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I'm amazed that Voyager is still sending us data. It had to travel a a bajillion (+/- 100) km and not get blasted by some flying scrap of rock. It's components
by Arnor 13y ago
I'm amazed that Voyager is still sending us data. It had to travel a a bajillion (+/- 100) km and not get blasted by some flying scrap of rock. It's components had to withstand every form of radiation our solar system has to offer, and the signals themselves had to make it all the way back to Earth without degrading beyond use. Wow!
Still, I'm worried that the tools of the 80s are not going to be sufficient to provide the details we'd need to understand what happens at the edge of the solar system.
For my part, I hope that we find some of those hidden dimensions, and it turns up on the other side of the solar system in a couple weeks.
- UnFleshedOne 13y ago> For my part, I hope that we find some of those hidden dimensions, and it turns up on the other side of the solar system in a couple weeks. Now that would turn the solar system into one huge game of asteroids...
- Afforess 13y ago>and not get blasted by some flying scrap of rock. I think a lot of people don't understand the scale of space. It's really, really empty. The chance of being intercepted by any solid matter is incredibly low. I can't even make any reasonable analogies to distances on Earth, it's so extreme.
- ars 13y agoLet's try: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%28mass+grain+sand%29+%2F+%28%28mass+solar+system+-+mass+sun%29+%2F+%284+pi+%28size+solar+system%29^3%29%2F3%29%29+^+%281%2F3%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%28mass+grain+sand%2... Answer: That's equivalent to a single grain of sand in a cube 1 mile on each side. (You'll have to convert the final result to miles in a second step - it timed out when I tried to make it do it in one step.) And this is including the mass of all the planets! (But not the sun.)
- schiffern 13y ago…and that's just for the Solar system, an incredibly busy region by space standards.
- rosser 13y agoThe mean density of the universe is something like 3-6 atoms per M³. When you consider the number of atoms in your typical cubic meter of matter — you, the ocean (water is ~10²² molecules per cubic centimeter), a mountain, let alone things like stars, where most of the matter in the universe is, anyway — that should give you a rough idea of just how empty space actually is.
- kristopolous 13y agothere's a lot of to-scale installations. May even be one in Your Fair City or Town: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model or if not, try the web: http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/ http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- akiselev 13y agoThese aren't the tools of the 80s, they're the tools of the early 70s at best, probably closer to late 60s. The vast majority of technology used in NASA missions has to have been used for about 10 years so that there is a detailed and verified data set about reliability. And then they over estimate. That's the reason why Voyager still works and why one of the first two Mars rovers is still chugging along, way past expected mission life (and the second one also died recently, way past mission life)
- reeses 13y agoV'ger made it out of Earth's orbit before we made it unsafe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris) and the rest of space is like driving from Calgary to Edmonton, but with more to look forward to.
- brazzy 13y agoSpace is full of canola?