TT&C facility.

wiradikusuma 14y ago

I have mixed feeling every time I read this kind of news. I envy those people who made it happen 35 years ago, they produced stuff that's still sophisticated by today's standard, while I'm here writing crappy websites. Man, I feel small.

laacz 14y ago

What I find most interesting about Voyager-1 and 2, that these crafts went to the outskirts of our Solar system because of funding cuts for Mariner program (Venus and Mars research). Marvelous what you can achieve even when you are given less money.