261–270 of 649 posts
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Why isn't it linear?
Assuming you're talking about the overall sharp drop-off and not the bounce-backs, this was my favorite way to explain it to students: We live near the ocean, and we have a rocky shoreline. We have a couple coves nearby. One cove is about the a half-mile across, but the opening to the larger bay nearby is just a couple hundred feet. On most days, the cove is really calm and the bay has roughly two foot waves. So, you…
I always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we were able to send a space probe, designed and built to be so robust that it's still doing its thing and sending us postcards after 46 years(!!!) of flying away from us in an extremely harmful environment, while we still fuck simple stuff up back home.
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That was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.
Eh, the future of space travel and exploration is very bright.
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Gravity. The suns gravity field is in theory infinite but there is a pretty precise boundary where it stops to have an immediate effect on the things around it and orbits around the sun are no longer possible.
> The suns gravity field is in theory infinite but there is a pretty precise boundary where it stops to have an immediate effect on the things around it and orbits around the sun are no longer a thing. This is not correct. The particles are not in orbit about the Sun, they're coming from the Sun--they're the solar wind. The heliopause is where the solar wind particles are stopped by the pressure of the surrounding in…
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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.
The delta-v for a mission like this is pretty incredible. Voyager 1 is still traveling at about 17km/s away from the sun. That's not much less than when it left Earth despite traveling so far away from the Sun... only because of the special gravity assists it did on the way out. There are some things that even money can't solve :) Compared to a planet, a spacecraft is almost negligible in both weight and capability t…
Criminy. Why aren't we launching more of these probes? With Musk's cheap rockets, we could launch a fleet of them.
Should we do science now or wait 18 months for innovation to double and try then.
Ok so it says online it’s going at almost 40,000 mph so what is stopping us from sending one at say 400,000 mph, then couldn’t we catch up with it eventually? and travel the same distance in like 5 years?
here's some logic on why even getting to the closest star isn't likely: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33274/how-long-cou...
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No, it’s an accurate headline for the general population. It’s sending nothing useful.
It's the most distant transmitter we're receiving anything from. Just the signal itself is useful and communicates that the probe is still powered.
there's lots of things much further away broadcasting information to us. just go outside at night and look up. you'll see a bunch of 'em