It's a shame deep space probe budgets aren't useful towards war on other countries or population-wide domestic surveillance or we'd have spacecraft at 10% the speed of light already.
Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
301–310 of 649 posts
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#302Always 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…
1 million miles per day is an insane figure
And yet it's a vanishingly small distance on the scale of the universe. Mind bending.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#303Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#304Finally found aliens!
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
They are still, indeed, orbiting the sun. In the same way the earths atmosphere is orbiting the earth.
No, they are traveling at velocities far exceeding the gravitational escape velocity of the sun. There is no meaningful sense in which they are orbiting.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
China Will. Their education is mint. Current US education model is too soft and weak. Perfect for war meatballs not enough for space travel.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#307My 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
Maybe you're the right person to ask. How do we know that the sun-particle-sensor or its wiring harness or one of its connectors simply hadn't failed?
A very valid question. In this case IIRC this drop-off in low-energy solar wind particles was correlated with observed changes in the magnetic field and also an increase in higher-energy cosmogenic particles all around the same time. These three phenomena (observed by different instruments) were theoretically predicted to occur at the heliopause transition. So it lends much more confidence to the interpretation of the data.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#308One of my favorite tech legends is that apparently Voyager 1 launched with a Viterbi encoder, even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it. After a number of years Moore's Law caught up and they remotely switched over to Viterbi for more efficient transmissions.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That makes sense as far as explaining another situation where you would see a similar pattern, but it doesn't really explain why. What's the equivalent of the land surrounding the cove here? The sun's gravity well? But that's a gradual drop-off, are we looking at the distance where the gravitational pull on particles is canceled out by some other force?
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#310"Mission control on Earth receives that data in binary code, or a series of ones and zeroes."
That's a relief.