Reply With QuoteI find it amazing that we can still communicate w/ something 11 Billion miles away. 16 hour delay seems trivial for such a distance.
I find it amazing that we can still communicate w/ something 11 Billion miles away. 16 hour delay seems trivial for such a distance.
35 years and we're a long way from even a light day from Earth.
I see it was Dr. Stone they were quoting - he was the Director of JPL at the end/start of the last century/new century. Lots of cool stuff was done while he was there.
I think the Voyager program is one of the supreme accomplishments of human civilization. It never ceases to amaze me what the folks at JPL achieved, and I'll never forget the impact it had on me as a kid in the '80s as Voyager 2 flybys routinely rewrote the textbooks on the outer planets.
Ditto, Gordon!
And this is some seriously cool stuff now; we're actually going to get a first-hand peek via a probe into interstellar space. :D
So why have we never launched another Voyager style probe? The batteries on the two Voyagers out there are only estimated to last until about 2020 or so. So what, then we just wait another 40-50 years to get something out there again? That seems silly.
New Horizons is fast approaching Pluto, and beyond.
I think the grand tour that the Voyagers took depended on an orbital alignment of planets that only comes along once a century or so. Something like that, anyway. So for now it may be more practical to target just one planet rather than several. Which we have done with wonderful success -- Galileo, for instance, and the Mars probes.
Yup, the planets were in alignment, the Grand Tour was cancelled due to budget cuts but enough got salvaged and tacked onto Voyager so it went to Uranus and Neptune in addition to the originally planned Jupiter and Saturn. I believe there is a Pluto mission on its way.
Next Grand Tour alignment is about a century and a half away.
I don't want a probe that goes to a bunch of other planets. I just want one that they fire towards the edge of the solar system as fast as possible.
I assume you're going to pay for it?
No, we'll pay for it in asspennies.
That's fine, but this was not the purpose for which Voyager was made. It's just sort of a bonus after it explored the planets.Originally Posted by Eric Majkut
Also, I wonder if without the planetary alignment it will be possible for other probes to attain similar velocities to Voyager. Dunno how the gravity-assist math worked out on that probe.
Urg! Must. Control. Urge to make. Obvious. Pun.
Bmmmurrppggg!
From here.Only once every 176 years do the giant outer planets line up to allow a spacecraft to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune with a minimum use of fuel and time. Using the gravity assist technique, or ‘slingshot’ effect, the flight time to Neptune was reduced from 30 years to only 12.
Only 3 more years for New Horizons to zip past Pluto and Charon.
NASA is talking about trying to get it to look at some other significant Plutoids, as well.
That is if alien fuckwits don't troll us by snagging the probe, pasting a Lady Gaga poster to the camera, and flinging the probe back at Earth. "That's for 50 years of I Love Lucy reruns, assholes"
Very nice!
However, if you had told this then young Science Fiction fan, after the moon landing in 1969, that we would not have landed on Mars or any of the other planets by 2012, I would never have believed you.
I love NASA.
Now, if only we get that Voyager battery performance out of our mobile devices! Who cares about radiation!
I knew it! I knew it! All those Rover photos were faked! We never landed on Mars!
This stuff is so awesome. It makes me wish that we didn't waste so much damn money every year on bullshit so that we could redirect some of it on launching a few more probes designed to explore beyond our solar system. Not to get all P&R up in here, but we probably could have funded half a dozen modern Voyagers with the money we spent on the Iraq mess.
A half-dozen??????
Dude, do you realize how much we blew on Iraq? We could have funded hundreds. Hell, maybe even thousands.
The TSA has a bigger budget than NASA.
I know, but we wouldn't need hundreds. Still, you're right, the money disparity is staggering, and makes me ill to think about the different ways it could have been spent. I wonder if anyone has ever put together an expense report on Iraq showing just what private companies made how much money off of it, and how few of those companies were in the U.S. and how little of that money found it's way back into our economy.
That is just sad on so many levels.
As Neil Degrasse Tyson likes to point out, NASA's budget equates to roughly half a penny on every dollar of taxes collected. Simply doubling that to a penny on every dollar would open up all sorts of insane possibilities for what NASA could do. The space program in the 1960's inspired an entire generation of starry eyed kids to grow up and become engineers, pilots, scientists, etc. Breathing new life into NASA would not only bring about practical scientific results, but also give this country a much needed kick in the ass to compete with other countries who are quickly overtaking us in those sorts of areas.
I'm usually pretty cynical about the "inspiring the youth" stuff, but listening to some of the guests on Tyson's Startalk program, I really believe there's something there, and that the little things actually can add up. His episode with Whoopi Goldberg is particularly powerful, she talks about how after seeing Uhura on Star Trek, she realized there was a place for her as a black woman in the future.
I guess maybe that story is more about about civil rights than science, but the sentiment is the same: how people perceive our culture as children can make a big impression on how they're molded as adults.
I think that is one reason that when famous people (athletes etc) claim they are not "role models" they underestimate the effect they can have.
Fucking NASA would have screwed it up.
The future of space is in the hands of private ventures now, fortunately. SpaceX's Falcon basically MOCKS NASA's efforts since they retired Saturn. The Falcon Heavy will launch 53k kg to LEO, for 1k/kg if they can meet a 4 launch/year schedule. And they plan more than double that. The Falcon9 rockets were developed to successful launch in 8 years from a startup, and are now supplying the ISS and launching satellites.
NASA is a big part of the problem, not the solution. (The Space Shuttle, on launch costs alone, is 50% more expensive than Saturn V and prevented the development of a decent heavy launch rocket...at least 6 replacement programs I can think of came and went! Heck, the last-gasp "Constellation" program was mostly mildly updated 1970's tech...I would NOT be shocked if NASA never developed their own launch platform again)
NASA's good at rovers and some groundside science research. They should stick to that.
Last edited by Starlight; 06-22-2012 at 11:43 AM.
Robotic exploration is so much cheaper than crewed. It costs a fortune to put humans in space, has numerous limitations as it stands, and quite frankly, the last two mega-disasters were NASA being sloppy and lazy. Yeah, putting an exploration crew on Mars could do a lot once they got there, but the cost would be staggering and the dangers immense (and disasters tend to make legislators gun-shy of throwing more money in NASA's direction).
And just for the record, JPL is managed by Cal Tech, not NASA directly.
SpaceX's is one of *seven* sufficiently funded private projects I know of to land robotic explorers on other planets or the moon, and all are headed for manned landings. Three, interestingly, are focusing on mars-to-stay. And Bigelow have a viable orbital spacestation design...indeed may be supplying an ISS module.
Then there's China. And if you think a few (tens of thousand, for that matter) deaths will stop the Chinese space program...
Last edited by Starlight; 06-22-2012 at 12:26 PM.
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