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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#231

Post by brandly »

jacquesm wrote: post #206
voytec wrote: post #70

I always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we were able to send a space probe, designed and built to be so robust that it's still doing its thing and sending us postcards after 46 years(!!!) of flying away from us in an extremely harmful environment, while we still fuck simple stuff up back home.

That was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.

Eh, the future of space travel and exploration is very bright.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#233

Post by Abekkus »

nonethewiser wrote: post #226
CSMastermind wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly Voyager benefitted from a particular alignment of the planets to get multiple slingshot boosts from gravity wells. Part of the appeal of the mission was that it will be a very long time before we could possibly do this again because the planets won't line up correctly and we have no technology to speed the probes up to the velocities that the voyager probes achieved.

> Voyager benefitted from a particular alignment of the planets to get multiple slingshot boosts from gravity wells. What exactly does that get us? It gets further into space faster? It travels faster? Cheaper to launch? I mean if it just means it leaves the solar system 20 years faster or something then it seems like cheaper launches far outweigh those favorable conditions.

Looks like once you escape earths orbit at 11km/s, you still need another 30km/s delta-v to then escape the solar system

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#234

Post by hackernewds »

lttlrck wrote: post #207
japhyr wrote: post #175

My favorite graph of all time is the one that demonstrate Voyager 1 had left the solar system. I was a high school math and science teacher at the time, and I spent the whole day sharing this graph with students. It was so much fun watching everyone's faces and seeing the moment they realized what it really meant. https://phys.org/news/2012-10-voyager-left-solar.html

I need an eink display on my office wall showing the current location/status. I always get a tremendous sense of wonder and wellbeing thinking about these probes/achievements, maybe it'd help keep me centered before the daily onslaught.

the current status is that we do not know where it has fared to, according to the title

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#235

Post by japhyr »

alain94040 wrote: post #192
japhyr wrote: post #175

My favorite graph of all time is the one that demonstrate Voyager 1 had left the solar system. I was a high school math and science teacher at the time, and I spent the whole day sharing this graph with students. It was so much fun watching everyone's faces and seeing the moment they realized what it really meant. https://phys.org/news/2012-10-voyager-left-solar.html

Why isn't it linear?

Assuming you're talking about the overall sharp drop-off and not the bounce-backs, this was my favorite way to explain it to students:

We live near the ocean, and we have a rocky shoreline. We have a couple coves nearby. One cove is about the a half-mile across, but the opening to the larger bay nearby is just a couple hundred feet. On most days, the cove is really calm and the bay has roughly two foot waves.

So, you can go out to the cove, pick up the biggest rock you can lift, and heave it into the water. You'll make a giant splash that amazes young kids, and then you can watch the ripples fan out over the bay. But you also see those ripples stop as soon as they reach the bay, where the larger waves absorb the smaller ripples from the rock. The rock represents the sun, the ripples represent solar wind, and the waves on the bay represents interstellar space.

I believe that's a reasonable way of explaining it; if I was wrong after all this time I'd love to know it.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#236

Post by johnwalkr »

WalterBright wrote: post #200

Criminy. Why aren't we launching more of these probes? With Musk's cheap rockets, we could launch a fleet of them.

The trajectory was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity based on the dynamics of our solar system, and surely the relevant experts will take advantage of the next similar opportunities. It's also almost a miracle that the probes have lasted this long. They used analogue electronics and if they launched ten years later, they would have more modern electronics and would probably have failed by now. And it's not possible to simply argue to use older designs to last longer in a new mission, because you would give up multiple orders of magnitude of data collection.

It's not a simple matter of any current launcher being cheaper so we should launch a bunch more.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#237

Post by jacquesm »

brandly wrote: post #231
jacquesm wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.

Eh, the future of space travel and exploration is very bright.

I'm not so sure about that. Humanity is turning ever more inward and education is getting worse and worse with the peak somewhere in the 1950's. If we have a bright future in space travel none of the countries with launch capability today look like they will be the ones driving it.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#238

Post by fallingknife »

floxy wrote: post #173
fallingknife wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Launch velocity was estimated at 66km/s. 11 of that would be burned climbing out of Earth's gravity well leaving us with a velocity of 55 km/s relative to Earth. It will take another 42 km/s to escape the solar system, so that would be a velocity of 13 km/s at escape. Voyager 1 is traveling at 17 km/s, so would either be ahead of it or will catch it eventually. But this doesn't account for the earth's orbit at 30 km/…

> So depending on the launch orientation to orbit The Wikipedia page has the date, time, and location for the Pascal-B test: August 27, 1957 22:35:00.0, 37.04903°N 116.0347°W So that would have been 10:35PM local daylight savings time from southern Nevada, so 9:30PM solar time. Turns out the potential adder from earth's rotation is a negligible ~0.37 km/s at that latitude. With earth tilted by 23.5 degrees, we have i…

I'm missing something from the initial calculation which is that the solar escape velocity from the current position of Voyager 1 is about 3km/s, so Voyager's velocity at escape would be 14km/s, not 17, which is very close to the 13km/s of plumbob without any earth assist. So basically anything in the direction of orbit beats voyager, and anything the other way loses.

Looking down on the north pole, the earth rotates and orbits counter clockwise. This means that anything from midnight to noon will be aligned with the orbital vector and anything noon to midnight will be offset. 930PM will be about halfway between sunset and midnight, so losing 11 km/s from orbital velocity sounds about right.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#239

Post by manicennui »

monocasa wrote: post #196
alain94040 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't it linear?

There's a relatively hard boundary at the heliopause.

This entire concept is wild to me as someone who is incredibly ignorant about space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#240

Post by [deleted] »

pdonis wrote: post #224
jacquesm wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gravity. The suns gravity field is in theory infinite but there is a pretty precise boundary where it stops to have an immediate effect on the things around it and orbits around the sun are no longer possible.

> The suns gravity field is in theory infinite but there is a pretty precise boundary where it stops to have an immediate effect on the things around it and orbits around the sun are no longer a thing. This is not correct. The particles are not in orbit about the Sun, they're coming from the Sun--they're the solar wind. The heliopause is where the solar wind particles are stopped by the pressure of the surrounding in…

[deleted]
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