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Eight-hour comms lags and shock discoveries: 30 years after Voyager 2 visited gas giant Neptune
As the world took down the bunting from the Apollo 11 celebrations, another anniversary rolled around: this weekend marked 30 years since Voyager 2 had its final planetary encounter, with Neptune. The closest approach of the giant by the long-lived probe occurred on 25 August 1989 and represented humanity's first, and only, …
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Monday 2nd September 2019 11:30 GMT TVU
"We'll need to send more probes for that. I would heartily agree to send a probe in orbit around Neptune"
Sadly these days, certain specific planets, Neptune, Uranus and Venus, have effectively been left out of future mission planning by the Western space agencies of NASA, ESA and JAXA and I'd like to see that remedied with more inter-agency cooperation to reduce costs.
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Wednesday 28th August 2019 05:56 GMT Barry Mahon
Exactly, unfortunately, even JPL has to answer to the bean counters.
For me the image near the end of the documentary film Voyager which shows the earth as a miniscule dot in an equally miniscule environment of millions of stars tells the tale of how arrogant we are about ourselves.
We are just that, a tiny dot.
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Thursday 29th August 2019 22:49 GMT M.V. Lipvig
Yeah, but we're a tiny dot with enormous reach for our size. I think it's amazing that we were able to build and control a space probe that is today leaving out solar system, considering that at the time of launch:
- Automobiles were still largely carbureted
- Disco was big
- Computers with RAM in the 512 BIT range, forget megabits, were expensive and blazing fast
- People were still using typewriters
- Cassette tapes were the coming thing
- precision metal cutting for spacecraft parts was done by a person with a saw, a file, a micrometer and a magnifying glass instead of a CAD machine
With the technical advances we made since the Voyagers were launched, you'd think we should be able to launch a spacecraft today that would catch both Voyagers by this time next year to give them a refurbish.
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Friday 30th August 2019 16:24 GMT Unicornpiss
Different times..
As someone who lives in the USA and was a kid when the Voyagers were launched, I thought I'd add a few thoughts.
-Some people born after the launches are now grandparents. Quite a few are deceased too.
-Long distance calls were still pricey. So were pocket calculators.
-eMail? Hey, you spelled Mail wrong.. What's a BBS?
-Climate change? What do you mean?
-The Concorde was offering supersonic international travel. A great loss IMHO when it stopped flying and something we've yet to return to. The moon landings were still relatively fresh in our memories as well.
-While awful things have happened in the world since the dawn of humanity, mass shootings and other mayhem by civilians were pretty much unheard of. Not an easy time, but gentler in some ways.
-Civil rights/LBGTA rights have come a long way since then. (though much still to be done)
-The ARPANET was thinking of branching out..
-The arcade craze had yet to begin, flourish, wane, and crash.
-Commodore, Tandy, and 2 guys named Steve were thinking there might be a market for microcomputers. A guy named Bill, with a terrible driving record, was thinking of coding a better BASIC.
-Beer in the US was mostly terrible. (glad I wasn't drinking yet)
-Pink Floyd was alive and well and touring with Roger Waters.
-CB radio was the chat application of the time. Heathkit was flourishing too.
-Somehow the water heater in my home, built in 1975, is still working (Did the JPL folks somehow design it??)
Keep on truckin' Voyagers..
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Tuesday 3rd March 2020 16:42 GMT oldfartuk
Re: Different times..
When I was 13 i spent my birthday money and savings on a Heathkit valved Oscilloscope OS-1. It took me 18 hours to build (in one sitting), and worked second time on power up (dry solder joint stopped it first time). As i recall it cost me £75, which in 1971 was a LOT of money. I had it years, never went wrong. Wish i'd kept it, they worth a fortune now.
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Tuesday 27th August 2019 11:36 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Voyager: The Most Amazing Unmanned Mission
I followed all the Viking, Mariner, Pioneer and Voyager missions avidly (and most missions since), but Voyager has a special place in my heart, because it achieved so much. Amazing that these craft are still active, and adding to our knowledge, bit by bit. A HUGE thank you to all those involved in these epic missions!
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Tuesday 27th August 2019 13:20 GMT Simon Harris
Re: Voyager: The Most Amazing Unmanned Mission
We're now about mid way between the 42nd anniversary of the launches of Voyager 2 (20 Aug 1977) and Voyager 1 (5 Sept 1977), and both still recording science on 4 or 5 instruments.
To put the mission in context, Hunt also told us: "My elder daughter came to work with me during this encounter. When I wrote my proposal to NASA for this mission, she was five years old; at the time of the encounter she was a PhD student at Cambridge!"
That should earn them the title of honorary generation ships, even if they are unmanned and all the analysis is done on Earth.
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Tuesday 27th August 2019 13:28 GMT Sartori
Re: Voyager: The Most Amazing Unmanned Mission
Absolutely, there have been many great space missions over the decades, but Voyager is just something else. Truly an inspiring mission and even now, it's still boldly going where nothing built by humans has gone before. Well done to everyone involved in Voyager, what an achievement!
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Tuesday 27th August 2019 14:06 GMT T. F. M. Reader
Proper requirement analysis
I keep telling younger colleagues (which means all of them, damn...), "Requirements will change, plan accordingly." They listen politely and then keep doing the minimum of what was asked for, and often less than that...
With Voyager, someone must have planned larger than necessary fuel tanks, while others took into consideration the extra bulk and weight (that likely mattered at launch, for manoeuvring in interplanetary space, for re-focusing cameras and whatever), and yet others filled those tanks with fuel that was ordered by procurement, etc.... And in the end it turned out handy when requirements did change...
And in my imagination when the question of visiting Uranus and Neptune came up the first time during a stand-up morning meeting no one in the agile team said, "But this was not in the original specification and there is no story for that!"
Those good old days when “spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.”
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Tuesday 27th August 2019 14:49 GMT Killing Time
Re: Proper requirement analysis
In fairness, New Horizons has completed one extra science mission and will probably achieve a third due to the forethought / planning of the project team and it must be acknowledged, the administrators.
Both groups manage to schmooze the politicians into signing off realistic budgets to support further science along the way.
Long may it continue!
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Wednesday 28th August 2019 12:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Proper requirement analysis
"They listen politely and then keep doing the minimum of what was asked for, and often less than that...
It was a bone of contention when Crosby Quality was flavour of the day. Management forbade what they saw as "over-engineering" - which we called "allowing for open-ended design". They conveniently forgot their proscriptions when our covert approach saved the day when a requirement did change just before delivery.
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Tuesday 27th August 2019 17:47 GMT Stevie
Bah!
Perhaps the saddest thing to reflect upon is that when the archeologists of the Beetles that will replace humans as the future top level civilization of the Earth come to examine our historical record, none of the magnificent starships we invented will be available for study because they weren't real.
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Tuesday 27th August 2019 18:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
8 hours?? Pah!!!
I have a dozen posts stuck in moderation every week for longer than that!!!
Really inspiring story, i avidly collected science and scifi magazine articles about Voyager as a child; and still pop over to "Heavens Above" to see how its journey is progressing.
Paris?? We've seen the rest, now we want to see Uranus.
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Saturday 15th February 2020 01:59 GMT HelpfulJohn
No, not if they used a triaxialating frequency over an anti-neutrino laced tachyon-burst verteron radiation, rotating frequency, spread spectrum Omega channel with a narrowed confinement beam.
Just as an aside, that last has bothered me a little for decades. Just about every week on "ST:Voyager", the super-smart engineer would need to narrow the confinement beam to get the magic transporters to work. I wondered why she didn't just set them to super-narrow *all* *the* *time*. Between that and not strengthening the shields every ten minutes, in addition to rotating the frequencies, both of which she could have set up on her very first shift, she could have taken loads more time off.
Maybe then she wouldn't have been so grumpy?
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Wednesday 28th August 2019 09:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
To put the mission in context, Hunt also told us: "My elder daughter came to work with me during this encounter. When I wrote my proposal to NASA for this mission, she was five years old; at the time of the encounter she was a PhD student at Cambridge!"
Another context is that 35 years ago I was in my final year at Oxford studying maths and one of my third year options was Error Correcting Codes .... I remember the lecturer describing the level of error-correcting used for Voyager and even then he said he was astonished that we were still in contact with it .... 35 years later its even more staggering!
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Wednesday 28th August 2019 12:29 GMT Robert Helpmann??
What's in a defninition
...the eighth, and farthest, planet in the Solar System.
Not when the Voyager craft were launched, no. Then there were 9 and we were looking for number 10. This retrospective on a wonderful program should unite the masses. Don't sneak any reminders of the planetary discrimination we have more recently been forced to endure into the story. It's too soon.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
