291–300 of 649 posts
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.
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I'll believe it when I see it. For now the Voyagers are the only thing out there that are expanding our envelope of influence, everything else is just data and will eventually evaporate. Think about it from a non-solar system perspective. Nothing we've done since Voyager has had any effect outside of our solar system and if we don't change our attitude it is quite likely that nothing ever will. Everything else we've…
That's a strangely high bar. As if Voyager had some nonnegligible effect outside of the Solar system.
I was just a tad young to care when the voyager spacecraft were first launched, but I have followed the adventures of these spacecraft since the mid 80s. I remember being a little disappointed in the “Neptune all night” TV special during the flyby as the whole night they only received one photo and didn’t have time to colorize it :-D But I have always been inspired by the ingenuity of the engineers in first designing…
Here is my favorite article about the engineers and team behind the mission still. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engine...
If someone is wondering about this, it has taken 46 years for voyager 1 to travel 22 light hours. fascinating.
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.
Always enjoyed this bit below about Voyager 1 a good reminder of how vast the universe is not too mention just to the oort cloud! "Even though Voyager 1 travels about a million miles per day, the spacecraft will take about 300 years to reach the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the far side." I have to hope that in the distant future we will hopefully have spaceships that wil…
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I wonder if we will ever pass Voyager 1. Might be the farthest for a long time.
I asked myself this same question when New Horizon sent pictures of Pluto back. I was surprised to learn that NH will never overtake Voyager because of the number of gravity assists Voyager 1 achieved. The planners had to race to achieve the 4 gravity assists in the 70's, the next time the 4 giants line up in such a way isn't until 2145. Perhaps some form of ion engine, one day, will help us overtake Voyager. Or more…
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> 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…
Why don't particles from surrounding interstellar medium show up in the graph as matching the pressure of the solar wind?
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Best guess: You get particles orbiting the sun, until you pass a point where the sun's gravity is too weak to hold them, and from that point you basically only see things who's escape trajectory intersects with yours
> You get particles orbiting the sun The particles hitting Voyager aren't orbiting the Sun; they're from the Sun, the solar wind. The heliopause is the point where they are stopped by the interstellar medium. That point is what Voyager passed as shown in the graph.