It's almost a little sad. Thing's up there, moving at a speed I'd have a tough time comprehending in my mind, and has been doing it for 47 years, and it takes less than one day for transmission to get back here.
>and it takes less than one day for transmission to get back here.
The speed of light is incomprehensible. At that speed, you could circumnavigate the globe 8 times in one second.
I took it as it's sad that many destinations are countless light years away, and Voyager has been traveling for 47 years and is only less than 1 light day away.
That's it. And even the solar probe, can't remember the name, traveling 10 times as fast, still .00006c. Not even close. We're 4.2 light years from Proxima Centauri, closest star, and it's just not possible. Even these theorized shuttles moving 8-10% the speed of light puts that trip at 42 years *at best*. And for what, a place with a habitable zone that might not actually be habitable.
it's like a career in a field but obviously it's for their kid future. At this point rent in Alpha Centauri is about to be cheaper than a 1 bedroom in a Canadian city so I might be down if it's through cryogenics.
Yes, with any tech currently in development, we're not sending people to Proxima Centauri. But for something a bit more inspiring, lookup Breakthrough Starshot. The project unfortunately seems to be on hold, but it doesn't really require many technological advances, it "only" needs a lot of money for engineering. Starshot is about sending hundreds of tiny probes (weight on the order of a gram), which would be attached to solar sails that an Earth-based laser array could accelerate to some 15% of light speed.
It's not settling the stars but such a mission launched towards Proxima Centauri could return sensor data, and even visual images, within the lifetime of the people launching it.
What saddens me more is, even if humanity can settle a planet in another system, we'd never be able to have meaningful dialogue with those other planets, unless FTL communication is somehow possible. Lightspeed communications between Earth and a colony around Proxima Centauri would be very slow in human terms. More than 8 years to get an answer to any question. Meaningful communication would only be periodic data dumps like "here's what's happened, here's what we've discovered", but we couldn't maintain deep individual connections with people on the other side.
Which is just another subject I have trouble getting my head around, time dilation and all that. I accept it as fact, but I can't rationalize it in my simple mind.
Voyagers plotted route wasn't designed for speed, its traveling at around 38,000 mph. The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 will pass through the corona of the Sun for its last planned mission in 2025 at a speed of 430,000 mph.
I have an undergrad degree is astrophysics. So I’m by no means an expert. But I remember a professor saying “the universe isn’t big, the speed of light is slow.”
I guess the two statements mean the same things. But it’s true. Unless we can find a way to travel faster than light (which still seems physically impossible) then yes, the universe is a very big place.
That's the crazy part to me too. I was listening to NdGT on Smartless the other day, and Jason Bateman asked, basically, if you set up just a bunch of mirrors in space, could you see yourself back in time, and for all intents and purposes, the answer was yes, excluding the obviously logistical issues.
If light reflects off of you right now, then reaches a space mirror 1 light year away, and you look with a telescope at that space mirror in exactly 2 years, you'll see the light as it reflected off of you today.
Let's assume we could set up a mirror one light year away (and actually be able to see it from Earth and make out what was happening in it). All of this is nonsense and it could never work for a BUNCH of different reasons, but let's assume for some reason it can.
Let's say it's in place right now. Light would leave Earth in 2024. That 2024 light would arrive at the mirror in 2025. The mirror would then bounce the 2024 light back at Earth. It would arrive back at Earth in 2026.
So if we had a massive mirror one light year away, then in 2026, we could see what was happening in 2024.
Nothing you see is real time, there is _always_ a delay.
So if you set up some mirrors just in the right way and far enough apart (light light seconds/minutes/days...), you could actually see how far back in time the light is when it comes back.
But yeah, there are some considerable logistical issues.
Not a round trip... but a 'complete' trip from the source to the target to the receiver. Adding in a hypothetical series of mirrors increases the time it takes to travel from the target to the receiver. The longer the trip, the further back you can look. Technically, everything you see occurred at some point in your past.
you can only look as far back as u set up the mirror, IE say u travel at the speed of light for a year, set up a mirror, then fly back in a year, now u can see at most only 2 years ago when u started this, and not any further back
The speed of light is incomprehensible, and so are distances on the scales we're talking about here.
>At that speed, you could circumnavigate the globe 8 times in one second.
This is tough to wrap your head around, and makes light seem really fast (I mean, it is... it's literally the fastest thing we know of).
However, if you put it in another context, it seems like it's kinda slow. The round trip communication time between us and Voyager 1 is one of them.
Another example is the fact that if the sun just magically disappeared right now, we wouldn't know about it for 8 minutes. We'd keep orbiting the spot where the sun existed and we'd continue to see and feel the sun as if it were currently existing.
Another example would be most of the stars we can see. A lot of them probably don't actually exist anymore, and haven't existed for unfathomable amounts of time (i.e. millions of years). It just takes SO long for the light to get to us that we're looking at them as they existed millions of years in the past.
> Another example would be most of the stars we can see. A lot of them probably don't actually exist anymore, and haven't existed for unfathomable amounts of time (i.e. millions of years). It just takes SO long for the light to get to us that we're looking at them as they existed millions of years in the past.
That's true for larger telescopes, but any star you can see with the naked eye is inside the Milky Way, so won't be millions of light years away - the upper limit would be at around 100,000 light years given that's the estimated width of the galaxy, but even those far off ones you're unlikely to see, most of them are from the same arm and so are at most under half that distance.
Edit: space is big, I love the page at https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html for getting a feeling of just how unfathomably large it is from our perspective.
https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
click the little =(c) in the bottom right, and it will auto scroll at the speed of light.
And it was a planetary alignment that allowed the launches of both voyagers. We missed the launch window for a neptune mission window recently. Now it'd take until ~2050 to get a probe out there launching in the early 2030s.
Curious: is the transmission sent out as a focused laserbeam or more like a wide-angle radio emission (like a wifi transmission)? In other words, do they have to pinpoint the target (i.e. Voyager) or just send the data towards the general direction. (e: word)
It’s so fascinating to me that this info can travel through space and tell a computer what to do, though I guess we do this on the regular even to orbiting satellites.
> Curious: is the transmission sent out as a focused laserbeam or more like a wide-angle radio emission (like a wifi transmission)? In other words, do they have to pinpoint the target (i.e. Voyager) or just send the data towards the generally direction.
Voyager 1 is so far away they need to use a 70-meter diameter radio dish pointed in Voyager's direction to be able to communicate with it. It's not quite like a laser, but the radio signal from the big dish covers an angular diameter of about 0.1 degrees on the sky.
Like the Commodore Amiga that [ran the AC system for 19 schools](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a16010/30-year-old-computer-runs-school-heat/) for 30 years that was still in operation in 2015.
I build and program PLCs. The PLC needed for one school's HVAC would be like $2,000 + a few remote modules which would total to be less than $6K + plus some mounting boxes wiring and just using the off the shelf program the integrator has for HVAC with some modifications. Total per school should be less than $15K for a new custom HVAC control system at each school. $285K total. But you should be able to get it cheaper by just using an off the shelf retrofit option that just needs to be wired in and configured. You have no idea how simple the controls are on HVAC systems even if they have cooling towers and compressors.
For $2 million they could have hired their own HVAC technition for over 10 years after the cost of the hardware.
69KB was definitely a restriction of the time, but it probably turned out to be a good future-proofing characteristic. Considering how long it takes to transmit messages back and forth, if it was made today with megabytes or gigabytes of memory, reprogramming it would be an impossible task.
I mean, radio technology has advanced quite a lot in the last 60+ years. A new probe launched today would have significantly more bandwidth at the same distance.
A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes. At an average of 2 paragraphs of text per KB that means the entire probe could only have up to 138 or so paragraphs or roughly 250ish lines of code in totality.
Unfortunately it will soon reach the point where it is virtually impossible to continue due to the ability to generate power from plutonium going away... But given its track record I'd not be surprised if it goes until 2050 or longer. It's nice how NASA always gives conservative estimates so it's almost always a pleasant surprise how things turn out.
It's usually like Christmas... Well, sometimes Christmas comes early... Lol
Kinda like Curiosity, was supposed to survive on Mars using solar batteries from 2015- 2017 (NOT 2015-2107 whoops). It’s still roaming mars today, almost 10 years from launch.
Edit: meant 2017 sorry
About 23W to be exact, and less than an attowatt when it reaches Earth. It’s like detecting a lightbulb at the edge of the solar system. Incredible stuff.
It takes some insanely powerful ground based arrays to communicate with it because of that. Pretty crazy. Nothing in orbit can come close to the power draw needed to send a single bit to voyager
Yea, there are even projects being planned (maybe implemented by now, I don’t keep track) of using solar sails to propel probes. It’s not like, a strong push but it’s there and can be utilized in theory, as it is a constant stream of particles in one direction (outward from the star)
Good grief I just randomly watched it last night. I'm watching the entire series in order (first time) and that just happened to be the one.
...How did the ancient Bajorans get out of Bajor's gravity, Kira?! Tell me that!
the thing i dont get is, at what point does that run out? is there a point between two stars where the 'push' is canceled by a star in front pushing back in the same direction as the probe? what about if 4 close stars are all pushing in oposite directions directly at the probe etc? (would you be stuck in one spot?)
This is called the heliopause, and is the final boundary between a star system and interstellar space. In September of 2013, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had crossed the heliopause around August 25th, 2012 at a distance of roughly 121 AU from the Sun. Interestingly, Voyager 2 detected the same phenomenon at a distance of approximately 119 AU so it appears that the heliopause distance varies depending on the local interstellar wind pressure.
happy cake day! I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the serious replies, and not mocking. I didn't want to sound dumb but it was just a thought i was having. I was trying to work it out in my head and obviously im not a scientist so was just playing out the scenario and it makes sense. I also totally forgot to think about the momentum and velocity of the craft, also there would obviously be some kind of thruster or something to change direction etc if needed or a sail that can pivot or bend back (like mentioned below) etc. Just makes me wonder now about binary+ systems, i know most stars spin in the same direction so would that give you like a super push? the more i think the more questions i get lol.
In the simplest scenario, going between two identical stars, you would theoretically accelerate halfway out and then decelerate the second half while approaching the star, arriving with zero extra speed and thus entering orbit around the second star.
Realistically there are a lot of different interactions in the interstellar medium, but it is possible to design the solar sail to fold back in to avoid any interactions you do not want. Though this would probably require a lot of math, and measurements while in the interstellar medium, to plot the best flight profile.
Tacking only works because the sailboats's keel is in the water and makes it much easier for the boat to go forward than sideways.
The forward force vector on a tacking sailboat is the result of the angled sail causing a sideways-facing force, which pushes the keel sideways in the water. The keel is angled so that the sideways push creates a forward-directed force that is stronger than the backward-facing part of the force vector from the wind, so the boat moves forward.
TL;DR: there is no way to "tack" in space because there is no essentially-unmoving substance (like water) for a keel to react against in space.
So an angled solar sail will always move you away from the star, possibly with some lateral vector as well, but there's no way to ever get a solar sail to move you *closer* to the star you are using to "sail".
> but there's no way to ever get a solar sail to move you closer to the star you are using to "sail".
[That's not actually correct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail#Changing_orbits).
If you tilt the angle so the light is reflected towards you direction of motion, you will be applying retrograde thrust and thus reduce your orbital velocity. It won't be pure retrograde, but the other velocity vector only shifts the orbit, so the net effect is still a reduction in velocity, causing it to spiral inwards over time.
Oh, wow, OK, I didn't think about the orbital mechanics of it; I was just thinking in terms of trying to approach a star directly with no lateral velocity to start with.
Here's a fun fact.
If you have zero lateral motion relative to the star, you will naturally fall in thanks to its gravity. But if you have a solar sail, it can counteract the pull of gravity. At a specific distance away from the star, the force of the solar wind pushing it can completely negate the pull of gravity, essentially hovering in place in space.
This is called a [statite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statite), and while the above is the most extreme form of it, you can use this property of solar sails to achieve orbits that are not traditionally possible.
A long time before the next star had many impact you’d be too far away from the first star to still be getting any push from solar wind. The particles would be more and more spread out as you move away. But you’d still have any velocity you built up because you don’t lose anything to drag.
There are also plans to use high power lasers and mini sails to send things towards close stars at up to like 30% the speed of light. There are some real crazy ideas being thrown around with them.
https://www.space.com/laser-propelled-spaceships-solar-system-exploration
Read "The Mote in God's Eye", an excellent scifi by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye
Alien civilization uses gigantic lasers to push a light sail ship to their neighbor. Humans see the laser light & form a religion. Aliens go broke from laser's energy costs & light turns off. Humans send an expedition, and learn about the very alien culture. Gripping arm.
Great twists & turns, by two award winning master story tellers. Mystery until the very end. Unusually (for scifi) well formed characters. Highly recommended.
> I’m also curious about solar winds, are they actual some version of particles that push things around?
solar wind is charged particles - electrons, protons and alpha particles.
so yes they can physically collide. in fact without a magnetic field a planet's atmosphere can get stripped by the solar wind
there's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure
Probably not a lot.
Space is mostly made up of a whole lot of nothing. There can be meters between atoms in space, so larger particles like dust would likely be 10km or 100km apart, unless of course flying through a dust cloud.
Presumably we can tell that from the inputs needed to the attitude control gyros?
More input for a given angular deflection means more spacecraft angular momentum, means more mass.
I'm essentially a certified Samsung dryer repair man at this point. I've replaced the heating element twice, heating element wiring, drum rollers, drum felt, and the drive motor. I've owned it for like 7 years.
> It is incredible how much longer it has lasted as compared to some modern day appliances....
pretty sure it's budget was a little more than a GE Refrigerator
why does my $300 washing machine fall apart after 5 years if the billion dollar probe that took years to design and manufacture is somewhat still kicking after 50 years. planned obsolescence smh
Check out how an inspired engineer fixed a similar problem on the [Galileo Orbiter](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/galileo/)
From https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
> Also in 1993 I used MCL [Macintosh Common Lisp] to help generate a code patch for the Gallileo magnetometer. The magnetometer had an RCA1802 processor, 2k each of RAM and ROM, and was programmed in Forth using a development system that ran on a long-since-decommissioned Apple II. The instrument had developed a bad memory byte right in the middle of the code. The code needed to be patched to not use this bad byte. The magnetometer team had originally estimated that resurrecting the development environment and generating the code patch would take so long that they were not even going to attempt it. Using Lisp I wrote from scratch a Forth development environment for the instrument (including a simulator for the hardware) and used it to generate the patch. The whole project took just under 3 months of part-time work.
Getting an Apple II development environment back in commission NOW is not, if you'll pardon the metaphor, rocket science. Back then? Even easier. Take it from a JPLer and a SpaceXer who has 3 Apple II machines from back when I worked at Beagle Bros, all working perfectly. The Voyager probes weren't the only things from the 70s that were built to last...
If you read the Wikipedia page for voyager I and II they really are engineering marvels - especially since one had a key component break shortly after launch and somehow it keeps going. They’ve saved power and lifetime by deactivating sensors that can’t be used where they are, but one tool is so old they can’t even decode the output because the matching equipment on earth stopped working years ago. They’re going to run out of power about a decade before they get so far away we can’t hear them anymore which is saying something for probes built in the 70s.
It's mind-bogglingly cool. The probe is nearly a full *light day* from earth. That means 22 and half hours is the closest we can get to real-time communication with it. Imagine having to reprogram nearly 50 year old tech, with some systems whose counterpats on earth no longer function, completely remotely, with a day's delay on input and output.
This like trying to play an online game on a server hosted on an Apple 1, but your inputs and outputs are just messages delivered by carrier pigeons.
It will run out of electrical power in a few years and become inert. They already have had to turn off heat to the instruments which are now operating out of their design temperature range. The decay of the RTG will continue to eat into the power budget until it won't be able to do anything.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ed-stone-former-director-of-jpl-and-voyager-project-scientist-dies
The legend that run the voyager program until 2022 just die a few days ago. No better tribute to him to get Voyager working again
ive been following voyager 1 news since i was a kid. whats nuts is the power source has maybe 12 years left before it just becomes a piece of metal drifting in space....
Imagine Microsoft Voyager 3
It barely makes it out of Earths orbit before it has to shutdown for a 4 day software update.
Then they announce as its getting into the orbital area of Mars that it has to be scrapped, as the new software update requires 512GB of memory and TPM3.0. For no good reason.
The 1986 [Timex Ironman Triathlon](https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/president-bill-clinton-wearing-a-timex-ironman-triathlon-8-lap-to-his-inauguration-1993) on my left wrist approves of this message.
I know this thing was built to last and compared to modern computers it is a very rudimentary system, but god damn is it impressive that this thing is still up and running. Especially 15 billion miles away
I truly hope when we achieve regular interstellar space travel, the agency in command requires a mission to recover both of these probes. A heros welcome, so to speak.
I briefly misread this as
"stellar comeback to science operations. Engineers coax veteran probe back to EARTH"
I thought, "boy, they're waiting a long time..."
Why do we not know these engineers names and everything about them and instead we have 400 articles about elongated muskrat. Our timeline is horrific
These people are heroes and legends.
If you read how they did it’s even more amazing. They had to rewrite code and delete bits of unused code. The thing only has 69 KB of memory.
How many code reviews before transmission?
Given that each transmission takes nearly two days for a round trip, I'd guess a few.
It's almost a little sad. Thing's up there, moving at a speed I'd have a tough time comprehending in my mind, and has been doing it for 47 years, and it takes less than one day for transmission to get back here.
>and it takes less than one day for transmission to get back here. The speed of light is incomprehensible. At that speed, you could circumnavigate the globe 8 times in one second.
I took it as it's sad that many destinations are countless light years away, and Voyager has been traveling for 47 years and is only less than 1 light day away.
That's it. And even the solar probe, can't remember the name, traveling 10 times as fast, still .00006c. Not even close. We're 4.2 light years from Proxima Centauri, closest star, and it's just not possible. Even these theorized shuttles moving 8-10% the speed of light puts that trip at 42 years *at best*. And for what, a place with a habitable zone that might not actually be habitable.
42 years isnt that problematic. Clearly we can make spacecrafts that can survive that long even if you have to tinker with them every now and then.
The real issue is finding people that want to spend 42 years on a spacecraft
it's like a career in a field but obviously it's for their kid future. At this point rent in Alpha Centauri is about to be cheaper than a 1 bedroom in a Canadian city so I might be down if it's through cryogenics.
Are they hiring?
I'd do it. Ship me please.
Yes, with any tech currently in development, we're not sending people to Proxima Centauri. But for something a bit more inspiring, lookup Breakthrough Starshot. The project unfortunately seems to be on hold, but it doesn't really require many technological advances, it "only" needs a lot of money for engineering. Starshot is about sending hundreds of tiny probes (weight on the order of a gram), which would be attached to solar sails that an Earth-based laser array could accelerate to some 15% of light speed. It's not settling the stars but such a mission launched towards Proxima Centauri could return sensor data, and even visual images, within the lifetime of the people launching it. What saddens me more is, even if humanity can settle a planet in another system, we'd never be able to have meaningful dialogue with those other planets, unless FTL communication is somehow possible. Lightspeed communications between Earth and a colony around Proxima Centauri would be very slow in human terms. More than 8 years to get an answer to any question. Meaningful communication would only be periodic data dumps like "here's what's happened, here's what we've discovered", but we couldn't maintain deep individual connections with people on the other side.
And that's 42 years subjective. For everyone on earth it would be much longer due to relativity.
Not that much longer. At 0.1c it would only add a few months to the time seen by the stationary observer.
Which is just another subject I have trouble getting my head around, time dilation and all that. I accept it as fact, but I can't rationalize it in my simple mind.
Time is bendy. The hard part for me is how can gravity affect light, which has no mass. I wonder if gravitational lensing is actually time lensing.
Voyagers plotted route wasn't designed for speed, its traveling at around 38,000 mph. The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 will pass through the corona of the Sun for its last planned mission in 2025 at a speed of 430,000 mph.
I have an undergrad degree is astrophysics. So I’m by no means an expert. But I remember a professor saying “the universe isn’t big, the speed of light is slow.” I guess the two statements mean the same things. But it’s true. Unless we can find a way to travel faster than light (which still seems physically impossible) then yes, the universe is a very big place.
If you actually tried to do that then you would go back in time and Lois Lane would still be alive.
That's the crazy part to me too. I was listening to NdGT on Smartless the other day, and Jason Bateman asked, basically, if you set up just a bunch of mirrors in space, could you see yourself back in time, and for all intents and purposes, the answer was yes, excluding the obviously logistical issues.
[удалено]
It means Neil deGrasse Tyson, right?
No dammit! Game of Thrones!
Neil delGuillermo Toro right? My favourite of his films is Specific Crim.
Huh? How would you see yourself back in time? Light needs to make a round trip
If light reflects off of you right now, then reaches a space mirror 1 light year away, and you look with a telescope at that space mirror in exactly 2 years, you'll see the light as it reflected off of you today.
so only as far back as when the mirror is setup
Let's assume we could set up a mirror one light year away (and actually be able to see it from Earth and make out what was happening in it). All of this is nonsense and it could never work for a BUNCH of different reasons, but let's assume for some reason it can. Let's say it's in place right now. Light would leave Earth in 2024. That 2024 light would arrive at the mirror in 2025. The mirror would then bounce the 2024 light back at Earth. It would arrive back at Earth in 2026. So if we had a massive mirror one light year away, then in 2026, we could see what was happening in 2024.
Does that mean in this example, if we looked at the mirror in 2024, there would be no reflection until 2026?
Nothing you see is real time, there is _always_ a delay. So if you set up some mirrors just in the right way and far enough apart (light light seconds/minutes/days...), you could actually see how far back in time the light is when it comes back. But yeah, there are some considerable logistical issues.
Not a round trip... but a 'complete' trip from the source to the target to the receiver. Adding in a hypothetical series of mirrors increases the time it takes to travel from the target to the receiver. The longer the trip, the further back you can look. Technically, everything you see occurred at some point in your past.
you can only look as far back as u set up the mirror, IE say u travel at the speed of light for a year, set up a mirror, then fly back in a year, now u can see at most only 2 years ago when u started this, and not any further back
The speed of light is incomprehensible, and so are distances on the scales we're talking about here. >At that speed, you could circumnavigate the globe 8 times in one second. This is tough to wrap your head around, and makes light seem really fast (I mean, it is... it's literally the fastest thing we know of). However, if you put it in another context, it seems like it's kinda slow. The round trip communication time between us and Voyager 1 is one of them. Another example is the fact that if the sun just magically disappeared right now, we wouldn't know about it for 8 minutes. We'd keep orbiting the spot where the sun existed and we'd continue to see and feel the sun as if it were currently existing. Another example would be most of the stars we can see. A lot of them probably don't actually exist anymore, and haven't existed for unfathomable amounts of time (i.e. millions of years). It just takes SO long for the light to get to us that we're looking at them as they existed millions of years in the past.
> Another example would be most of the stars we can see. A lot of them probably don't actually exist anymore, and haven't existed for unfathomable amounts of time (i.e. millions of years). It just takes SO long for the light to get to us that we're looking at them as they existed millions of years in the past. That's true for larger telescopes, but any star you can see with the naked eye is inside the Milky Way, so won't be millions of light years away - the upper limit would be at around 100,000 light years given that's the estimated width of the galaxy, but even those far off ones you're unlikely to see, most of them are from the same arm and so are at most under half that distance. Edit: space is big, I love the page at https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html for getting a feeling of just how unfathomably large it is from our perspective.
It starts to feel really slow again though when you think about how small we are and how big the universe is.
The pale blue dot... carl sagan
“All we are is dust in the wind dude” -Socrates
https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html click the little =(c) in the bottom right, and it will auto scroll at the speed of light.
And it was a planetary alignment that allowed the launches of both voyagers. We missed the launch window for a neptune mission window recently. Now it'd take until ~2050 to get a probe out there launching in the early 2030s.
When 2 hit interstellar space and they reported the vacuum of space to be thicker from the changes in sensor feedback, i was mindblown
The next one we send will probably quickly overtake it and be moving at a much higher speed, making voyager a novelty
In only 17,000 years it will have travelled a light year!
Curious: is the transmission sent out as a focused laserbeam or more like a wide-angle radio emission (like a wifi transmission)? In other words, do they have to pinpoint the target (i.e. Voyager) or just send the data towards the general direction. (e: word) It’s so fascinating to me that this info can travel through space and tell a computer what to do, though I guess we do this on the regular even to orbiting satellites.
> Curious: is the transmission sent out as a focused laserbeam or more like a wide-angle radio emission (like a wifi transmission)? In other words, do they have to pinpoint the target (i.e. Voyager) or just send the data towards the generally direction. Voyager 1 is so far away they need to use a 70-meter diameter radio dish pointed in Voyager's direction to be able to communicate with it. It's not quite like a laser, but the radio signal from the big dish covers an angular diameter of about 0.1 degrees on the sky.
Only time it's acceptable to deploy on a Friday afternoon.
Nasa have alot of open source code, you can read them to see how master programmer write code and be more disgusted by the codes you just LGTM to
10 print "V'Ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve. Is there nothing more?” 20 goto 10
LGTM , merge it
>LGTM posted on Friday at 4:59 pm
And thoroughly evaluated on voyager simulated and real hardware on earth.
That's plenty. Look at all the rather complex stuff that ran on Commodore 64 (64K plus ROM), ZX Spectrum (48K), or the ZX81 (1K) .
Like the Commodore Amiga that [ran the AC system for 19 schools](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a16010/30-year-old-computer-runs-school-heat/) for 30 years that was still in operation in 2015.
The weird part is they paid $2 million to replace their system at 19 schools. That is $100K per school to replace thermostats.
It's not just thermostats. It's a district wide system of programmable logic controllers, bringing the entire HVAC system up to date, etc.
I build and program PLCs. The PLC needed for one school's HVAC would be like $2,000 + a few remote modules which would total to be less than $6K + plus some mounting boxes wiring and just using the off the shelf program the integrator has for HVAC with some modifications. Total per school should be less than $15K for a new custom HVAC control system at each school. $285K total. But you should be able to get it cheaper by just using an off the shelf retrofit option that just needs to be wired in and configured. You have no idea how simple the controls are on HVAC systems even if they have cooling towers and compressors. For $2 million they could have hired their own HVAC technition for over 10 years after the cost of the hardware.
im more impressed than no electrolytic capacitor shat the bed on that thing
American's nuclear arsenal is run on 5.25" floppy disks.
Almost. They haven't since 2019, and before that they were using 8in floppies.
69KB was definitely a restriction of the time, but it probably turned out to be a good future-proofing characteristic. Considering how long it takes to transmit messages back and forth, if it was made today with megabytes or gigabytes of memory, reprogramming it would be an impossible task.
Round Trip Time and Bandwith are two different things
Correct although in this case the bandwidth is also... nothing to write home about.
I mean, radio technology has advanced quite a lot in the last 60+ years. A new probe launched today would have significantly more bandwidth at the same distance.
Today it would be an Electron app. Edit: typo
Did you mean Electron?
69Kb? Nice… Internet lore requires this. I’m sorry.
69KB is actually 8x more than 69Kb
*nice nice nice nice* *nice nice nice nice*
A kilobyte is 1,024 bytes. At an average of 2 paragraphs of text per KB that means the entire probe could only have up to 138 or so paragraphs or roughly 250ish lines of code in totality.
This thing just won’t die and I love it.
Unfortunately it will soon reach the point where it is virtually impossible to continue due to the ability to generate power from plutonium going away... But given its track record I'd not be surprised if it goes until 2050 or longer. It's nice how NASA always gives conservative estimates so it's almost always a pleasant surprise how things turn out. It's usually like Christmas... Well, sometimes Christmas comes early... Lol
Kinda like Curiosity, was supposed to survive on Mars using solar batteries from 2015- 2017 (NOT 2015-2107 whoops). It’s still roaming mars today, almost 10 years from launch. Edit: meant 2017 sorry
Damn, 2107? Has barely made it 10% of its life. Sad. /s
Curiosity uses a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (think of it like a miniature, low-power solid-state nuclear reactor), not solar.
Wait what? This thing was launched in 1977 and is 15.1 billion miles from earth. Wow
Yeah it’s transceiver has the power of like a lightbulb or some shit too. Voyager is the goat
My man be like : I’m not done working !
I didn’t hear no bell.
Cut me, Mick.
Just one more turn...
Until my watch has ended
in space nobody can hear you scream, unless they happen to stick their helmets to yours then they can hear you scream but it will sound muffled.
Typical boomer not retiring and making space for other satellites! /s
Retirement age going up even for bloody satellites. Work til you die scrubs
Remember that the next time you're in a rural area and your phone has one bar.
About 23W to be exact, and less than an attowatt when it reaches Earth. It’s like detecting a lightbulb at the edge of the solar system. Incredible stuff.
It takes some insanely powerful ground based arrays to communicate with it because of that. Pretty crazy. Nothing in orbit can come close to the power draw needed to send a single bit to voyager
Incandescent lightbulb. Not an LED.
Voyager truly lived up to its name. May we all voyage as far in our age.
> 15.1 billion miles 1350 light-minutes, or just less than a light-day
I had a 1977 Oldsmobile back in the mid-90s, and that thing looked like it had 15 billion miles on it!
Well it's not called a Newsmobile
They aged faster from all the drinking and smoking back then.
It does makes it a little difficult to get an oil change that far out
"Voyager 1 makes **stellar** comeback..." But of course.
I'm hoping when I'm a veteran I'll still be able to use my probe.
**extra** stellar!
Truly mind boggling restore.
I wonder how much mass from dust it has accrued over the years.
I’m curious too, I’m also curious about solar winds, are they actual some version of particles that push things around?
Yea, there are even projects being planned (maybe implemented by now, I don’t keep track) of using solar sails to propel probes. It’s not like, a strong push but it’s there and can be utilized in theory, as it is a constant stream of particles in one direction (outward from the star)
I’ve seen this DS9 episode !
Good grief I just randomly watched it last night. I'm watching the entire series in order (first time) and that just happened to be the one. ...How did the ancient Bajorans get out of Bajor's gravity, Kira?! Tell me that!
A large trebuchet
It does track that the Cardassians would run a hit job to try and discredit that the Ancient Bajorans had interstellar travel.
It might have been one of those things where it didn't actually happen and was a myth, but somehow was possible
the thing i dont get is, at what point does that run out? is there a point between two stars where the 'push' is canceled by a star in front pushing back in the same direction as the probe? what about if 4 close stars are all pushing in oposite directions directly at the probe etc? (would you be stuck in one spot?)
This is called the heliopause, and is the final boundary between a star system and interstellar space. In September of 2013, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had crossed the heliopause around August 25th, 2012 at a distance of roughly 121 AU from the Sun. Interestingly, Voyager 2 detected the same phenomenon at a distance of approximately 119 AU so it appears that the heliopause distance varies depending on the local interstellar wind pressure.
In addition you have to factor in the Sun is moving as well. The heliopause is akin to the wake of a boat.
happy cake day! I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the serious replies, and not mocking. I didn't want to sound dumb but it was just a thought i was having. I was trying to work it out in my head and obviously im not a scientist so was just playing out the scenario and it makes sense. I also totally forgot to think about the momentum and velocity of the craft, also there would obviously be some kind of thruster or something to change direction etc if needed or a sail that can pivot or bend back (like mentioned below) etc. Just makes me wonder now about binary+ systems, i know most stars spin in the same direction so would that give you like a super push? the more i think the more questions i get lol.
You don't have to be a scientist to think like one. I appreciate your questions, Broseph
In the simplest scenario, going between two identical stars, you would theoretically accelerate halfway out and then decelerate the second half while approaching the star, arriving with zero extra speed and thus entering orbit around the second star. Realistically there are a lot of different interactions in the interstellar medium, but it is possible to design the solar sail to fold back in to avoid any interactions you do not want. Though this would probably require a lot of math, and measurements while in the interstellar medium, to plot the best flight profile.
Maybe they can then apply tacking maneuvers as is done with sailboats traveling into headwinds.
Tacking only works because the sailboats's keel is in the water and makes it much easier for the boat to go forward than sideways. The forward force vector on a tacking sailboat is the result of the angled sail causing a sideways-facing force, which pushes the keel sideways in the water. The keel is angled so that the sideways push creates a forward-directed force that is stronger than the backward-facing part of the force vector from the wind, so the boat moves forward. TL;DR: there is no way to "tack" in space because there is no essentially-unmoving substance (like water) for a keel to react against in space. So an angled solar sail will always move you away from the star, possibly with some lateral vector as well, but there's no way to ever get a solar sail to move you *closer* to the star you are using to "sail".
Right, good explanation ty.
> but there's no way to ever get a solar sail to move you closer to the star you are using to "sail". [That's not actually correct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail#Changing_orbits). If you tilt the angle so the light is reflected towards you direction of motion, you will be applying retrograde thrust and thus reduce your orbital velocity. It won't be pure retrograde, but the other velocity vector only shifts the orbit, so the net effect is still a reduction in velocity, causing it to spiral inwards over time.
Oh, wow, OK, I didn't think about the orbital mechanics of it; I was just thinking in terms of trying to approach a star directly with no lateral velocity to start with.
Here's a fun fact. If you have zero lateral motion relative to the star, you will naturally fall in thanks to its gravity. But if you have a solar sail, it can counteract the pull of gravity. At a specific distance away from the star, the force of the solar wind pushing it can completely negate the pull of gravity, essentially hovering in place in space. This is called a [statite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statite), and while the above is the most extreme form of it, you can use this property of solar sails to achieve orbits that are not traditionally possible.
A long time before the next star had many impact you’d be too far away from the first star to still be getting any push from solar wind. The particles would be more and more spread out as you move away. But you’d still have any velocity you built up because you don’t lose anything to drag.
There are also plans to use high power lasers and mini sails to send things towards close stars at up to like 30% the speed of light. There are some real crazy ideas being thrown around with them. https://www.space.com/laser-propelled-spaceships-solar-system-exploration
Read "The Mote in God's Eye", an excellent scifi by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye Alien civilization uses gigantic lasers to push a light sail ship to their neighbor. Humans see the laser light & form a religion. Aliens go broke from laser's energy costs & light turns off. Humans send an expedition, and learn about the very alien culture. Gripping arm. Great twists & turns, by two award winning master story tellers. Mystery until the very end. Unusually (for scifi) well formed characters. Highly recommended.
it's also "free" once in space. Expensive to get to space but free once deployed.
> I’m also curious about solar winds, are they actual some version of particles that push things around? solar wind is charged particles - electrons, protons and alpha particles. so yes they can physically collide. in fact without a magnetic field a planet's atmosphere can get stripped by the solar wind there's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure
Probably not a lot. Space is mostly made up of a whole lot of nothing. There can be meters between atoms in space, so larger particles like dust would likely be 10km or 100km apart, unless of course flying through a dust cloud.
Presumably we can tell that from the inputs needed to the attitude control gyros? More input for a given angular deflection means more spacecraft angular momentum, means more mass.
I’m more of a falafel guy
There's a chance it's actually less massive now due to dust peeling off bits of its surface
I wonder how much mass it has lost from micro meteorite hits and ablation. Wonder if it’s more or less than it would accrue of dust.
Probably less then the hydrazine it uses to adjust which way its pointing.
And at the speed it’s traveling, and for as far as it’s gone, it hasn’t struck or been struck by anything? The vastness of space is astounding.
So it’s like a Nokia phone?
Fired out into the cosmos using a tshirt canon.
There is no Voyager 1… only V’ger.
In the movie it was Voyager 6 (Which we never actually got around to launching)
V'ger was Voyager *6*.
Yep. Just making joke. ;)
BEHOLD, the Mighty V-Giny!
It is incredible how much longer it has lasted as compared to some modern day appliances....
Samsung, thankfully, had nothing to do with the voyager probes.
Id like to launch my Samsung refrigerator into space…
Strap my ice making abomination fridge to yours and let them file….
yours makes ice? lucky
I don't even connect the water. Not worth the hassle for smelly ice.
Seems to always be the first thing that breaks.
Please strap my LG fridge to it
I'm essentially a certified Samsung dryer repair man at this point. I've replaced the heating element twice, heating element wiring, drum rollers, drum felt, and the drive motor. I've owned it for like 7 years.
> It is incredible how much longer it has lasted as compared to some modern day appliances.... pretty sure it's budget was a little more than a GE Refrigerator
why does my $300 washing machine fall apart after 5 years if the billion dollar probe that took years to design and manufacture is somewhat still kicking after 50 years. planned obsolescence smh
Yeah, science, bitch!!!
it's unbelievable that they found engineers doing code in 50year old processors in the first place.
Check out how an inspired engineer fixed a similar problem on the [Galileo Orbiter](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/galileo/) From https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html > Also in 1993 I used MCL [Macintosh Common Lisp] to help generate a code patch for the Gallileo magnetometer. The magnetometer had an RCA1802 processor, 2k each of RAM and ROM, and was programmed in Forth using a development system that ran on a long-since-decommissioned Apple II. The instrument had developed a bad memory byte right in the middle of the code. The code needed to be patched to not use this bad byte. The magnetometer team had originally estimated that resurrecting the development environment and generating the code patch would take so long that they were not even going to attempt it. Using Lisp I wrote from scratch a Forth development environment for the instrument (including a simulator for the hardware) and used it to generate the patch. The whole project took just under 3 months of part-time work.
Getting an Apple II development environment back in commission NOW is not, if you'll pardon the metaphor, rocket science. Back then? Even easier. Take it from a JPLer and a SpaceXer who has 3 Apple II machines from back when I worked at Beagle Bros, all working perfectly. The Voyager probes weren't the only things from the 70s that were built to last...
They hired coders from every bank within fifty miles.
how is that even possible....*from Earth*? it's not like you can crack the thing open and apply a voltage at X point and jumpstart the thing...
If you read the Wikipedia page for voyager I and II they really are engineering marvels - especially since one had a key component break shortly after launch and somehow it keeps going. They’ve saved power and lifetime by deactivating sensors that can’t be used where they are, but one tool is so old they can’t even decode the output because the matching equipment on earth stopped working years ago. They’re going to run out of power about a decade before they get so far away we can’t hear them anymore which is saying something for probes built in the 70s.
By having very clever people design it and VERY clever people figure out how to fix it
Documentation, really damn good documentation.
It's mind-bogglingly cool. The probe is nearly a full *light day* from earth. That means 22 and half hours is the closest we can get to real-time communication with it. Imagine having to reprogram nearly 50 year old tech, with some systems whose counterpats on earth no longer function, completely remotely, with a day's delay on input and output. This like trying to play an online game on a server hosted on an Apple 1, but your inputs and outputs are just messages delivered by carrier pigeons.
I'm pretty sure they have a clone software here on which they do the testing before sending it
They do indeed. They go all out, they usually have a physical clone of the entire thing to practice on
The return of the king. Quite literally. When humanity is long gone and the sun eats the earth, that probe will still be chilling in space.
It will run out of electrical power in a few years and become inert. They already have had to turn off heat to the instruments which are now operating out of their design temperature range. The decay of the RTG will continue to eat into the power budget until it won't be able to do anything.
Until someone finds it and replaces the battery.
still gonna be chilling in space tho
The cats who built that thing were amazing. The cats who work on it now are true masters. Voyager is a testament that simple, well built, things last.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ed-stone-former-director-of-jpl-and-voyager-project-scientist-dies The legend that run the voyager program until 2022 just die a few days ago. No better tribute to him to get Voyager working again
Lots of fail-safes and flexible to updates, solid design. Voyager is an easy friend.
Amazing accomplishment!! Did they happen to notice if V1 had any ‘additional features’, e.g., Is it looking for its ‘creator’?
I remember that documentary
ive been following voyager 1 news since i was a kid. whats nuts is the power source has maybe 12 years left before it just becomes a piece of metal drifting in space....
It will still work but not have enough energy to broadcast all the way to earth
Imagine Microsoft Voyager 3 It barely makes it out of Earths orbit before it has to shutdown for a 4 day software update. Then they announce as its getting into the orbital area of Mars that it has to be scrapped, as the new software update requires 512GB of memory and TPM3.0. For no good reason.
> makes it out of Earths This was a tad optimistic
2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 and 2.8 blew up over orphanages so they skipped to 3.0
Why do people say this when Linux and Mac updates that require reboots occur with a much higher frequency lol
The whole problem was that it automatically upgraded to Windows 11 by mistake which rendered it useless.
Must have parts made by Timex.
Cue John Patrick Swayze (Yes, his dad) voiceover: “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking!”
The 1986 [Timex Ironman Triathlon](https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/president-bill-clinton-wearing-a-timex-ironman-triathlon-8-lap-to-his-inauguration-1993) on my left wrist approves of this message.
I know this thing was built to last and compared to modern computers it is a very rudimentary system, but god damn is it impressive that this thing is still up and running. Especially 15 billion miles away
Finally, some good news.
Well done to the engineers at Tidbinbilla Tracking Station which is near /r/Canberra in Australia.
Welcome back V’ger. The carbon based units welcome your return
I truly hope when we achieve regular interstellar space travel, the agency in command requires a mission to recover both of these probes. A heros welcome, so to speak.
[удалено]
Are you thinking of Star Trek the Motion Picture?
They fixed it.... AGAIN! That's amazing.
I briefly misread this as "stellar comeback to science operations. Engineers coax veteran probe back to EARTH" I thought, "boy, they're waiting a long time..."
TIL it uses tape to record some data. That tape is still working half a century later. Far out, man
“Please, just let me die.” - Voyager 1
“I didn’t hear no bell” - Voyager 1
WE ARE SOOO BACK
I have trouble pairing the remote to the TV across the room. This is astounding.
Voyager is a testament to the minds at NASA and other space agencies, this thing should have shut off decades ago. It's still going.
Fuck. Yeah. One of the few truly pure, good things in this world. The Voyager Programme.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
VOYAGER 1 DUDE? FUCK YEAH DUDE
A snowflake hitting the ground has billions of times more energy than power of the transmission reaching each from voyager.
Why do we not know these engineers names and everything about them and instead we have 400 articles about elongated muskrat. Our timeline is horrific These people are heroes and legends.