I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
21–30 of 109 posts
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#22I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
I believe it's called the "wait calculation".
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#23I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
One fairly decent argument against waiting until we have the technology is that it cuts against how we develop the necessary technology in the first place. We can't improve our propulsion/spacefaring tech without designing, building and launching spacecraft. There's absolutely no reason to assume that we will have invented a faster engine if we've just been sitting around for 100 years not building anything. Hell, we…
Oh, I am not saying we shouldn't launch, it is just an interesting conundrum.
I think if you do launch then you have a clear target to improve on.
And the next one does not have to go to the same destination.
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just FYI nothing man made is even close to light years away from the Earth. EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. Isn't this just fact? EDIT 2: I see the OP changed his original comment, so I can understand the confusion. Thanks all :)
Our radio broadcasts are.
Ok, nothing man-made of the spacecraft type...
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#25I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
> Quite likely you can keep doing this until you can reach it in e.g. a year Given that Alpha Centauri is 4 light-years away, this is a fairly bold speculation.
In fact is it possible most of the energy it got is not from human but from inter planet force? Hence we need someone to keep on calculating when is the best time to send another one. Not that we have sent any ...
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#26https://www.space.com/22787-voyager-1-signal-interstellar-sp...
From her elder sister. Or “of”. It is just awesome.
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#27I'm amazed and still can't get my head around how today we can receive images and valuable data from a device which is currently lightdays away from us and was built with 60's technology & know-how and is operating well beyond it's expected lifetime. I raise my glass to the engineers who worked on this. Makes my daily programming tasks feel stupid in comparison. Edit: corrected, thanks for the numbers
Yeah but did they use Agile methods and have good team velocity as they burned down the backlog? If not, how can we really be sure the project was a success?
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#28From where no man will go.
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#29I am always baffled by the conundrum of the futility of launching a spacecraft to go far away by our own ability to invent faster engines. Say it takes 300 years to get to Alpha Centauri. If you launch it you have 150 years to invent a spacecraft that goes twice the speed of the first one. Very likely. If you launch that one it will overtake the other one. Now you have 75 years to find an even faster engine. Launch i…
This is why I didn't invest in solar yet. Even with subsidies, it looked to me like they would take far more than double the time to pay for themselves than it would for the price to cut itself in half based on current trends. Might as well wait a few years.
Re: Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space
#30Not a comment of the article itself, but for anyone interested in both Voyagers, PBS recently did a great documentary called "The Farthest" . I highly recommend it. http://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/home/
Thanks but only for American
Do you mean that the website is not available outside of the U.S.? "The Farthest" is also on Netflix, but I don't know about non-US availability. It's also available for rent/purchase on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu3kuUB1sOQ. If all else fails, it's available on DVD -- I bought two copies myself so I can loan it to friends without worrying about it being lost.