I wonder how long it will take for someone to get rich enough to be able to send their own private interstellar space missions. America's super wealthy are getting very rich. At this rate we will have multiple people with a trillion dollars by the end of the century. What is stopping someone from building and launching interstellar probes instead of buying another few super yachts.
Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
321–330 of 411 posts
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#322The scale gets surreal fast: 8 minutes for sunlight, a day to ping Voyager 1, and then it would take Voyager 1 another 75000 years to reach the nearest star. Our entire technological reach is basically a rounding error at interstellar distances.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#323Not that we would literally do this with Voyager, but it makes me wonder at the potential utility of a string of probes, one sent every couple of [insert correct time interval, decades, centuries?], to effectively create a communication relay stretching out into deep space somewhere. My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit from a re…
I think only the Grand Tour program was possible every 175 years:
From Wikipedia [1]:
"that an alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that would occur in the late 1970s would enable a single spacecraft to visit all of the outer planets by using gravity assists."
Gravity assists with more than one planet are more frequent. Cassini-Huygens [2] as example had five (Venus, Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn)
I would suspect when the goal ist only to leave the solar system as fast as possible (and don't reach a specific planet) they are much more often.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the distances are mind-boggling. There are a few somewhat realistic solutions for making such a trip in the forseeable future. If you send something of significant mass, it is certain to take a long time. So we're either talking generation ships(§), embryo space colonization (growing into adults en route or at destination) or hibernation. That or a breakthrough in fundamental physics. -- (§) Something like O'Nei…
This old video is a beautiful and astounding demonstration of just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big the Universe is, and where in all this endless space our dear favourite little Pale Blue Dot (Earth) resides: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-3Oq_82XNA We all Earthlings are extremely lucky to be alive and thriving (or trying to) in such a beautiful bountiful rarest-of-rare ecosystem that somehow survived and th…
Add this one to your pile:
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm kinda interesting in the same statistics for trains, although I wouldn't be surprised if we don't travel near that distance with trains.
The same statistic for trains is a few hundred deaths per "passenger-light-year". Or 0.004 fatalities per 100 million miles. [1] [1] https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/2024-10/... Some back of the envelope calculations give me roughly ~40,000 deaths per passenger-light-year if you travel by car instead of train.
Amazing, I knew trains were way safer than cars, but it's almost hard to believe that hurling folks through the air is even safer than that (or I guess similarly safe now).
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#326"About to reach" - read 1 year from "now".
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#327It is going to be difficult to service the probe at that distance, and probably they won't be able to find spare parts anyway.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#328The scale gets surreal fast: 8 minutes for sunlight, a day to ping Voyager 1, and then it would take Voyager 1 another 75000 years to reach the nearest star. Our entire technological reach is basically a rounding error at interstellar distances.
Astronomers often have an error margin of an order of magnitude or two. 1 billion or 100 billion. Close enough either way!
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#329I am curious, how are we communicating with it? like how do we know where it is right now, and how are we sending signals to communicate with it? won't our signal affected by noise or the like. When it is this far, how are accurately sending our signals to it.
We know where it is right now, because we know which way it's going, how fast and that it isn't currently thrusting anywhere. its just going in a (straight?) line, so it's pretty easy to keep track of.
You can measure the speed of something towards/away from you by measuring the doppler shift of the signal (how much the frequency is increased or decreased compared to the expected frequency), and since the radio receivers will have to be very precisely pointed to get a good signal, you can also probably fine tune any estimates of position by wiggling the receivers around a little bit until you get the best signal. The signals are definitely getting degraded by noise etc, since it's so far away. That's why the communication speed is so slow, so they can make sure they got one bit before getting the next one. Some more mathsy details here https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calcu...
But by having a very big antenna, and knowing exactly what you're looking for and where, it can help to filter out all the noise and get out the proper data
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#330Where is the Earth in its orbit around the sun when this event happens? For half of each year, the sun is closer to Voyager 1 than is the Earth. Also, does anyone know how long communication with the probe is disrupted when the sun is directly between them?
Both Voyagers left the ecliptic plane with their final gravitational slingshots (Voyager 1 went north, Voyager 2 went south so only the Canberra radio dishes can communicate with it) so even when Earth is further from them than the sun there's 35 degrees of separation.