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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#451

Post by danbruc »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #427
ikiris wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But again, why is it a sudden cut-off and not a gradual one?

Have look at your sink [1], it is called termination shock. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#/media/File:Helios...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Termination_shock

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#452

Post by idiotsecant »

seanhunter wrote: post #423
gorgoiler wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My life archive is available to my heirs and successors as long as they know the LUKS password for any of the numerous storage devices I leave behind. It’s risky though — the passwords aren’t known to them yet and one logistical slip up means the disk may be unusable. That is, however, until some point in the future when they will have a computer powerful enough to just break the key and feast upon my cat photos, tax…

Only a matter of a really really _really_ long time and an absolutely unimaginably huge amount of energy. All the energy released by converting all mass in the solar system into energy apparently gives a hard physical limit just above 2^225 elementary computations before you run out of gas so brute forcing a 256-bit symmetric key seems entirely unfeasible even if all of humanities resources were dedicated to the prob…

If, for example, someone has a computer capable of computing with a large number of qbits a lot of cryptography has less substantial break requirements.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#454

Post by bagels »

refulgentis wrote: post #225
WalterBright wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know. But still, just flying around the solar system can be endlessly productive. Does anyone think we've learned all we can about the solar system?

There's plenty of things flying around the solar system :) though: ear hear, I second the sentiment

Intentional eggcorn?

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#455

Post by bagels »

Teever wrote: post #223
MeImCounting wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voyager took advantage of a specific alignment of planets that allowed it to make many consecutive gravity assists.

I was under the impression that it took advantage of a rare alignment of planets to not only get a speed boost but also pass by all the planets to get photos of them. In theory we could just do an arbitrary number of consecutive gravity assists between say earth and mars to get the speed to travel past a single planet to exmaine it and then travel on out of the solar system. With the cost savings of the new Starship…

Venus and Earth are more often used compared to Mars. The window is more frequent, it's more massive, and takes less delta-v to get to.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#456

Post by dotancohen »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #394
londons_explore wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the contents of your computer is anything like the contents of most old people's attics, there is a good chance your descendants really don't want to go through all of it. They'll just chuck it in the trash without even opening it. Turns out the next generation has their own life to worry about, and doesn't care much for their ancestors' stuff (unless it's money... they love money...).

Pretty much. Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are nice when you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine and plate of cheese. Otherwise who cares? Nothing is worse than trying to go through bunch of old faded photos where no one - even the owner - can identify who is actually in the picture. I guess in our day and age we could write extensive meta data about where and when a picture was taken and who is in…

  > Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are nice when you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine and plate of cheese. Otherwise who cares?
I could imagine a future where DRM and copyright and just the cold fear of ligation could change the recreational screentime for families from being primarily studio-produced content to being primarily ancestor-produced content.

I remember some book I read where the child was constantly hearing about his family's history. Dune, maybe? Maybe a Philip Dick book? Asimov? I'm getting old.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#457

Post by skissane »

oneshtein wrote: post #450
skissane wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, they can send commands to Voyager 1, and it executes them, and it is still sending data back - the problem is the data coming back is gibberish (repeated patterns of 0s and 1s). They are still hoping they can work out a sequence of commands to reset its computers and resolve the problem. So it makes sense the DSN is currently talking to it.

For me, it looks like it computer damaged by interstellar radiation, which is much more energetic than solar radiation, so it's unlikely that reset will help.

According to NASA's blog [0] they believe the problem is between the FDS computer and the TMU (the outbound radio modulator). The other two onboard computer systems, CCS and AACS, they believe are still working. All three systems are dual redundant pairs of computers. So, even if one FDS was damaged, in theory they should be able to switch to the other. The blog post is vague on what exactly they tried - "the team tried to restart the FDS and return it to the state it was in before the issue began, but the spacecraft still isn’t returning useable data" - so I don't think we can rule out there are other things they can still try.

[0] https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#458

Post by thriftwy »

anon_cow1111 wrote: post #334
alain94040 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

It is certainly not vacuum. Vacuum is when a gas particle is more likely to hit a wall (or other solid object) than other gas particle. It is absolutely not so on the edge of solar system, where low density is compensated by the vastness of space.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#459

Post by smcleod »

londons_explore wrote: post #384
gorgoiler wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My life archive is available to my heirs and successors as long as they know the LUKS password for any of the numerous storage devices I leave behind. It’s risky though — the passwords aren’t known to them yet and one logistical slip up means the disk may be unusable. That is, however, until some point in the future when they will have a computer powerful enough to just break the key and feast upon my cat photos, tax…

If the contents of your computer is anything like the contents of most old people's attics, there is a good chance your descendants really don't want to go through all of it. They'll just chuck it in the trash without even opening it. Turns out the next generation has their own life to worry about, and doesn't care much for their ancestors' stuff (unless it's money... they love money...).

Oh man I’d love to have all the data of my parents, grandparents etc… even just having analogue records is interesting I’d love to know what kinds of hobbies they had like collecting digital music, art, books etc.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#460

Post by jacquesm »

kortilla wrote: post #321
jacquesm wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

No, indeed, I'm not a believer. When I see someone that lies with abandon and who regularly behaves in absolutely horrible ways towards others and that person happens to want to establish a colony on another planet my first thought is 'nutcase' not 'savior of humanity'.

I marked Musk very early (long before his name became a household item) as someone with a ton of potential and he has definitely realized some of it. But along the way he's become a horrible human being who will now potentially undo any good that he's done and then some. If you are a believer than I'm perfectly ok with that and I hope that you will be strengthened in your belief and that you are right.

In the meantime I'll just take what I see and extrapolate from there and it doesn't look good.

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