Voyager's 35th birthday gift: One-way INTERSTELLAR ticket As NASA's Voyager probes complete their 35th year of operation, Voyager 1 has sensed a second change in the surrounding expanse of obsidian nothingness - just as scientists predicted would happen before the craft enters interstellar space. Artist's impression of Voyager 1 and 2 in the heliosheath Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech …
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All of yous, go here, and watch / download at least the first say 8 videos....
http://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy
Or you can download the entire site (all vids, all subjects) from here....
http://mujica.org/khan/howto.html
The universe and the sizes of it all, you know, the videos explained it all - my mind has blown.
Really. It's just incomprehensibly HUGE, and that is only the KNOWN or OBSERVABLE size of the universe.
And it's unknowably hugerea evera even more again.
I mean to the edge of the heliosphere is HUGE..... but it's really nothing of nothing, a billion, trillion times over, and then some more again.
I am wanting to see "instant through universe mapping and travel" happen - but while star treck and star wars etc., were interesting in the traveling through space aspect.....
The known size of the observable universe is - words escape me.
See the videos.
I love reading about the Voyager missions, it is science and engineering at its very best without the politics and "mine's bigger than yours" that goes along with current science projects. Depending on what information they come back with, it'd be good to see a dedicated Interstellar mission planned.
We read:
Nevertheless, it's NASA's longest-operating craft ever, rocketing through space for the last 35 years.
"Rocketing" is not the word I would use. "Falling", "following a geodesic through spacetime", possibly "careening" or "hurtling" would be more appropriate.
As it is the USAs NASA I'd use 'shooting along'.
Speaking as an American, I and many of my friends like to describe its rapid velocity as "wailing"... as in "60,000km/h! Man, that sucker's really wailing!
Btw, nice Doors reference by the Cal Tech guy... Break on through, break on through, break on through, break on through, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
"Alive!" she cried!
"The Pluto Fast Flyby was later cancelled due to a lack of funding, but it was replaced by the Pluto Kuiper Express."
Okay.
"The mission was cancelled for budgetary reasons, but later replaced by the similar New Horizons mission."
OKAY!
"New Horizons is a NASA robotic spacecraft mission currently en route to the dwarf planet Pluto. It is expected to be the first spacecraft to fly by and study Pluto and its moons, Charon, Nix, Hydra, S/2011 P 1, and S/2012 P 1, with an estimated arrival date at the Pluto–Charon system of July 14, 2015. NASA may then also attempt flybys of one or more other Kuiper belt objects, if a suitable target can be located."
All right then. Phew.
I think it's time that wealthy people of interest picked up some tabs. Spend some money, guys, I will vote against the tax harpies.
> I think it's time that wealthy people of interest picked up some tabs. Spend some money, guys, I will vote
> against the tax harpies.
Where are the Charles Yerkeses and Percival Lowells (P.L.uto) of this new age? "Gates" or "Virgin _" could be rolled into some interesting names.
We are / do / have.
New Horizons is heading for Pluto.
Dawn is off to Ceres having already surveyed Vesta.
Cassini is orbiting Saturn.
Curiosity is trundling around Mars.
And that's just the few that spring to mind.
There is a tendency to go to other planets and stay there rather than doing a tour of the solar system, but you can get a lot more science done it you have a few years in orbit, rather than an hour flying past. New Horizons is the exception to the rule but the physics of getting there make an orbiting probe a bit too tricky.
"There is a tendency to go to other planets and stay there rather than doing a tour of the solar system, but you can get a lot more science done it you have a few years in orbit, rather than an hour flying past."
I'm fairly sure that the Voyager trips were a rather "once in a lifetime" event (every 200 years or so?) due to a rather rare alignment of the outer planets. So very few probes will do tours of the solar system for a while yet.
It was a fortuitous planetary alignment that allowed the Voyager missions to occur when they did, the positions of the major outer planets allowed the probes to get a gravitational speed boost from each one as they passed. This particular set of conditions is not going to occur again for a long time, and getting to the edge of the solar system on rocket power alone can't be done with current technology (Well possibly with the fancy next generation of ion drives and VASIMR engines but you'd still need a hell of a lot of fuel). We'll probably have to wait for the next alignment before we can do the Grand Tour again.
The scientists behind Voyager are a mixture of physicists and geologists. The former discipline has a Nobel prize. In the past, the committee have been willing to award that prize to those who head up massive collaborations. I wonder if they have the imagination to reward the Voyager team. It is surely one of the most stunningly successful scientific experiments ever.
"I wonder if they have the imagination to reward the Voyager team."
I might be misunderstanding your intent here, but a Nobel Prize can only be awarded to a maximum of three people. It's in the rules:
"A maximum of three laureates and two different works may be selected per award. Except for the Peace Prize, which can be awarded to institutions, the awards can only be given to individuals. If the Peace Prize is not awarded, the money is split among the scientific prizes. This has happened 19 times so far." - Wikipedia
Although lately the discussion has been started whether that rule should be overruled in order to award the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Higgs mechanism (and the Higgs boson) to more than three of
Philip Anderson
Robert Brout
François Englert
Gerald Guralnik
Carl Hagen
Peter Higgs
Tom Kibble
Gerard t'Hooft
And even that would be unfair to the CERN collaborations.
The time of easily identifiable "core individuals" responsible for a scientific discovery has passed I think.
I'm aware of the rule. My point is that the rule hasn't stopped the committee from awarding a prize to a humungous collaboration. I hate to pick on individuals, since it implies I don't think they deserved it (which is something I'm not knowledgeable enough to claim) but an example may give others something to shoot at:
Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer shared the 1984 prize for creating the W and Z bosons at CERN. The basic idea of colliding protons and anti-protons is not *that* inventive. The inventiveness comes from solving the engineering problem of actually making the scheme work. I find it hard to believe that just two people made the crucial engineering breakthroughs. I bet there are dozens of others who reckon they have a moral share in the prize.
...if that is possible.
The article makes reference to "north" and "south" in a number of places, eg
...the direction of the magnetic fields, which will change from running east-west to running north-south.
Right now, Voyager 1 is heading north while Voyager 2, at least 9 billion miles from the Sun, is moving south.
Are these directions with respect to Earth - and therefore does this mean the two craft are traveling up from, and down from the plane of the ecliptic, respectively?
Seems a good question, seems you are not the first to ask it: http://cosmoquest.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-58802.html
A fellow called Mugaliens enlightened that forum with "The Sun has a defined North and South Pole, as does the ecliptic, based on the motion around the pole being counterclockwise when viewed from the north.
An easy way to remember this is to take your right hand, curve your fingers in the direction of Earth's orbit around the sun, and stick your thumb up. Your thumb points North.Interesting, this is the same way I remember the lines of magnetic flux around a straight wire carrying a current."
Interesting how you remember the magnetic field orientation. When I did O level physics they taught us Maxwell's Corkscrew Rule. Of course that's not very helpful if you don't drink wine ;-)
(PS nearly 30 years later (and absolutely no need to use it) and I still remember it - sign of a good mnemonic!)
By convention, 'North' and 'South' in the context of the Solar System refer to positions relative to the plane of the ecliptic (defined as the plane in which the Earth orbits the sun), such that the rotation of the Solar System is counter-clockwise if viewed from 'North'. This is not the same as 'North' and 'South' as defined on Earth, as the Earth is tilted with respect to the plane of the ecliptic, so Earth's 'North' rotates in a circle approximately 23 degrees out from the Solar Systems' North.
A picture paints a thousand words, so here:
Thanks for that, when I said the Earth, I suppose I really meant the Sun.
So, in order to visit the outer planets, both these vehicles must have originally been launched in the plane of the ecliptic, is that correct? But they have now changed direction so that they are traveling at ninety degrees to it?
The article notes a rapidly escalating amount of galactic cosmic rays as Voyager goes through the 'heliosheath'. Are these 'rays' slowed and stopped or deflected by the effects of Sol? If so, is it a magnetic, electrostatic or electromagnetic effect? I can't imagine it would be particle interaction since everything out there is mostly empty space and I can't see how photons coming in would be affected at all.
Is it a boiling maelstrom of energetic 'stuff' on the outside of the heliosheath region or is this an increase which is only noticeable by sensitive instruments?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere seems pertinant to your question. I'm not sure though, because it is making my brain hurt. I did note that the assumed model of what was happening was revised in 2009 due to data from the Cassini probe.
>I can't imagine it would be particle interaction since everything out there is mostly empty space
Very, very low pressure is still pressure.
It must have been quite something to have been involved in building a machine that is still functioning after 35 years, has now left our solar system, and will be out there, somewhere, for thousands of years, if not eternity.
Now that's what you call leaving your mark.
Mind bogglingly, and going by my rough calculations, in a couple of hundred years time it will still have another 73800 years to travel at the current speed before reaching the distance of our nearest star. Unless it bumps into something on the way of course.
It will evaporate(*) well before eternity. It will probably have evaporated before it next encounters a solar system (unless they managed to aim it precisely at one of our nearest neighbours a mere handful of light-years away).
(*) most things have a vapour pressure greater than that of interstellar space. Also it's being bombarded by high-energy particles.
"I wish they made cars, computers, appliances and other products as reliable as the Voyagers.... "
My C64 still works fine, though the floppy disks are getting harder to read.
There are still plenty of 70's vintage cars and motorcycles running about, though not many around NY. I bet the Voyagers wouldn't be looking too hot if they had to deal with NYC taxis, snowpocalypses and salted roads.
Grandma's Hobart stand mixers, they're still chugging along and highly coveted by pastry chefs.
"When corporate America puts something to last, it will last. I hope they abandon planned obsolescence."
Well, when you basically have unlimited funding, you can build things to last.
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