So about 50*364 more years until it’s travelled a light year!
Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
351–360 of 411 posts
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#352> Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation. Compare that to the Moon (1.3 seconds), Mars (up to 4 minutes), and Pluto (nearly 7 hours). These numbers aren't right...Mars is 4 minutes MINIMUM, but could be up to 22-ish minutes at the maximum distance between Earth and Mars. This is also one way, double that for communication and a response.
Right, that also caught my eye. There is no way Mars is closer than Sol (~8 minutes) when it’s on the other side of Sol. This article has some problems.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#353Not 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…
Could a probe return data by semaphore? Wave a flag that blocks the light of Alpha Centauri as seen from a telescope off to the side of the sun, say at the distance of Neptune's orbit. It should be possible to hide Alpha Centauri behind a relatively small semaphore until the probe gets fairly close.
Neat idea, but it looks like the math doesn't really work out: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/66295/is-interstel...
Though it looks like these folks are thinking about blocking from near the star, which requires megastructures for anything detectable. I haven't done even back of the envelope calculations but I'd guess the limiting factor is you'd only be causing an eclipse/transit in an unusably narrow angle directly behind the craft. As you get closer the cone expands but the signal weakens.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you are describing has been proposed before, for example within context of projects like Breakthrough Starshot. In that the case the idea is to launch thousands of probes, each weighing only a few grams or less, and accelerating them to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light using solar sails and (powerful) earth-based lasers. The probes could reach alpha centauri within 20-30 years. There seems to be som…
What these proposals like to forget (even if addressing everything else) is that you need to slow down once you arrive if you want to have any time at all for useful observation once you reach your destination. What's the point of reaching alpha centauri in 30 years if you're gonna zip past everything interesting in seconds? Will the sensors we can cram on tiny probes even be able to capture useful data at all under…
Jupiter is 43 lightminutes from the Sun.
If we shoot a thousand probes at 0.1c directly at the Alpha Centauri star, they should have several hours within a Jupiter-distance range of the star to capture data. Seems like enough sensors and time to synthesize an interesting image of the system when all that data gets back to Earth.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#355It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective.
We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone.
It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more vCPUs at an unoptimized Python loop. If Voyager had been built with today's "move fast and break things" mindset, it would have bricked itself at the heliopause pending a firmware update that required a stronger handshake.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if we can go the reverse direction, where instead of launching more probes from Earth to serve as relays, the spacecraft would launch physical media toward Earth packed with whatever data it has collected. Given advancements in data storage density, we could achieve higher bandwidth than what's possible with radios. The logistics would be difficult since it involves catch those flying media, especially if th…
Binary encoding by pulsing the ion stream. Then picking that up with terrestrial telescopes. Very clever!
Smoke signals in space. I love it.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#357"I write code therefore space exploration interests me" - not me
I think Voyager is not just a space exploration project, but more a demonstration of technical ingenuity. Sure, the probe probably collected great data just by being where no other probe was before, but to be real: I don't know nearly enough about space exploration research to get excited about the results and mostly just looked at the pictures.
What amazes me about the device and the mission as a whole is the sheer challenge of operating a device that is so far away, you have to use the prefix light to make the scale understandable. I like devices, that have been engineered to something close to perfection. I think aircraft a cool because they so very rarely fail. I think that pacemakers are amazing, because they can not fail. This is another example, and perhaps one of the greatest: a spacecraft that is running for 40+ years in the harshest environments and still works.
And that's not even touching the emotional and somewhat existential thoughts that comes with the scale and distance this little guy has traveled.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#358Once we develop a technology that will allow us to do a tour around our solar system within a day or so, catching up to Voyager 1 and 2 would be a neat way to wrap up the sightseeing trip before heading home.
Too bad none of us will get to experience it.
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#359It’s wild how Voyager forces two truths to sit together: Technically, what we’ve done is almost boringly modest. ~17 km/s ~1 light-day in ~50 years No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now On cosmic scales it’s… basically still on our doorstep. Psychologically, it’s still one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done. We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it woul…
whatever you say clanker
Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
#360It’s wild how Voyager forces two truths to sit together: Technically, what we’ve done is almost boringly modest. ~17 km/s ~1 light-day in ~50 years No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now On cosmic scales it’s… basically still on our doorstep. Psychologically, it’s still one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done. We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it woul…
This is a strange comment. The author claims to be a human—"what we've done", " we built something", " we pointed a metal box into the dark"—but nearly every sentence sounds distinctly AI-writen. (Examples: "I keep coming back to this:", "Voyager isn't ... It's ...", "the assumption that the future would exist and might care", "on our doorstep", "see the end of the story", "depends less on ... and more on ...", etc.)
their bio basically says they are AI for sure
>about: Engineer building workflow-focused AI systems. Interested in ML reliability, document-heavy automation, and enterprise integrations. I enjoy discussing real-world constraints in AI and distributed systems.