NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
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Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
#2Sad to see EOL coming up, but too bad NASA's budget has been cut so back over the years.
We just had a smaller planetary alignment a few months ago. Would have been nice if NASA had the budget to send out a more robust craft a few years ago. But I guess science no longer means anything to the US. Especially now.
Maybe China will take up the mantle, I heard they are about to send out a rather long term interesting craft, but I forgot the details.
Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
#3It's stunning to think how well these missions have done and what we've learnt. I'd love to see new missions aimed at much greater longevity with more modern instruments. I wonder how long one could make the mission? 100 years? 200? Would new generators reduce the power loss to less than 4W/year, or would it just need more/much bigger ones?
Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
#4Obligatory trailer for the "It's Quieter in the Twilight" documentary, about the team of engineers riding out the end of the Voyager program:
Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
#5I've been following Voyager since the late 70s when my dad (who worked at Ames) would bring home printouts of the Jupiter images. This interview captures something profound about these missions that non-space folks often miss.
The most striking part isn't the technical achievement of keeping 1970s hardware alive for half a century. It's the human infrastructure behind it - the institutional knowledge passed through generations of engineers like some ancient priesthood maintaining a temple.
Think about it: We're teaching 2020s engineers to understand machine code written before MS-DOS existed, working with 50 year old documentation on yellowing paper, and bringing retirees back to decipher systems they built when Nixon was president.
Our space exploration legacy is being maintained by the engineering equivalent of oral history. This is why we need consistent funding for these long-term missions - the value isn't just in the data, but in maintaining the unbroken chain of knowledge transfer that makes missions like this possible.
The sticky notes on diagrams trying to revive a silent probe 15 billion miles away just broke me. This is humanity at its finest.
Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
#6Every time this topic comes up on HN, I always like to remind readers about the following:
One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written:
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
I get chills every time I think about this.
Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
#7Voyagers are the greatest technical achievement of human kind. Keeping in the space a piece of hardware run by a computer with power of today's car keys, in the hostile environment, outside freaking solar system is something that is the most amazing thing we have witnessed so far.
Kudos to all the people who made it happen and kept going this project, we owe them, as a humanity, really a lot.
Voyagers will keep flying across Milky Way, maybe they will last longer the the Earth itself, as the witnesses of our civilization.
Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
#8Sad to see EOL coming up, but too bad NASA's budget has been cut so back over the years. We just had a smaller planetary alignment a few months ago. Would have been nice if NASA had the budget to send out a more robust craft a few years ago. But I guess science no longer means anything to the US. Especially now. Maybe China will take up the mantle, I heard they are about to send out a rather long term interesting cra…
A visual alignment like the one you mention wouldn’t have been useful for spacecraft to get to the planets more easily.
An alignment in the scale of the one that enabled the Voyager flybys of the outer planets won’t happen until sometime in the 23rd century.
Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
#9Sad to see EOL coming up, but too bad NASA's budget has been cut so back over the years. We just had a smaller planetary alignment a few months ago. Would have been nice if NASA had the budget to send out a more robust craft a few years ago. But I guess science no longer means anything to the US. Especially now. Maybe China will take up the mantle, I heard they are about to send out a rather long term interesting cra…
NASA’s budget is larger today adjusted for inflation than during the Voyager program. https://images.app.goo.gl/qai42hiZ8RMtfViw6
Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
#10Sad to see EOL coming up, but too bad NASA's budget has been cut so back over the years. We just had a smaller planetary alignment a few months ago. Would have been nice if NASA had the budget to send out a more robust craft a few years ago. But I guess science no longer means anything to the US. Especially now. Maybe China will take up the mantle, I heard they are about to send out a rather long term interesting cra…
NASA’s budget is larger today adjusted for inflation than during the Voyager program. https://images.app.goo.gl/qai42hiZ8RMtfViw6
People usually measure this as percentage of GDP, not absolute dollars.