Is there any chance we can zap its general direction with a radio beam and then listen with a huge radio telescope to get an accurate radar fix on where it is?
Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
341–350 of 649 posts
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That makes sense as far as explaining another situation where you would see a similar pattern, but it doesn't really explain why. What's the equivalent of the land surrounding the cove here? The sun's gravity well? But that's a gradual drop-off, are we looking at the distance where the gravitational pull on particles is canceled out by some other force?
Hydraulic Jump on interstellar scale.
Heliopause. The heliopause is the theoretical boundary where the Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium; where the solar wind's strength is no longer great enough to push back the stellar winds of the surrounding stars. This is the boundary where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#343Earlier 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…
What I'm getting this from? Reading the news for the last 40 years or so. Watching the new generation and their education levels. Seeing how science is now 'the enemy' rather than the future. > 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…
We never had the launch rate in the 1960s that we do today. It really doesn’t matter if you believe Musk or not, NASA is contracting with SpaceX to use Starship (and others) for lunar surface missions of far greater capability than Apollo. Our missions to Mars also far exceed what we did in the 60s and 70s, both the US and China are funding and planning sample return missions, in addition to lunar surface bases. And Starship is so capable, it’s launching more for a single Artemis mission than all Apollo combined or all the mass needed for NASA’s Crewed Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0. And Starship is just one of half a dozen RLVs being developed as we speak (with metal bent, engines test firing). We will soon leave the high water mark of Apollo far behind.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 onl…
China?
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know how well it holds today but for some time it was known that running certain computations on existing hardware would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running when available.
If hardware next year is X times better (e.g. even 1.01 or 1% better) than this year, and you have a computation that takes T time today, then next year, it'll take T/X time. So waiting will take 1 + T/X years if time unit is years. So the condition you want is 1+T/X Though even faster will be doing part of the computation now and then switching to new hardware later, so it's a false dichotomy.
> Though even faster will be doing part of the computation now and then switching to new hardware later
Not necessairly. This still costs:
• Programmer/development time to implement save/restore/transfer
• Time on new hardware, bottlenecked by old hardware, restoring a partial computation from old disks or networks
You're not going to waste time restoring partial calculations for anything from an Amiga cluster for time saving purpouses. Additionally, this scheme ties up hardware that then can't be used for "cost effective to finish on current hardware" calculations.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many, many unmanned missions happening now making amazing discoveries. Cassini was nothing short of mind blowing. I'm somewhat sympathetic to your claims, and I wish more people were intellectually curious, but there are very likely more people in absolute numbers performing scientific research now than ever.
I'll believe it when I see it. For now the Voyagers are the only thing out there that are expanding our envelope of influence, everything else is just data and will eventually evaporate. Think about it from a non-solar system perspective. Nothing we've done since Voyager has had any effect outside of our solar system and if we don't change our attitude it is quite likely that nothing ever will. Everything else we've…
New Horizons is also on its way out of the solar system, and it is still potentially encountering celestial bodies out there.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#347The software is running since 1977.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#348Is there any chance we can zap its general direction with a radio beam and then listen with a huge radio telescope to get an accurate radar fix on where it is?
No. It's simply too far away for that, because d*4 gets you.
Now, if the zapper were Big Enough, when received it didn't destroy the probe, AND that there was a big enough receiver, they maybe...
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#349Always enjoyed this bit below about Voyager 1 a good reminder of how vast the universe is not too mention just to the oort cloud! "Even though Voyager 1 travels about a million miles per day, the spacecraft will take about 300 years to reach the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the far side." I have to hope that in the distant future we will hopefully have spaceships that wil…
Wow, so the heliopause is inscribed well, well, well within the port cloud? Insane
This is a helpful image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#/media/File:PIA170...
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#350One 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.
I don’t know how well it holds today but for some time it was known that running certain computations on existing hardware would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running when available.
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