This is one of my favorite reasonably recent Voyager anecdote, from a recent special about the program.<p>Paraphrasing, the person said "You carry more computing power in your pocket than what we have on Voyager. And by that, I don't mean your smart phone. I mean you car key fob."
I recently[1] learned that you can telnet to a NASA machine to query various information
about astronomical bodies, including man-made satellites.<p>> telnet horizons.jpl.nasa.gov 6775<p>The interface is pretty difficult to use, but there is a python wrapper for it. I forced myself
to stumble through the telnet interface.<p>> Voyager<p>(no semicolon–othewise it'd look up in the small-bodies table)<p>That tells you Voyager 1 is ID 31, and Voyager 2 is ID 32.<p>> 31<p>> E<p>> <Enter> x2 (take defaults)<p>> 2022-06-18<p>> 2022-06-19<p>> 1h<p>> <Enter><p>> A<p>Spits out this data:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/connorjclark/de205ce62a7f1d4fda6d8fa74acb2958" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/connorjclark/de205ce62a7f1d4fda6d8fa...</a><p>I'm not knowledgable enough to know how to utilize this data in an interesting way, but I assume this "Ephemeris" data can be utilized to determine where to point your telescope for any given object.<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/cjamcl/status/1536609292572184576" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/cjamcl/status/1536609292572184576</a>
Very nice overview of the Voyager program.<p>I love the words from the President included on the spacecraft:
<i>“We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”</i>
This is a good overview of the Voyager program, but did they just slap that headline on it to try and make it news? I was expecting some sort of announcement. But there isn't even any definite plans to shut down any instruments in the near future.
What is astonishing is how little these space crafts have travelled. They go at 38k mph and it would have still taken them 40,000 years to reach nearest star to the earth! The fastest space craft so far is Parker Solar Probe which was about 10X faster but even that would have taken 4000 years to get to nearest star. There are huge problems increasing speed beyond this because even a tiny particle can seriously damage the space craft at higher speed. The expanse of space is truly mind blowing. If physical requires that for a body to move from point X to Y it must travel through all points in-between then we are screwed.
> <i>But if an engineer had a choice to put in a part that was 10 percent more expensive but wasn't something that was needed for a four-year mission, they just went ahead and did that. And they wouldn't necessarily tell management.</i><p>Engineers doing good things even though everyone else doesnt want to care & just wants something cheap. Heartbreaking long tale of humanity, that opting to do good things is so hard to get buy in on.
Rest now sweet explorers. You've given us more knowledge than we asked for and inspired untold numbers. Even in your final dreams you give us beautiful gifts and prove to the universe that we exist.
It's the half life of the RTG that is limiting them, right? Because they're way too far to use any kind of solar power.<p>Ps I always thought that record was a bit funny. I mean it's a good method of initiating communication. Just strapping it to a can of poison is kind of a mixed message. "Hey buddies we're peaceful humans, ps here's a can of instadeath" :) Though I suppose little radioactivity would be left by the time it ever reached an alien civilization.
When will Voyager 1 become 1 light-day distance away?[1]<p>* 1 LD from Earth = November 18, 2026 -- 1,614 days from today<p>* 1 LD from Sun = Feb 03, 2027 -- 1,691 days from today<p><a href="https://www.quora.com/When-will-Voyager-1-become-1-light-day-distance-away" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/When-will-Voyager-1-become-1-light-day...</a>
I remember when Voyager was swinging past Jupiter for the first time. Caltech set up monitors all over campus, where we got to see the pictures as they arrived. We'd check the monitors before class, after class, etc. A popular joke was if one of the moon pictures showed a giant Death-Star-like hatch on it, how fast we'd be putting together a manned mission to investigate.<p>It was fun watching the scientists boiling over with excitement when all their theories were trashed by each new picture, and they had to reinvent them from scratch.
If I could decide, I would happily scrap all human missions and launch one massive science robot with a huge visible light camera on it per year. Idlewords convinced me of this:<p><a href="https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm" rel="nofollow">https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm</a>
Great article. Learned something new. The satellites were larger than I thought.<p>Coincidentally, randomly the other day, I thought how much more advanced our computing would be today as a species if we worked within the constraints of the computing of available at the time of Voyager or even the 90s.<p>I think we would favor information and communication vs. cruft and entertainment. Working within constrained computing environments forces us to make tough decisions about what is important or pushes us to innovate and be creative with what we have to work with.
Carl Sagan is mentioned in the article. He was quite a treasure. He came by our dorm once for conversation and dinner. The conversation was about whether life could be based on silicon rather than oxygen. I.e. living rocks! Very fun.
Two bits of history I learned from the article:<p>1. The last human to touch the spacecraft was a physicist inspecting two detectors — probably part of the low-energy telescope system (LET).<p><i>Although many scientists have worked on the Voyagers over the decades, Cummings can make a unique claim. “I was the last person to touch the spacecraft before they launched,” he says. Cummings was responsible for two detectors designed to measure the flux of electrons and other charged particles when the Voyagers encountered the giant planets. Particles would pass through a small “window” in each detector that consisted of aluminum foil just three microns thick. Cummings worried that technicians working on the spacecraft might have accidentally dented or poked holes in the windows. “So they needed to be inspected right before launch,” he says. “Indeed, I found that one of them was a little bit loose.”</i><p>2. Carl Sagan not only commented on the “Pale Blue Dot” but also persuaded NASA to take the photograph in the first place.<p><i>Sagan urged NASA officials to have Voyager 1 transmit one last series of images. So, on Valentine's Day in 1990, the probe aimed its cameras back toward the inner solar system and took 60 final shots. The most haunting of them all, made famous by Sagan as the “Pale Blue Dot,” captured Earth from a distance of 3.8 billion miles. It remains the most distant portrait of our planet ever taken. Veiled by wan sunlight that reflected off the camera's optics, Earth is barely visible in the image. It doesn't occupy even a full pixel.</i><p><i>Sagan, who died in 1996, “worked really hard to convince NASA that it was worth looking back at ourselves,” Spilker says, “and seeing just how tiny that pale blue dot was.”</i>
I find the space-age to be super fascinating! The Venera program is one favourite, where they managed to put a lander on Venus more than 50 years ago and send back data.<p>Just imagine the skills and knowledge with the technology at the time, to figure out how to land something safely in an unknown environment. Love it!
If Voyager had the equivalent of a modern cell phone, worth of compute. What would have been the power requirements for the mission for the same duration?
Space navigation is amazing. If I throw a rock into the lake I can barely see where it is until it hits the water. When we fling these craft into the void how do we know where they are and where they are going?<p>I can think of three ways:<p>(1) get the direction right in the first place and just assume the craft is where we calculate it should be;<p>(2) watch it from afar somehow; or<p>(3) have it tell us where it is.<p>These seem like three quite different options and I would love to know how it’s actually done.
The problem with getting a gravity assist from Jupiter is that it causes Jupiter to slightly slow down. Now, you might imagine that Jupiter is very big, and the slowdown is infinitesimal. But these things add up, and as more and more craft get a boost from Jupiter, Jupiter will lose orbital velocity and spiral inward to get sucked into the sun.<p>And then what?
> if the models were correct, should have pushed the heliopause farther out than 120 AU. “It was unexpected by all the theorists,” Krimigis says. “I think the modeling, in terms of the findings of the Voyagers, has been found wanting.”<p>Uncalibrated and/or unfalsifiable computer models should never be trusted.
45 years in space. About time for another set of probes to go beyond where they went and explore the border of the solar wind with more modern instruments.
<i>They are the first human-made objects to do so, a distinction they will hold for at least another few decades.</i><p>Uhh...won't they still be the first?
> <i>Flandro calculated that the repeated gravity assists, as they are called, would cut the flight time between Earth and Neptune from 30 years to 12. There was just one catch: the alignment happened only once every 176 years. To reach the planets while the lineup lasted, a spacecraft would have to be launched by the mid-1970s.</i><p>How many of such startling discoveries get noticed by bureaucracy/administration nowadays? Back then, it seems ideas percolated to execution stage pretty fast. I wonder if a part-time working grad student's serendipitous finds will be taken seriously to action in today's environment.