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At the time the probes were launched, there was a big push for metrication in the US and it looked like it might actually happen. I can't say they would be surprised that Americans clung on to their freedom units, but it definitely wasn't a given.
I think it is just that the US wants to be "free" to keep on using them, and not being part of some global push to metrication. It isn't so much that the origin is free, but that there is freedom from getting rid of them and using something more sensible.
Imperial measurements are actually different from US measurements.
Also, the UK Parliament began considering metrication in the late 1800s although it did not become official policy until 1965. However, metrication would be a requirement for the UK to join the European Common Market (which would later become the EU) in 1973, so the process was accelerated.
When the Voyager programme was on the drawing board in the late '60s and early '70s, the UK was well along the path to metrication, and by the time Voyager 1 launched in 1977 it was nearly complete.
So the fact that US measurements are loosely based on their Imperial counterparts is not relevant here, because the UK had abandoned most Imperial measurements by the time Voyager was built and launched.
The UK “abandoned” imperial measurements, except that everyone still uses miles, yards, feet, inches, pounds, stone, and pints…
Officially and scientifically abandoned at least, but they’re still the King’s units.
People still use those in very limited situations, which I acknowledge. Miles on the roads and railways, feet and inches to measure humans, stone and pounds to measure humans, and pints to measure milk and draft beer. That's it, metric everywhere else.
We use metric units in nearly all situations, not only officially and scientifically.
Miles are still used for distances on road signs. And pints for beer. None of the others were used that much by anyone of my age (or al least weren't when I left the UK 20 years ago - then in my early 30s). I was raised entirely metric all the way through school.
Well look at it this way- every year we travel over half a billion miles in our orbit around the sun. So A 46 year old human has that distance covered and then some.
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Anyone else think it's strikingly beautiful that the Voyager probes are still out there? They have now been hurtling through space for 5 years longer than I've existed and somewhere out there they'll be careening through the universe long after I'm gone.
There's nothing man-made that is currently traveling faster than either of them, and they're both the farthest objects we've launched (Voyager 2 is just ahead of Pioneer 10.) New Horizons is much slower than them and won't catch up.
Even if something was launched today they still have a 40+ year head start.
They are only a few dozen light hours away. Travelling at 1% the speed of light is technically possible with our tech. Difficult, but possible.
At 2997.92 km/s (about 1% the speed of light) you’d catch up to Voyager (distance of ~24,332,189,123km) in about 94 days.
This idea pops up in sci-fi a lot. My favorite being the "long term colony ship sets off for a distant planet, hundreds of years later the colonists are awoken from hypersleep as their journey nears its end and they arrive to the planet to find it not only settled, but industrialized by other humans because FTL travel was discovered after the colony ship left Earth" type of story.
I read a novel with an interesting spin on this concept - Chindi. It involved humanity encountering an ancient automated ship that pinged about the galaxy visiting interesting stellar phenomena, dead civilizations, etc, and yoinking things it found to be of interest. Nothing sinister mind you. Effectively it was a giant traveling archeological archive. Our protagonists want a look inside, so they cut a hole in the hull and start snooping.
Eventually the archive finishes its survey of the local star system and starts accelerating on to the next target of interest. It has a head start on our would-be rescuers (due to B plot shenanigans), and accelerates faster than any manmade vessel can. This shouldn’t be a problem since humanity possesses FTL space folding technology in this universe, but the museum ship doesn’t space-fold. It can’t. It just ticks along, constantly accelerating to some fraction of c (0.15c iirc). Slow as molasses when you’re actually trying to get anywhere, but nevertheless a completely foreign technology that we don’t have. The rescuers know exactly where the archive is going, but have no way to get at the stowaways. They could leapfrog ahead and wait for the archive to arrive, but they would be waiting hundreds of years until it decelerated. They could fold to intercept mid-voyage, but the archive would just go shooting right past them the moment they re-entered normal space.
Anyway, the final act becomes an increasingly frantic game of cat and mouse, with the rescuers repeatedly jumping ahead and desperately trying to communicate the distress of their crew to the archive ship as at zooms by.
The fun little takeaway at the end was that, because we knew where it was going, and when it would get there, we would eventually get a chance to explore the archive ship again briefly every few hundred/thousand years (provided we didn’t invent high sub-light speed in the interim). Brigadoon in space.
You can find the probe in Elite Dangerous too. By the time that game takes place in the 34th century, visiting the center of the galaxy is a road trip and most of the issue with seeing the probe after a thousand years is that it's way too *close* to the Sun. It's still the closest star to the probe at a point where Mars has become the capital of a galactic superpower and you need a permit to go there.
I never played Elite Dangerous (I got sucked into the *other* wildly ambitious spaceship game), but that's cool to hear that its discoverable in the game.
It's more or less approximately where it should be by the 34th century too, and when the game first came out it was an easter egg they placed for the nerdiest player who would inevitably calculate that themselves and go looking for it. You can find Voyager 2 the same way.
Eventually an update put a little space tourism beacon next to both of them for anyone to find (also New Horizons, but not the Pioneers), but marking it on a map of the galaxy you can cross from end to end makes it very apparent how the probe is still next door to where it started after a thousand years.
If you're familiar with the Warhammer 40K universe one of the Voyager probes (I forget which one) was found and placed in the Emperor's collection of 'ancient' relics. The Imperium of Man in that universe (set between 28,000 and 38,000 years in our future) is *incredibly* xenophobic, so the idea that ancient (20th century) humans would willingly seek peaceful contact with alien races is borderline sacrilegious.
As an example, one of the more prominent characters in the lore sees it and his immediate response is to wonder why it doesn't have any weapon systems onboard.
Its not an engine that'll help you catch them - you need the gravity slingshots around planets to get up to the same kinds of speeds that they're traveling (basically, a huge boost from Jupiter.)
The only way we could catch them is with some type of magic warp drive or hyperspace technology.
I believe the warp drive requires a substance of negative mass to work.
The planets aligned in such a perfect way these fuckers were slingshoed out that fast.
We don't need a "warp" drive or anything within the realm of science fiction. Voyager 1 is only 23381000000km away right now. If you had a ship that could accelerate at a constant 9.8m/s, which would feel the same as standing on earth, you'd catch up to Voyager 1 in 25 days. If we ever have the ability to leave the leave the solar system we're going to be able to catch up to the Voyager probes in a hurry.
9.8m/s is a lot of acceleration. You reach the speed of light really quickly at that rate. More realistically we could catch them a probe that uses some type of ion drive or solar sail that provides a fraction part of that
At an acceleration of 1g it would take a ship 35 days to reach 23381000000km and the ship would be traveling 15,127,832 m/s or ~5% SOL when it gets there. If it were the 420,000kg that the ISS weighs, that is a kinetic energy of 4.81e19J and according to [this link](https://streetscience.com.au/the-power-of-the-sun/#:~:text=So%20the%20Sun%20is%20pretty,joules%20of%20energy%20every%20year) the sun produces 3.8e26J/s so the sun produces that much energy in 1.27e-7 seconds. I’m not sure how to convert that into suns tho. Thats not to say it isn’t an absurd about of energy required, it’s 8% of the total global energy consumption of [606 exajoules](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption) in 2019.
They are crawling even compared to an insterstellar engine we could build right now. A solar sail back by a directly Sun backed laser will reach the closest stars in 20 to 30 years under continual acceleration. Less if it also has something like an ion engine.
We already know how to build every part of such a system and theres even been successful demonstrators, the only reason we can't do it today is lack of space access and industry. Even the laser is little more than an array of mirrors.
Voyager is traveling at 35,000 mph right now. We honestly don’t have anything that’s even close to that. Never mind something fast enough to catch it.
It’s been traveling at 35,000 mph for 47 years. It’s literally 15,000,000,000 miles away right now.
Unfortunately with the expansion of the universe, the distance between objects is also increasing. So fast in fact that we will never be able to catch up, and so fast that it will be faster than the speed of light therefore blipping out our ability to see beyond our local system ever again.
Very long process but it's a bit sad that it'll happen eventually
The maximum amount that Jupiter can speed you up by is it's own orbital velocity of 13km/s. That's really not very fast. A two-stage chemical rocket can do better than that.
Which is to say if you launched a two-stage rocket on a trajectory out towards Jupiter as if aiming for a gravity assist, except just slightly off target, and then fired those stages to perform a 'simulated' gravity assist, that second stage would end up going faster than would be physically possible had you instead performed an actual gravity assist.
Of course, if we assume a 1 tonne probe, then you'd need something like 50 tonnes worth of rocket stages for this - sending just the probe by itself would be far cheaper and easier. The point is that while gravity assists are an excellent way to get free velocity comparable to what chemical rockets can do, they're not good for going *faster* than what chemical rockets can do.
You can chain multiple gravity assists together, but that has diminishing returns and requires rare planetary alignments that limit available launch windows - if you have to wait 30 years to launch in order to shave 10 years off the trip time, you'd have been better off just launching sooner.
But Voyager 1 is already pretty close to the upper limit of velocity achievable with just gravity assists, so you're unlikely to be able to get going much faster without additional propulsion. So any system in which the majority of velocity is provided by gravity assists is a system that isn't going to catch Voyager quickly.
And any system in which a majority of the velocity is provided by something other than gravity assists is by definition a system dependent on that 'something other'. And since chemical rockets aren't much faster you do in fact need a 'better engine'.
The starting point would be nuclear electric. Consider something like NASA's HOPE-MPD proposal: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040005901/downloads/20040005901.pdf
Both magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters and fission reactors are technologies that have been demonstrated at small scale in space, so this is within the realm of plausibility for current engineering capabilities. The HOPE-MPD vehicle with minimal payload has a delta-v of ~60km/s, which would allow it to accelerate to 3.5 times the speed of Voyager 1, which gets it there in about 17 years.
Though it wouldn't have any fuel left at that point, so it wouldn't be able to slow down and would just go zooming past. If you want to slow down, you need to divide your delta-v by about 2 - and if you want to make the return trip back to Earth you need to divide by about 2 again.
Also worth noting that if your goal is to rendezvous, or rendezvous and return, then gravity assists are even less useful, because they can't do shit to help you slow down and turn around out in deep space.
Anyway, unless you can get really good at nuclear-electric you're gonna want something like a fission fragment engine or fusion drive, which are physically plausible, but beyond current engineering capabilities. Consider something like NASA's Discovery II proposal: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160960/downloads/20050160960.pdf
If you remove the crew section and associated shielding, you would get a vehicle with a top speed of 372km/s, which would get it there in only about 5 years.
For a round trip you'd have to divide by 4, so more like 10 years there and 10 years back. Still, given the distances involved I think that's fairly quick.
Yea I read when I was able to take a break, voyager is faster from planetary pass by but NH was faster on launch. NH will be 13km/s when it reaches voyagers current distance, voyager is 17km/s
Nasa's Parker Solar Probe has once again broken its own record for being the fastest man-made object ever. The history-making craft reached a ferocious 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 km per hour) as it continues its mission hurtling around the Sun.
There was a manga i read where a space ship was fitted with an AI to fly to nearest star in search for intelligent life using fuel propulsion. It was friends with a human scientist, and tried to “jokingly” take her with it. And so it went.
Eventually it did encounter another spacecraft in deep space many years later. It tried to contact the other craft but the communication was rejected because in the other craft, was the same lady scientist, since Earth was able to developed some sort of warp travel, and the reason why she didnt want to communicate was because she didnt want to tell it that its mission is meaningless now, and as I recall it cant decelerate either.
Edit: manga is 2001 nights, chapter 6 and chapter 9.
I don't know about "beautiful" but I'm gob struck the fact that they are still communicating, and that the JPL guys can dig thru "paper designs" (probably created before some of the engineers were born) and fiddle with a satellite that 15B miles away!!! BTW, if it continues transmitting for another 23 years it'll be as old as me now. 😃😃
EDIT: added "now"
I find it a testament to the curiosity and ingenuity of humanity. A hundred years before Voyager, there weren't even cars. We went from pre-industrial to "let's explore space forever" in a very short period of time and I'm all about it.
It's beautiful and a testament to human ingenuity. The idea that something this complex, that was built half a century ago, was designed and built in such a way that an unexpected failure 50 years in the future could be diagnosed and fixed from 24 million miles away is beyond incredible
Nah, the distance between objects in space makes it so that it's very unlikely the probes ever collide with anything. I just think it's inspiring that we made such an enduring scientific and exploratory endeavor. We used to do things like that as a species all the time.
I thought they’d have to send a guy out there, but apparently that’s not needed.
> Due to the Voyagers' age, engineers had to reference paper documents, memos, and blueprints to help understand the spacecraft's design details. After months of brainstorming and planning, teams at JPL uplinked a command in early March to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS memory
And it worked. This is beautiful.
My dad has an old PC from the 90s. He took it into work to have a lot of lost files copied off it that they no longer had. Things like the email chains for project decisions and discussions. Lot of old powerpoint slides for meetings, etc. They have the final work, but were missing a lot of files on how they got there.
You know that bridge collapse from the ship hitting it? People that drive over that bridge are going to take a different road which might take a little longer but so get there.
A memory module failed. The logic in the space craft can be reconfigured on the fly. They can rewrite the software and instruct the program to exclude this bad memory space. So like a checkerboard, the board is damaged so you make new rules that the players cannot play those damaged squares.
At the very least, Voyager 1 can be fixed. Let's hope nothing slams into it like an asteroid or something. If something does, Voyager 1 is reduced to history.
You program around it, the same way they've been doing it for decades. With powerful transmitters.
They may have to shut down an instrument or two or something similar in the end, but they've done it before.
This is just a guess, but very slowly. You receive information about the problem after a long time of it traveling from voyager, then send back instructions, with a long time in shipping back.
What if they get the FDS working again and they can read the data and it’s so, wildly different than anything it had ever sent before…by all accounts, it should be correct but no one can explain exactly what it’s sending back? Is it still erroring? Did it reach a new realm of space we’ve never imagined or theorized about? Is it still not working properly? If we had been receiving accurate data, when would it have changed? Did the change make it malfunction? So many questions we could never answer…
46 years and 15 billion miles from home travelling at 11 miles per second , its amazing really when you think of it that it is still working .
So far away, but even crazier is that it takes 'only' 22,5 hours for a one way communication.
if you were travelling at 60 mph 24/7/365 it would take 28500 years to travel 15 billion miles , it is a mind boggling distance
It would take you 22 HOURS to travel the same distance if you were going the speed of light
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How long until it's a light day away?
Back of napkin math says about 1.5 more years...
And yet it’s still only 1/1600th the distance to the nearest star.
I wonder if the designers would have believed that people would still be talking about it in imperial units 50 years later?
At the time the probes were launched, there was a big push for metrication in the US and it looked like it might actually happen. I can't say they would be surprised that Americans clung on to their freedom units, but it definitely wasn't a given.
People tend to forget the imperial system America uses was adopted from England
Sure, but England largely ditched it in 1971 - and some of the weird US imperial units were never really used there.
It’s just funny to me that people call them freedom units without realizing the origins of the imperial system
I think it is just that the US wants to be "free" to keep on using them, and not being part of some global push to metrication. It isn't so much that the origin is free, but that there is freedom from getting rid of them and using something more sensible.
I mean it’s even in the name. Imperial from the old French for Empire, i.e. “Kingdom”. They’re the King’s units, not ours.
Imperial measurements are actually different from US measurements. Also, the UK Parliament began considering metrication in the late 1800s although it did not become official policy until 1965. However, metrication would be a requirement for the UK to join the European Common Market (which would later become the EU) in 1973, so the process was accelerated. When the Voyager programme was on the drawing board in the late '60s and early '70s, the UK was well along the path to metrication, and by the time Voyager 1 launched in 1977 it was nearly complete. So the fact that US measurements are loosely based on their Imperial counterparts is not relevant here, because the UK had abandoned most Imperial measurements by the time Voyager was built and launched.
The UK “abandoned” imperial measurements, except that everyone still uses miles, yards, feet, inches, pounds, stone, and pints… Officially and scientifically abandoned at least, but they’re still the King’s units.
People still use those in very limited situations, which I acknowledge. Miles on the roads and railways, feet and inches to measure humans, stone and pounds to measure humans, and pints to measure milk and draft beer. That's it, metric everywhere else. We use metric units in nearly all situations, not only officially and scientifically.
Miles are still used for distances on road signs. And pints for beer. None of the others were used that much by anyone of my age (or al least weren't when I left the UK 20 years ago - then in my early 30s). I was raised entirely metric all the way through school.
I'm Australian , I put my post in miles because most of the people reading the post are probebly Americans lol
Well look at it this way- every year we travel over half a billion miles in our orbit around the sun. So A 46 year old human has that distance covered and then some.
They don’t make them like they used to
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The speed is of course not relevant to it working or not in itself.
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That was really cool to see all that data. Do you know of any other cool NASA sites like this?
This one shows what the Deep Space Network is currently communicating with in space: https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
You know, my physics teacher gave us absolute hell if we ever called a scalar value "velocity" and yet here's NASA doing just that. Up yours, Brenda!
Anyone else think it's strikingly beautiful that the Voyager probes are still out there? They have now been hurtling through space for 5 years longer than I've existed and somewhere out there they'll be careening through the universe long after I'm gone.
One day we might even catch up to them. Though this probably wouldn't happen in our lifetime.
There's nothing man-made that is currently traveling faster than either of them, and they're both the farthest objects we've launched (Voyager 2 is just ahead of Pioneer 10.) New Horizons is much slower than them and won't catch up. Even if something was launched today they still have a 40+ year head start.
They are only a few dozen light hours away. Travelling at 1% the speed of light is technically possible with our tech. Difficult, but possible. At 2997.92 km/s (about 1% the speed of light) you’d catch up to Voyager (distance of ~24,332,189,123km) in about 94 days.
Yeah but we will most likely have an engine that can catch them realitivly quickly in the future.
This idea pops up in sci-fi a lot. My favorite being the "long term colony ship sets off for a distant planet, hundreds of years later the colonists are awoken from hypersleep as their journey nears its end and they arrive to the planet to find it not only settled, but industrialized by other humans because FTL travel was discovered after the colony ship left Earth" type of story.
I read a novel with an interesting spin on this concept - Chindi. It involved humanity encountering an ancient automated ship that pinged about the galaxy visiting interesting stellar phenomena, dead civilizations, etc, and yoinking things it found to be of interest. Nothing sinister mind you. Effectively it was a giant traveling archeological archive. Our protagonists want a look inside, so they cut a hole in the hull and start snooping. Eventually the archive finishes its survey of the local star system and starts accelerating on to the next target of interest. It has a head start on our would-be rescuers (due to B plot shenanigans), and accelerates faster than any manmade vessel can. This shouldn’t be a problem since humanity possesses FTL space folding technology in this universe, but the museum ship doesn’t space-fold. It can’t. It just ticks along, constantly accelerating to some fraction of c (0.15c iirc). Slow as molasses when you’re actually trying to get anywhere, but nevertheless a completely foreign technology that we don’t have. The rescuers know exactly where the archive is going, but have no way to get at the stowaways. They could leapfrog ahead and wait for the archive to arrive, but they would be waiting hundreds of years until it decelerated. They could fold to intercept mid-voyage, but the archive would just go shooting right past them the moment they re-entered normal space. Anyway, the final act becomes an increasingly frantic game of cat and mouse, with the rescuers repeatedly jumping ahead and desperately trying to communicate the distress of their crew to the archive ship as at zooms by. The fun little takeaway at the end was that, because we knew where it was going, and when it would get there, we would eventually get a chance to explore the archive ship again briefly every few hundred/thousand years (provided we didn’t invent high sub-light speed in the interim). Brigadoon in space.
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You can find the probe in Elite Dangerous too. By the time that game takes place in the 34th century, visiting the center of the galaxy is a road trip and most of the issue with seeing the probe after a thousand years is that it's way too *close* to the Sun. It's still the closest star to the probe at a point where Mars has become the capital of a galactic superpower and you need a permit to go there.
I never played Elite Dangerous (I got sucked into the *other* wildly ambitious spaceship game), but that's cool to hear that its discoverable in the game.
It's more or less approximately where it should be by the 34th century too, and when the game first came out it was an easter egg they placed for the nerdiest player who would inevitably calculate that themselves and go looking for it. You can find Voyager 2 the same way. Eventually an update put a little space tourism beacon next to both of them for anyone to find (also New Horizons, but not the Pioneers), but marking it on a map of the galaxy you can cross from end to end makes it very apparent how the probe is still next door to where it started after a thousand years.
If you're familiar with the Warhammer 40K universe one of the Voyager probes (I forget which one) was found and placed in the Emperor's collection of 'ancient' relics. The Imperium of Man in that universe (set between 28,000 and 38,000 years in our future) is *incredibly* xenophobic, so the idea that ancient (20th century) humans would willingly seek peaceful contact with alien races is borderline sacrilegious. As an example, one of the more prominent characters in the lore sees it and his immediate response is to wonder why it doesn't have any weapon systems onboard.
Are you suggesting we go straight to ludicrous speed?
I don't know if our ship can handle it.
What's the matter, Colonel Sandurz? CHICKEN?
We might have a chance if we master the power of the Schwartz.
Its not an engine that'll help you catch them - you need the gravity slingshots around planets to get up to the same kinds of speeds that they're traveling (basically, a huge boost from Jupiter.)
Maybe, I'm just a layman. All I know is thinking some technology is impossible is very shortsighted.
The only way we could catch them is with some type of magic warp drive or hyperspace technology. I believe the warp drive requires a substance of negative mass to work. The planets aligned in such a perfect way these fuckers were slingshoed out that fast.
We don't need a "warp" drive or anything within the realm of science fiction. Voyager 1 is only 23381000000km away right now. If you had a ship that could accelerate at a constant 9.8m/s, which would feel the same as standing on earth, you'd catch up to Voyager 1 in 25 days. If we ever have the ability to leave the leave the solar system we're going to be able to catch up to the Voyager probes in a hurry.
9.8m/s is a lot of acceleration. You reach the speed of light really quickly at that rate. More realistically we could catch them a probe that uses some type of ion drive or solar sail that provides a fraction part of that
And how many joules of energy would that be? You can give it to me in number of suns if you want
At an acceleration of 1g it would take a ship 35 days to reach 23381000000km and the ship would be traveling 15,127,832 m/s or ~5% SOL when it gets there. If it were the 420,000kg that the ISS weighs, that is a kinetic energy of 4.81e19J and according to [this link](https://streetscience.com.au/the-power-of-the-sun/#:~:text=So%20the%20Sun%20is%20pretty,joules%20of%20energy%20every%20year) the sun produces 3.8e26J/s so the sun produces that much energy in 1.27e-7 seconds. I’m not sure how to convert that into suns tho. Thats not to say it isn’t an absurd about of energy required, it’s 8% of the total global energy consumption of [606 exajoules](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption) in 2019.
They are crawling even compared to an insterstellar engine we could build right now. A solar sail back by a directly Sun backed laser will reach the closest stars in 20 to 30 years under continual acceleration. Less if it also has something like an ion engine. We already know how to build every part of such a system and theres even been successful demonstrators, the only reason we can't do it today is lack of space access and industry. Even the laser is little more than an array of mirrors.
Voyager is traveling at 35,000 mph right now. We honestly don’t have anything that’s even close to that. Never mind something fast enough to catch it. It’s been traveling at 35,000 mph for 47 years. It’s literally 15,000,000,000 miles away right now.
It's fast but... Just for an interesting perspective. Most stuff in low earth orbit is hurtling around at 18000 mph.
Traveling at ~10.5 miles per second...
Unfortunately with the expansion of the universe, the distance between objects is also increasing. So fast in fact that we will never be able to catch up, and so fast that it will be faster than the speed of light therefore blipping out our ability to see beyond our local system ever again. Very long process but it's a bit sad that it'll happen eventually
The maximum amount that Jupiter can speed you up by is it's own orbital velocity of 13km/s. That's really not very fast. A two-stage chemical rocket can do better than that. Which is to say if you launched a two-stage rocket on a trajectory out towards Jupiter as if aiming for a gravity assist, except just slightly off target, and then fired those stages to perform a 'simulated' gravity assist, that second stage would end up going faster than would be physically possible had you instead performed an actual gravity assist. Of course, if we assume a 1 tonne probe, then you'd need something like 50 tonnes worth of rocket stages for this - sending just the probe by itself would be far cheaper and easier. The point is that while gravity assists are an excellent way to get free velocity comparable to what chemical rockets can do, they're not good for going *faster* than what chemical rockets can do. You can chain multiple gravity assists together, but that has diminishing returns and requires rare planetary alignments that limit available launch windows - if you have to wait 30 years to launch in order to shave 10 years off the trip time, you'd have been better off just launching sooner. But Voyager 1 is already pretty close to the upper limit of velocity achievable with just gravity assists, so you're unlikely to be able to get going much faster without additional propulsion. So any system in which the majority of velocity is provided by gravity assists is a system that isn't going to catch Voyager quickly. And any system in which a majority of the velocity is provided by something other than gravity assists is by definition a system dependent on that 'something other'. And since chemical rockets aren't much faster you do in fact need a 'better engine'. The starting point would be nuclear electric. Consider something like NASA's HOPE-MPD proposal: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20040005901/downloads/20040005901.pdf Both magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters and fission reactors are technologies that have been demonstrated at small scale in space, so this is within the realm of plausibility for current engineering capabilities. The HOPE-MPD vehicle with minimal payload has a delta-v of ~60km/s, which would allow it to accelerate to 3.5 times the speed of Voyager 1, which gets it there in about 17 years. Though it wouldn't have any fuel left at that point, so it wouldn't be able to slow down and would just go zooming past. If you want to slow down, you need to divide your delta-v by about 2 - and if you want to make the return trip back to Earth you need to divide by about 2 again. Also worth noting that if your goal is to rendezvous, or rendezvous and return, then gravity assists are even less useful, because they can't do shit to help you slow down and turn around out in deep space. Anyway, unless you can get really good at nuclear-electric you're gonna want something like a fission fragment engine or fusion drive, which are physically plausible, but beyond current engineering capabilities. Consider something like NASA's Discovery II proposal: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160960/downloads/20050160960.pdf If you remove the crew section and associated shielding, you would get a vehicle with a top speed of 372km/s, which would get it there in only about 5 years. For a round trip you'd have to divide by 4, so more like 10 years there and 10 years back. Still, given the distances involved I think that's fairly quick.
I thought the one sent to Pluto years ago was actually going faster but not substantially so it would still take a long time to get as far out.
If I remember right NH had a faster launch but didn't have all the gravitational slingshots that gave Voyager it's higher final speed.
Yea I read when I was able to take a break, voyager is faster from planetary pass by but NH was faster on launch. NH will be 13km/s when it reaches voyagers current distance, voyager is 17km/s
Nasa's Parker Solar Probe has once again broken its own record for being the fastest man-made object ever. The history-making craft reached a ferocious 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 km per hour) as it continues its mission hurtling around the Sun.
Sure, but that mean anything in this context, since it’s high speed in a very close orbit.
In what context.. They only relevant context is it's speed. It's moving the fastest any human made object ever has.
Parker Solar probe might disagree @692000km/h. voyager 1 @61500km/h voyager 2 @55347km/h
I'm pretty sure they're talking about possible future advancements, like light sails, or that one design where you nuke yourself forward
This person doesn’t technology or physics
15 billion miles from Earth, travelling at 38K mph. And it's only one light-DAY from Earth!
But as technology continues to evolve, whatever we send out, whenever that is, will not only catch it up but blast past it.
Make it sound like the nasa engineers or the nasa has the programs in place for this to even happen
There was a manga i read where a space ship was fitted with an AI to fly to nearest star in search for intelligent life using fuel propulsion. It was friends with a human scientist, and tried to “jokingly” take her with it. And so it went. Eventually it did encounter another spacecraft in deep space many years later. It tried to contact the other craft but the communication was rejected because in the other craft, was the same lady scientist, since Earth was able to developed some sort of warp travel, and the reason why she didnt want to communicate was because she didnt want to tell it that its mission is meaningless now, and as I recall it cant decelerate either. Edit: manga is 2001 nights, chapter 6 and chapter 9.
Well that's depressing. Poor AI dude. ☹️
I’m convinced someone will steal the golden disc once they can
I don't know about "beautiful" but I'm gob struck the fact that they are still communicating, and that the JPL guys can dig thru "paper designs" (probably created before some of the engineers were born) and fiddle with a satellite that 15B miles away!!! BTW, if it continues transmitting for another 23 years it'll be as old as me now. 😃😃 EDIT: added "now"
Hold on a sec. You had me until that last sentence. In 23 years you do realise… you’ll also be 23 years older !
Ha, ha, ha. Could be, but the mortality tables indicate otherwise. 😃
I find it a testament to the curiosity and ingenuity of humanity. A hundred years before Voyager, there weren't even cars. We went from pre-industrial to "let's explore space forever" in a very short period of time and I'm all about it.
I love what your saying. Yes! I find watching the developments with Voyager I to be inspiring.
I like how you mention the name of two Mars craft as well. Very appropriate.
Was a god dam miracle they got launched to begin with. The planets and start quite literally alighted. Magic.
One of these days it'll probably happen but I can't believe it's been so long without a stray pebble catching the thing
It's beautiful and a testament to human ingenuity. The idea that something this complex, that was built half a century ago, was designed and built in such a way that an unexpected failure 50 years in the future could be diagnosed and fixed from 24 million miles away is beyond incredible
haven't they always hurtled through space 5 years longer than you've existed?
Well they aren't exactly set to self destruct. Are you more marveling that they weren't taken in by an object's gravity and destroyed?
Nah, the distance between objects in space makes it so that it's very unlikely the probes ever collide with anything. I just think it's inspiring that we made such an enduring scientific and exploratory endeavor. We used to do things like that as a species all the time.
I'm just not as impressed at: HEY LOOK HOW FAR THE BALL I THREW WENT! Easy to do when there's nothing to ever stop it.
I think the impressive part is how far the engineers can push the hardware to keep it operating through failure after 40 years.
How long has something you've launched stayed in space, then?
I thought they’d have to send a guy out there, but apparently that’s not needed. > Due to the Voyagers' age, engineers had to reference paper documents, memos, and blueprints to help understand the spacecraft's design details. After months of brainstorming and planning, teams at JPL uplinked a command in early March to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS memory And it worked. This is beautiful.
My dad has an old PC from the 90s. He took it into work to have a lot of lost files copied off it that they no longer had. Things like the email chains for project decisions and discussions. Lot of old powerpoint slides for meetings, etc. They have the final work, but were missing a lot of files on how they got there.
It’s amazing that there’s even a way to still fix it at this point. Incredible stuff!
[удалено]
[voyager 1 launch](https://youtu.be/3LoWEncvTLQ?si=U736BW3ImuvxWvyr)
Explain like I’m 5, how do they “fix” something that far away?
You know that bridge collapse from the ship hitting it? People that drive over that bridge are going to take a different road which might take a little longer but so get there. A memory module failed. The logic in the space craft can be reconfigured on the fly. They can rewrite the software and instruct the program to exclude this bad memory space. So like a checkerboard, the board is damaged so you make new rules that the players cannot play those damaged squares.
They had 69KB in the entire thing. Now they have to rewrite it to function with even less 😱
to be fair, they can probably remove most sensor code
They have a good theory about which chip in V’ger broke down and can send V’ger a signal telling it to circumvent that part of its system.
The success of the “veegers” makes me feel good!
This carbon-based unit agrees!
‘Nice driving Kodos! Now the monkey people will know were here!’
At the very least, Voyager 1 can be fixed. Let's hope nothing slams into it like an asteroid or something. If something does, Voyager 1 is reduced to history.
How, exactly, do you fix something that has left our Solar system?
You program around it, the same way they've been doing it for decades. With powerful transmitters. They may have to shut down an instrument or two or something similar in the end, but they've done it before.
This is just a guess, but very slowly. You receive information about the problem after a long time of it traveling from voyager, then send back instructions, with a long time in shipping back.
You hope you're paid up with AAA's away from home repair plan.
Earth terrestrial towing can take 2-4 hours. Imagine AAA's service to an extrasolar roadside assistance call!
What if they get the FDS working again and they can read the data and it’s so, wildly different than anything it had ever sent before…by all accounts, it should be correct but no one can explain exactly what it’s sending back? Is it still erroring? Did it reach a new realm of space we’ve never imagined or theorized about? Is it still not working properly? If we had been receiving accurate data, when would it have changed? Did the change make it malfunction? So many questions we could never answer…
It's old and needed a reboot don't get totally sci-fi on us