471–480 of 649 posts
If NASA can't contact it again and it has bravely gone into the great darkness alone with a piece of us, let's hope it's eventually found by a race capable of understanding the fragment of memory it carries. If you're lost V'ger, safe travels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Earlier 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…
It's proven to be a hardy spacecraft and has defied a lot of seemingly terminal problems before, fingers crossed she can overcome this one too.
God speed Voyager.
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.
What the US accomplished from 1950-1980 is incredible.
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That was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.
Even if your cynical doom porn is true you’re wrong because both of those people, 1 in particular, are pushing space exploration forward.
One 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.
The notion that encoding/transmitting could be simpler than decoding/receiving is interesting. It reminds me of the way optical drives for many years could write at, say, 48x but read at 8x, such that the majority of time spent was the verification step (if enabled) rather than the burn step. Just speculating, I assume it's because of things like error correction, filtering out noise/degradation. Producing the extra…
It was never faster to write than it was to read.
If NASA can't contact it again and it has bravely gone into the great darkness alone with a piece of us, let's hope it's eventually found by a race capable of understanding the fragment of memory it carries. If you're lost V'ger, safe travels.
A race?
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…
Wow, so the heliopause is inscribed well, well, well within the port cloud? Insane
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…