201–210 of 330 posts
It has taken 46 years to get 22.5 light hours away from Earth!
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Good lord could you imagine the meltdown HN would have if Apple had taken this option to solve the old-batteries-support-lower-peak-current physics problem? “Your device battery no longer supports the camera. Or the backlight on the top third of the screen. But it runs at full speed otherwise!”
If this happened after 45 years, I don't think people would mind.
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You can't. Voyager's launch date coincided with a planetary alignment allowing for gravitational slingshotting out of our galaxy. We have to wait for the next alignment.
If you only want to get a gravity boost from Jupiter and Saturn (like V1) I wonder if you wouldn't have to wait as long, say, every 20 years instead of every 176? https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/timeline/#event-a-once-... But you'd still have to fly for ~40 years to get to where they are now, and they'll keep on flying during those 40 years.
Good old segmentation and goto's at work! Are goto's still considered harmful?
Even in modern C programming goto is still pulling its weight for handling unrolling and cleanups.
sorry, i just have a silly question: what would it take to send new probes out there? voyager 3 and 4 for example to follow the same path (more or less, sans planet alignment) V1 and V2 followed, but with better hardware of course.
There's basically no point scientifically for doing the four-planet flyby again. Since Voyager, we've already done much better at Jupiter and Saturn with years-long orbiter missions. A quick flyby wouldn't get us anything we don't already know at those. Voyager gets the mindshare because it was first and the four-way slingshot is fun to visualize, but the reality is that Galileo and Cassini and Juno delivered thousan…
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Cool! What else can you tell us about this robot you built?
It's the Maestro from Moon Surgical, it's done over 200 surgeries, all successful. So far (no whammy) its had 100% reliability with the first 6 systems we built. We designed it (hardware wise) with only 3 engineers, including me, and we hand built the first ones right here in San Carlos, CA. The company is based in Paris and has a whole interesting history there as well.
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The plutonium 238 decays according to a curve, and the thermocouples are degraded as well by heat and radiation according to a curve. So the power output drops rather predictably: "The radioisotope thermoelectric generator on each spacecraft puts out 4 watts less each year." [1] The Voyagers will soon no longer have enough power to operate any of their instruments. They'll have enough power to continue operating the…
> [1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/ Also: Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth. That FAQ covers a lot of interes…
Since it’s powered by an RTG, how does the power get “used up”? I assume that this refers to the available power budget at a given moment versus some sort of expendable power reserve.
"The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory." Just another proof that we may have gained a lot, but also lost something in our pu…
The "hack" wouldn't be necessary, or can be done natively in many modern systems.