Voyager 1 left the planet 41 years ago – and SpaceX hopes to land on Earth this Saturday Yesterday saw the 41st anniversary of Voyager 1’s launch from the Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 41 – and SpaceX fire up its next Falcon 9 at the neighbouring Launch Complex 40 pad. Launched just after its twin, Voyager 2, the spacecraft was sent on NASA’s Grand Tour of the solar system, scooting past Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn …
Long billion 10**12 or short billion 10**9. Since the 1950s the short scale has been increasingly used in technical writing and journalism, so this has to be assumed as the short billion.
Now approx 1.6 km per mile, so 13.3 billion miles is (13.3 * 1.6) billion km. No idea where you got 21.4 million km from....
"No idea where you got 21.4 million km from...."
It's almost as though two similar-sounding words that differ only by a single letter can occasionally be accidentally substituted for one another when writing. It's a shame this is such rare occurrence that we haven't invented a word to describe such typos.
O'Reilly ?
From bitter experience, women are very good at adding all sorts of irrelevant details to the directions ... I mean "carry on until you get to the A454, turn left, 500 yards, your're there" is succinct. You don't need to know about any roundabouts, superstores, churches, or other landmarks on the way.
"You don't need to know about any roundabouts, superstores, churches, or other landmarks on the way."
Depends on what sort of navigator you are. Some people navigate better with landmarks than with dead reckoning.
"carry on until you get to the A454, turn left, 500 yards, your're there"
Your example includes a landmark, the A454. A superstore might be a tad more obviously visible than a street sign that says "A454".
"carry on until you get to the A454, turn left, 500 yards, your're there"
Which road will I be on to get to the A454?
Will it say A454 on the sign, or will it be the name of the road, or the name of the town it leads to?
How far do I go until I reach the A454? 1 mile? 50? 100? How will I know if I've missed it if I've no idea how far to go?
Do I turn left on the A454? Or turn left onto the A454? Or is the left turn simply at the same place as the A454 ?
Your succinct directions suck.
> Just don't put a woman in charge
Just for your info, what might have seemed funny to some audiences in a 1950s American sitcom doesn't come across as particularly witty or imaginative in 2018.
But you must know that, otherwise you wouldn't have bothered to go anonymous for this one.
Please don't faint, but that was good up into the 1990's.
It went:
1950's: Bam, zoom, straight to the moon physical abuse of women.
1960's: James Bond slayed more female sex symbols than you could shake a stick at... Hippies, free love.
1970's: James Bond still swinging it, Disco, Son of Sam, etc.
1980's: Weird Science: creating female sex slaves and ballistic missiles in adolescent boys bedrooms... With Computers & Modems.
1990's: Everybody is Fucking. Even Bill Clinton.
2000's: Age of the Offended. Yet everybody is fucking.
Main theme throughout all is everybody is getting laid and laughing at the same shit - except maybe in front of you.
@Belperite
We don't need to retrieve it. As you can see in that same documentary, it is programmed to return to Earth on its own once its data banks are full or it starts having an existential crisis about how it knows all, but why doesn't that make it happy?
Whichever comes first....
"I believe that's due to the pain in its diodes down its left side."
.
Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see in infrared,
How I hate the night.
.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.
"We don't need to retrieve it. As you can see in that same documentary, it is programmed to return to Earth on its own once its data banks are full or it starts having an existential crisis about how it knows all, but why doesn't that make it happy?"
Is there going to be a mandate that it will have to have its own toilet provided at all public facilities?
@Alien
" V'ger
I'm sure I saw a documentary about what will happen to that probe once. Perhaps we should launch a mission to retrieve it"
No No! We have to leave it out there for some aliens to soup it up, (hopefully without using any Microsoft stuff on it) and then for Captain Kirk to find it.
It is so written!
This post has been deleted by its author
"That's what happens when you let FORTRAN programmers build things"
Whereas Pascal programmers could simply choose which one would be first, as in
CONST First = 42, Last = 43;
VAR Voyager : ARRAY [First .. Last] OF SPACEPROBE ;
and given that there are just 2 Voyagers, they might have gone for Voyager FALSE, to be followed by Voyager TRUE (or actually Voyager[FALSE] and Voyager[TRUE]), which would have been really, really WRONG
I'll get me coat. The one with Jensen and Wirth's "Pascal User Manual and Report" in the pocket. please
That sounds impressively fast, but when I worked it out (please check my maths here!) it's approximately: 334640906 miles (according to Google's conversion). Divide by around 365.25 days per year = 916,197 miles per day. Divide by 24 hours per day, and that's around 38,174 miles per hour. The ISS goes around about 17,500 mph so it's only twice as fast as the ISS, roughly speaking. (I'm assuming that the 3.4AU is approximate and that 365.25 is close enough for a year's duration). I honestly thought it would be going faster than that.
How much is it decelerating by? Since it's in (mostly) vacuum, there wouldn't be much in the way of friction against other particles. And I wouldn't think collisions with micro-meteorites, etc. would make much of a dent in its speed. Other parts of it, yes, but not its speed! The sun's rays would presumably push it along by a tiny amount, collisions from behind by other space particles might do the same slightly, but unless it's been slowed down a lot by hitting the heliosheath / edge of the healioshpere, then what's been slowing it down? Oh, and the slingshots around planets (which the ISS obviously hasn't benefited from unless you count its orbit as a permanent slingshot around Earth) is another reason why I'd have thought it would be a lot faster than twice ISS's speed.
then what's been slowing it down?
Throw a rock in the air. It rises slower and slower, hangs in the air, and then speeds up again as it falls. And then it stops when it hits you. More or less the same with orbital mechanics. Long story short, the lowest point on an orbit is the fastest, highest point is the slowest. Trading speed for height, effectively.
I'll refer you to a wonderful computer-based training course called Kerbal Space Program. 30 quid on Steam, and a lot of hours of fun. Runs on Linux too, if that's your bag.
Throw a rock in the air. It rises slower and slower, hangs in the air, and then speeds up again as it falls.
Unless it achieves escape velocity. But, yeah, it will have been subject to gravity from the sun and the larger planets since the last flyby manoeuvre, though I suspect the effects are now negligible.
That's angular velocity. It's not moving at all relative to earth's orbit, which is what AU refers to.
AU is a distance, and linear speeds can thus be expressed as AU over time_interval. Angular velocity is how much of an arc an object covers in a certain amount of time, so radians, or degrees, over time_interval. The ISS whizzing along at 17500 mph (7820m/s, 1.65AU/year) is its orbital speed.
That sounds impressively fast, but when I worked it out (please check my maths here!) it's approximately: 334640906 miles (according to Google's conversion).
Bah, Google. Doesn't even know about El Reg Standard Units.
rik@argus201s:~$ units
Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2016-06-21
2954 units, 109 prefixes, 88 nonlinear units
You have: 3.6AU/year
You want: km/s
* 17.066058
/ 0.058595839
You have: 3.6AU/year
You want: VSheepVac
* 0.0028467153
/ 351.28206
Voyager's trajectory will bring it back to Earth, someday.
It's just just going the long way round
... not if the Borg intercept it first. They'll know where we are, how to get there and they'll realise they've got a massive potential payout for deformation of character by those nasty Hollywoodians on Earth...
They'll know where we are, how to get there and they'll realise they've got a massive potential payout for deformation of character by those nasty Hollywoodians on Earth...
Hollywood panel beaters? I predict several first contact scenarios. Trump will start a trade war. May will depart on a trade visit. Ok, so some of that may be wishful thinking. Meanwhile, engineers can explain how Borg spacecraft could be optimised by cutting a few corners.
So they'll turn Borg cubes into Borg spheres? I guess that makes them more aerodynamic than bricks.
And then Apple's lawyers can sue them for having rounded corners! Or the design of Apple's new 'office' becomes more apparent as a Borg docking station. Some thought it was the pyramids, the fools..
Land where?
Am I the only one who thought SpaceX was going to land on Voyager 1?
Now that ....
What's that now? Space-X are sending up something to mate with Voyager?
Is Stephen Collins still up to it?
blowing my ever so small trumpet,
A very comact piece of control and instrumentation code I wrote for part of a somewhat novel (at the tme) monitoring system for an industrial machine is still being used unchanged on the five original installs 31 years later - an output of a PhD project. Subsequently rewritten (mine was coded in 6502 assembly) for new incantations that I believe process aircraft turbine blades, it seems to be still running, remarkably. I can only presum,e that the machines were repurposed for other similar processing and being dumb and simple no changes were seen to be necessary for what are no longer safety critical systems.
From a conversation about 10 years ago, they were still running on the same hardware . Spares have been laid down.
The softwa, if not the hardware was a test stufy in what might be done in more formal verification.
My oldest application still running and in use is 20 years old - although it doesn't run anything so critical. It's a museum system (that's why probably it lasted so long...).
It was originally written on NT4, and now is working on 7. Unluckily, it will soon be replaced by a WordPress (!) based application, made by a fashionable hipster company. I wish them good luck....
My oldest application still running and in use is 20 years old
My oldest extant application for a surviving system (a set of perl scripts managing a contact directory) would have been 20 years old this month if I hadn't completely rewritten it in another language last year. I'd been trying to get round to a rewrite for seven years, but you know how it goes: somehow there was always something a bit more urgent to do.
Hmm,
I do not know if this counts. But my oldest still running code was written during my practice semester while going for my electrical engineering degree. The company needed something to filter the signal to the Inmarsat satellite according to Inmarsat specs. I was the fresh face and told to mull about a solution for this new fangled requirements as I had just done the tests for the underlying math.
After some sleepless nights I found an obvious solution. I just needed the information of some future and past bits.
I went to the department head, proposed the solution and to my surprise he went to legal to start the paperwork for a patent application. The (small) royalties stopped a few years ago due to the patent expiring. But the code (written in gate logic, later VHDL) is still in use in their ASICs. The code is more than 25 years old.
Apparently writing software for military kit or avionics is one way of getting multiple decades of runtime. That stuff hangs around for ages. Airbus's FBW system dates back to the 1980s. Bits of today's Ariane 5 were first used on Ariane 4, decades ago. I know that some computing systems on RN Type 42 destroyers were very ancient, even receiving a 1k memory upgrade in the 1990s (yep; ferrite core RAM). Might have been 4k, some of my own memory has been de-gaussed.
Nope, they had to reduce the heater below the rated temperature of the last functioning instrument in 2012 to have enough power.
Sorry but they will even be unable to transmit much longer than 2025. The tape system used to replay stored data, when there is contact, will not be able to slow down to the availiable speed. The bandwidth is limited due to the weakness of the signal. Even if the adapt the DSN to receive at the recorders minimum speed at that range, the power budget might not be enough for the last instrument. And that does supply data about the edge of the solar system.
SpaceX is an "infamously tight-lipped company" because the US Gov't will give them an ass whipping over ITAR if they release any actual information.
Indeed, there are European space companies making a living with products that are specifically not American-sourced and thus don't have to deal with ITAR.
It's sad because I have fascinating space books from the '50s-'80s that have far more detail than anyone would show today.
And we wonder why no one is excited about space today, when all you can talk about is boring stuff.
The original Voyager was probably written in assembler - remember those days when you had to put comments in there to document it?
"I've always amazed that the signal reaches Earth from that distance. Aiming the antenna at the point where the Earth will be when the signal arrives here is incredible."
You would get really awesome wi-fi reception if you were using one of NASA's 54 meter dishes. Even using those antennas, the signal from the Voyager spacecraft is still down in the weeds.
Is it only the USA and Germany which bridge mathematics and science in school?
The ISS is moving ~17,500mph because of orbital mechanics. If it was going slower, it will fall back to earth. If it was going a little faster, it would increase it's orbital altitude, if it was going much faster... say 25,000mph, it would escape earth's gravity.
Consider how fast an object must be going to maintain earth orbit, then how fast something needs to go to escape earth's orbit. Finally, work how fast something must go to escape the grasp of the sun. Most objects don't decelerate due to friction, they decelerate from gravitational pull of a large object. Such as a large planet, star, etc.
If you don't believe 35000mph is fast, perhaps you should consider just how fast it really is. If you were watching traffic on a road, in which the speed limit is 35000mph, you wouldn't see the traffic go by, and you couldn't turn your neck fast enough to keep up; even if you were 5000 feet from the road.
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