3 ms·
Several commenters are joking about how many times they've heard this before, but NASA goes into great detail about why it was so difficult to measure and what
by stephenhuey 13y ago
Several commenters are joking about how many times they've heard this before, but NASA goes into great detail about why it was so difficult to measure and what new information helped them decide for sure. Here's a small excerpt:
"The particular oscillations meant the spacecraft was bathed in plasma more than 40 times denser than what they had encountered in the outer layer of the heliosphere. Density of this sort is to be expected in interstellar space."
Read their account of how an "unexpected gift from the sun" helped them. It's not long and quite fascinating, and some little tidbits like this are pretty intriguing to me:
"By the time the signals get to Earth, they are a fraction of a billion-billionth of a watt."
- DanBC 13y ago> "By the time the signals get to Earth, they are a fraction of a billion-billionth of a watt." Check my math but one billionth of a Watt is 1 nW. So one billion-billionth of a Watt is 1 atto Watt?
- HowardMei 13y agoIt's a shame that Voyager doesn't carry some tiny nuke bombs to mark its positions. The SNR at a billion-billionth of a watt level is terrible.
- thelambentonion 13y agoAn excerpt from a course I recently attended: http://i.imgur.com/6VW4X3o.png http://i.imgur.com/6VW4X3o.png The noise floor of the Goldstone Observatory is truly incredible.
- noselasd 13y agoThey can image its position from the radio waves; http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-09/nrao-v1s091213.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-09/nrao-v1s09121...