Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
1–10 of 318 posts
Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
#2Truly amazing!!
Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
#3Can we send a voyager 3 with much advance battery and sensor, and at much faster speed so that it may reach farther than voyager 1 and 2, in let’s say just couple of years ?
Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
#4> scientists and engineers back on Earth have increasingly had to deal with age-related maintenance issues
There is perhaps unintended irony in that sentence, but it does evoke some Asimov stories in which human characters age while supporting technology.
Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
#5Can we send a voyager 3 with much advance battery and sensor, and at much faster speed so that it may reach farther than voyager 1 and 2, in let’s say just couple of years ?
No, we cannot.
We could make a Voyager 3, but I don't think there is any way to expect it to catch up with currently feasible technology. And it could only be launched at specific times.
It certainly could have more advanced sensors and batteries. I don't know if the battery improvement would really matter on a decades long mission.
Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
#6Can we send a voyager 3 with much advance battery and sensor, and at much faster speed so that it may reach farther than voyager 1 and 2, in let’s say just couple of years ?
As far as I understand their speed mostly comes from gravity assists from Jupiter, so you'd have to wait for suitable orbital alignments and the basic technology for "much faster speed" doesn't exist.
Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
#7It's too bad this cant qualify as some sort of world record
Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
#8> scientists and engineers back on Earth have increasingly had to deal with age-related maintenance issues There is perhaps unintended irony in that sentence, but it does evoke some Asimov stories in which human characters age while supporting technology.
I like this quote:
“We didn’t design them to last 30 years or 40 years, we designed them not to fail,” John Casani, Voyager project manager from 1975 to 1977, says in a NASA statement.
Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
#9It's too bad this cant qualify as some sort of world record
Could be the start of space records :-)
Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981
#10Can we send a voyager 3 with much advance battery and sensor, and at much faster speed so that it may reach farther than voyager 1 and 2, in let’s say just couple of years ?
Yes, but mostly no, also no, and, frankly, why would we.
Yes: we could lift off a much heavier spacecraft, give it plenty of fuel, and many of its parts would be lighter than their 1970s equivalent, giving us lots of room for modern sensors
No: the "battery" in the old ones is nuclear and it's going to be difficult to beat that (but not impossible: a nuclear stirling engine, either powered by fission or by decay, e.g. https://www.nasa.gov/technology/rps/stirling-convertor-sets-...)
Also no: the old Voyagers benefited from a lot of gravity assists from half the solar system, thanks to an alignment which won't happen again until 2151 (https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5075/when-is-the-n...), so unless you're not in a hurry, we won't have that.
Why would we: the _point_ of the Voyager crafts was to do close flybys and collect plenty of data from the outer planets, not to go as far away and as fast as possible. You want to be as slow as possible near them, so you have science time. You're rushing this part in order to get right away to the centuries of nothing which follow?