NASA: Humanity has finally reached into INTERSTELLAR SPACE Data beamed back from the Voyager 1 spacecraft has shown that the probe has left our Solar System and entered interstellar space, becoming the first manmade object to travel beyond mankind's home system. At a press conference on Thursday, NASA engineers said that the probe actually made the leap last year after travelling 12 …
btk_ wrote:
"Kind of strange to think that it launched the year I was born. Every moment of my life that ship has been speeding into space..."It was launched a few months before I was born, is now 12 billion miles from earth and is still more useful than me! :D
I watched its launch on TV, followed its progress past the planets, had a whole set of NatGeo magazines devoted to Viking, Pioneer, and Voyager probes. Great days, and still these probes carry on. Hats off and raise our glasses to all those people who made this possible
When they deal with the unknown they over-engineer and make worst-case guesses on how long it will last.
We've been very lucky that space exploration has been less hostile to our probes than our worst fears.
I'm glad I've lived to see a probe enter Interstellar space, I just hope I live long enough to see us start the colonization of our tiny corner of the galaxy.
I for one will be raising a pint to Voyager 1!
"There is a rover on Mars that was supposed to only work for 3 months, it's now in it's twelth year."
An achievement indeed. But their predictive skills are out by a factor of almost 50 and counting. Not that I'm complaining about the longevity but presumably the more accurate the prediction the less required over-engineering and thus allowing more science to be carried out for the same cost. But we live and learn, hopefully.
Voyagers are a marvel of engineering. I doubt there are any space-related projects today that will not only be around in 36 years, but perform go above and beyond what they were designed to do. ISS, for instance, was just recently completed, has been glitchy all throughout and will be de-orbited in just 7 years.
If there's anything that the latest NSA saga shows, it is that US is still capable of grandiose and audacious projects. It just would've been nice to have that spirit applied towards something constructive that advances our civilization and unites people of the world in being proud of human achievement (rather than uniting them in disliking US).
First (and only) British launched satellite which is even older, might still be alive, but didn't go quite so far away. It may have travelled further but my calculator is broken and ICBA to work it out :-)
It is pretty cool that thing is out there just sailing happily along. Designed and with 'rudimentary' computers, made with 'primitive' hardware and assembled by blue collar machinists.
It is easy to get caught up in the whole 'the future is tomorrow' idea but forget that the future already happened and all we've done is made incremental additions to it. Big ideas aren't popular anymore and it is sad. In todays climate NASA would be laughed out of the Capitol Building if they said they wanted to launch a probe into the void just for the hell of it.
People can no longer wrap their minds around the intrinsic value of doing something just because they can. Everything must have a purpose and that purpose is too often tied solely to either making more money or destroying something. Those things are old hat and have proven highly overrated. If we continue on this path we will have successfully mastered time travel, but with a portal only goes backwards and doesn't provide a way to return.
"Big ideas aren't popular anymore and it is sad. In todays climate NASA would be laughed out of the Capitol Building if they said they wanted to launch a probe into the void just for the hell of it."
Well actually it has..
New Horizons will reach Pluto in July 2015, about 10 years after it's launch.
What has changed is opportunity for "Grand Tour" missions (which originally were meant to do all 4 gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, in 1 go) comes along about ever 100-120 years (and Voyager was still split in 2 parts due to funding and missing the exact launch window back then).
The other thing is the hostility to using RTG's for the power source (and the fact NASA is having real trouble getting any more Pu238 made).
I'd also note that ISS started construction started construction in 1998 with the Zaryla module and will likely be extended past 2028, IE 30 years+.
Eh, just an update on this. I decided to get a second opinion on whether vehicles should be male or female. I asked the wisest guy I know---my karate instructor. I asked him if my car was male or female. Definitely female, he said. Why? "Because each Nissan, she go!"
The gender of the probes is a really great question!
At first I thought male for sure because you never see female hermits and females aren't nearly as likely to just wander off to see what's over 'there'. Then I realized it had been talking non-stop for 36 years so I had to go with female.
>"...because you never see female hermits..."
Uh... ain't that somewhat self-fulfilling? Hermits being, er... hermits, and all?
She probably thinks she's been quietly chattering to a couple of dozen space cats for the last 36 years and doesn't even know we're listening.
I wondered what you were referring to based on that comment until I saw the beer icon. It reminded me of a translation of a Samuel Beckett poem. It's not anywhere near as smooth as the original French but it still seems oddly apropos:
just think if all this
one day all this
one fine day
just think
if one day
one fine day
all this
stopped
just think
"They said it had left the galaxy. And that its onboard computer was less powerful than an iphone! Wonder which model they meant?"
Any of them
I re-checked it's processor details. It is indeed a 16 bit unit that processes in 4 bit chunk through some CMOS chips (I think there's an equivalent to the LS183 ALU in the CMOS range)
Actual speed is about 80 kips, or about 2.5x faster than a pocket calculator.
"Indeed, there's no way such limited computing power could handle the warp calculations necessary to have taken it out of the galaxy."
No.
They did manage to shoehorn in a compression algorithm that cut data volumes by a bit over 4 bits per pixel by just sending the differences between them on a line. Handy for an 800x800 image. I imaging the reversible digital tape recorder had a lot to do with this as I'm not sure if their main memory could even hold one of them. DMA is very handy if you can write the processor instruction set.
I think there's a lot those guys did that could be applied, in principal at least, to software today. They were just so incredibly efficient at it.
Granted, being able to correct errors on the fly, as it were, is a great improvement but the error rates themselves are way up compared to what they pulled off 30+ years ago with 13" monochrome text development machines and thousands of printed tractor fed pages of code as their collaborative store and backups. They've got a lot to be proud of!
Even if they can't get out of the galaxy yet :)
>>They said it had left the galaxy.
I just can't stop chuckling at that.
>> Actual speed is about 80 kips, or about 2.5x faster than a pocket calculator.
If it left the galaxy, then its actual speed is in excess of Warp 6.
Looks like it'll take well over a thousand years to even reach the edge of the Oort cloud, which is within the Sun's sphere of influence still.. Assuming improvements in medical technology let you live that long, you're more likely to see purpose built interstellar probes overtake it than see Voyager get that far.
Space, as they say, is big. Really big.
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Amazing,
it would have taken 10 years to design , so thats technology from almost 50 years ago .
I bet many of the managers get congratulated on this,
but the real engineers, Nahh,
Well done , compare to current designs that have a life measured in 10's of months not 10's of years.
I can imagine the management response," Hay you over engineered it, you should have saved cost / weight",
god bless the guys, with their slide rulers and pen protectors in their shit pocket,
they will all dead now, as they smoked 100 a day, and worked 100 hour weeks,
but I'm envious.
Only Engineers and Machinists. Real deal, highly skilled blue collar tradesmen. No CNC or (very) functional CAD. No laser measurment or automated Interferometric Comparison for optical flats. Just Jo Blocks, micrometers and dial calipers. Blueprints (that were actually blue) and Dykem stained fingers.
There are still some out there but they're a dying breed. We have fairly impressive array of machinists here but it is harder and harder to find the manual precision machinist. The move toward more standardized catalog parts (even for spacecraft) and continuing improvements in CNC are seeing them be slowly phased out in favor of 'nerd' machinists who are better coders than they are craftsmen (no offense CNC guys in the back). Machines still can't match their precision, but getting clients to pay for two or three solid days of highly skilled labor for a single component are rarer these days.
CAD and complex simulation models have also done a lot to move away from high precision parts. The simulations are accurate enough now to build to lower tolerances as you can validate the entire system or subsystem design before the build. That gets into the whole craftsmanship of certainty vs craftsmanship of risk debate which is a weird place. Asking two craftsmen to define craftsmanship is far more dangerous than a political or religious debate :)
They would require huge antennas and a fair bit of leccy for the amplification and signal generation. Inflatable antennas or a huge ribbon aerial might do the trick.
Provided they're robust enough, plasma drive cubesats (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/15/cubesats_to_go_interplanetary_with_tiny_ion_drives/) would be a good fit for a rudimentary mission to probe the shape of the heliosheath. Launch a flock of them atop a relatively small rocket and have them slingshot around the moon (for the orbital inclination change) to go off in different directions so you get data from several positions in addition to the 2 datapoints that we currently have from the Voyagers. The size of them allows you to cover a large spread with only one launch.
In the region of the 'bow wave' there is a momentum interchange between the interstellar wind and the heliosphere. Presumably a large proportion of the resulting force is transferred to the sun via its magnetic field. Now that the extent of the heliosphere has been determined, and the strength of the interstellar wind measured, it must be possible to estimate this force.
Does anyone know how strong this force is and how it compares with gravitational attraction towards the centre of the galaxy?
Don't forget that the sun is orbiting the centre of the galaxy, taking around 200 million years to go around. There wont be a resultant force in that direction.
The force exerted by the solar wind is well known, as is the light pressure. But both of them reduce with the inverse square, so they'll be tiny out where Voyager is, and negligible at the centre of the galaxy.
But the force of the solar wind is not at issue. The issue would be how much force resulted on the sun due to it flinging out that mass and sunlight, and the answer is zero. It flings it out equally in all directions at once, so the resultant force is zero.
So in answer to your question, the force due to the solar wind and the gravitational attraction towards the centre of the galaxy, do indeed exactly match each other, since they are both zero.
I remember reports that it wasn't quite where Newtonian/ Einsteinian gravity says it should be. There were various explanations mooted other than new physics, but they seemed a bit strained. The longer it carries on diverging from its Newtonian trajectory, the more strained the other explanations become.
It's a *very* small deviation. But if it's real, Voyager may yet become most famous as first evidence of some new physics.
because in a few hundred thousand years it would be really embarrassing if a war was started with an (ex) friendly alien race because a mildly radioactive lump of metal landed on them, with directions to where it came from.
I am sure the then PM or president of earth will try to deny it of course...
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