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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#331

Post by dotnet00 »

eastern wrote: post #324
dotnet00 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see where you're getting this from? It's so blatant that things are only improving, the US is running so many high profile missions, SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its ow…

Also, there's that other country, which cannot be named, which can do this rocket shit reasonably well.

I tend to generally ignore Russia in the context of development nowadays in spaceflight because I don't see them having the spare resources or talent to do any meaningful new development. They're good at reusing and iterating what they inherited from the USSR, but they've promised so much new stuff over the years and have delivered on basically nothing. The countries I mentioned have all at least managed to bring online modern "from scratch" designs in reasonable timeframes.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#334

Post by anon_cow1111 »

alain94040 wrote: post #192
japhyr wrote: post #175

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?

Wow yes, that was also my main question and it looks like the answer everyone is agreeing on is "interstellar wind pushing back against the solar wind"

BUT- The graph says 2-3 particles/sec hitting the detector, which in sub-atomic terms is like 2 drops of water in an ocean's worth of volume. How much meaningful particle interaction is happening when everything is so close to a true vaccuum? Is this another one of those weird quantum-field-theory things? (Asking as a layman not a physicist obviously)

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#335

Post by beltsazar »

> Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.

It's like when you write a program and you have to wait for almost two days to compile the code, run the program, and see its output. Meanwhile programmers these days complain when the build time is more than a few minutes.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#336

Post by ferw »

cshimmin wrote: post #307
dotancohen wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're the right person to ask. How do we know that the sun-particle-sensor or its wiring harness or one of its connectors simply hadn't failed?

A very valid question. In this case IIRC this drop-off in low-energy solar wind particles was correlated with observed changes in the magnetic field and also an increase in higher-energy cosmogenic particles all around the same time. These three phenomena (observed by different instruments) were theoretically predicted to occur at the heliopause transition. So it lends much more confidence to the interpretation of th…

I believe that the direction of the magnetic filed didn't change, contrary to expectations. The explanation was that the galaxy's magnetic field is aligned with the magnetic field of our sun.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130913162459/http://news.natio...

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#337

Post by mongol »

bmitc wrote: post #44
mongol wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We receive information that its radios are still working.

Communication is exchange of information . The sun is not communicating with us, and we know its "radio" is still working. It's a pedantic, and incorrect, argument against the headline. The guidelines actually say not to do this, even when you're right.

That is information. Without the radios working we would know less. To say stating that is against site guidelines is ridiculous.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#338

Post by hlehmann »

apitman wrote: post #308

One of my favorite tech legends is that apparently Voyager 1 launched with a Viterbi encoder, even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it. After a number of years Moore's Law caught up and they remotely switched over to Viterbi for more efficient transmissions.

Doesn't seem likely. All data received from the craft is recorded, so it doesn't need to be decoded in real time, and if the spacecraft has the hardware to encode it at some rate then it's quite likely that we would have hardware here on earth that could decode it at that same rate.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#339

Post by mike_d »

gzer0 wrote: post #282

One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this ev…

The Golden Record was supposed to include the Beetles "Here Comes The Sun" but the label wanted more in licensing fees than the whole thing cost to produce.
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