251–260 of 649 posts
If someone is wondering about this, it has taken 46 years for voyager 1 to travel 22 light hours. fascinating.
I wonder in how many years from now, we can do the 46 years in 22 months? 22 days? 22 hours?
So yeah, I'm eagerly looking forward to that day.
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So long as it isn't impossible, the improbable becomes inevitable at scales as vast as the universe.
Not really. Very large improbabilities require a lot more time than what the universe has been around for.
Going from zero to one of something tends to be a lot less likely than going from one to two or more.
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> Voyager benefitted from a particular alignment of the planets to get multiple slingshot boosts from gravity wells. What exactly does that get us? It gets further into space faster? It travels faster? Cheaper to launch? I mean if it just means it leaves the solar system 20 years faster or something then it seems like cheaper launches far outweigh those favorable conditions.
Looks like once you escape earths orbit at 11km/s, you still need another 30km/s delta-v to then escape the solar system
Among my increasingly prized possessions is an original copy of Nasa's "Voyager Encounters Jupiter* report, detailing mission findings, and featuring some of the image highlights. Internet Archive, bless them, have this online: https://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19800025809/mo... >
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Eh, the future of space travel and exploration is very bright.
I'm not so sure about that. Humanity is turning ever more inward and education is getting worse and worse with the peak somewhere in the 1950's. If we have a bright future in space travel none of the countries with launch capability today look like they will be the ones driving it.
My favorite graph of all time is the one that demonstrate Voyager 1 had left the solar system. I was a high school math and science teacher at the time, and I spent the whole day sharing this graph with students. It was so much fun watching everyone's faces and seeing the moment they realized what it really meant. https://phys.org/news/2012-10-voyager-left-solar.html
Why isn't it linear?
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A ridiculously huge and powerful array of antennas spread across the planet. NASA has a dashboard online for the Deep Space Network and you can see live which spacecraft we're communicating with. The Voyagers are usually active any time I look.
How live is it? Voyager 1 seemed to be shown there just now.
The time to think of replacements has long passed, not to fly by the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity than the Voyagers and continue exploring the interstellar medium. Some other comments here mentioned the tech to do that: - ion propulsion - light sail And also nuclear fission might be an option, I like the fission fragment idea for its simplicity. [1][2] [1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core…
This is a fun option too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
How is it possible to still be able to get a signal from a spacecraft that's so far away? How can the antenna be directional enough while still being pointed right at the Earth? How do we remove the noise?
A ridiculously huge and powerful array of antennas spread across the planet. NASA has a dashboard online for the Deep Space Network and you can see live which spacecraft we're communicating with. The Voyagers are usually active any time I look.