
Where are the Voyagers? - lelf
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/index.html
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sidcool
> Because Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 1 is traveling from
> Earth, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at
> certain times of the year.

So obvious yet so mind blowing.

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patrickmn
We really are on a fragile blue ball doing loop-de-loops through space!

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lisper
If you shrunk the sun down to the size of a ping-pong ball, earth would be a
poppy seed orbiting ten meters away. Pluto would be 100m away. The Voyagers
would be 300m away.

The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be 500 miles away.

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wiz21c
Proxima Centauri is so far away that's depressing...

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ekianjo
the proxima is almost a joke in the name.

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enave
Well, there are three stars in the alpha centauri system. Proxima is the most
proximate

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ekianjo
It is, but it's almost marginal:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri#/media/File:Rel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri#/media/File:Relative_positions_of_Sun,_Alpha_Centauri_AB_and_Proxima_Centauri.png)

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josho
As amazing as space technologies are, we are in the stone ages when it comes
to spaceflight:

> Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 2 is traveling from Earth,
> the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain
> times of the year.

We don't even have the technology to escape the sun's gravity without needing
a gravitational slingshot from other planets, and that still leaves us with a
space craft moving slower than the earth.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Problem is we don't really know where to go next. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin
tried to cook up alternate space travel methods for years and still couldn't
come up with anything better than the same basic rocket model that put Gagarin
into space.

Most theorized "warp drives" either require more energy than humanity is
capable of producing or necessitate breaking a law of physics or two just to
move anything organic or larger than a postage stamp.

Then again, the answer could be right under our noses. There's a Sci-fi story
- I forget the name - where space travel is actually quite simple if you know
the math to make it happen, and when a peaceful alien race visits Earth, the
humans - with their thousands of years of armed conflict - kill the aliens and
take their spaceships.

Makes me wonder that if we treat the rest of the universe the way we have
treated our planet, do we truly deserve the right to roam the stars?

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ant6n
There's the EM drive, maybe. Some recent discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995125)

If you can create trust out of electricty (ion drives also come to mind), then
if you have nuclear power or fusion, things get interesting again in terms of
propulsion.

To reach orbit, there are a bunch of interesting proposals: skyhooks (i.e.
space elevator light), launch loops, railguns.

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jcranmer
The EM drive is reported as producing maybe 1 mN per kW. The largest power
plant in the world produces about 22 GW of energy--at that ratio, an EM drive
could produce maybe 22 kN. The first stage of the Saturn V rockets produced
35,000 kN of thrust.

As a practical engine, EM drives are worse than chemical rockets or even ion
thrusters (which produce about 25-250 mN/kW, according to Wikipedia).

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VLM
If your numbers are correct, and I did the math correctly in my head, that's
about five thousand pounds of thrust. A nuclear submarine might weigh ten
thousand times that. Obviously a nuclear sub operates at much lower power
level and obviously the hull doesn't have to be as thick for a spacecraft so I
think it not a ridiculous comparison. Also you're spacecraft need not carry
dozens of ICBMs, torpedoes, hundreds of sailors, etc.

Obviously the first engine ever exhaustively tested is usually not the highest
performance achievable. A factor of a thousand seems possible although a
hundred is more likely.

So for a very large nuclear plant, if the EM drive were weightless (LOL) then
maybe 1/10th G applied to that nuclear sub is some kind of theoretical limit
not entirely ridiculous but possible.

Now consider that to one sig fig a G of acceleration for a year is the speed
of light. And if you're careful maybe you could run the plant for three
decades.

So a round trip to the speed of light and back again is more or less back of
the envelope possible to visit some distant star.

Relativity rears its ugly head and ten years of ship time around the speed of
light is a lot further than 10 lightyears and time passing on earth is a lot
longer than ten years.

Of course at the speed of light you're going to need a rather substantial
hull, an active radar that can avoid interstellar crud, etc. If you can detect
"stuff" at a day out, at a tenth of a G accelerating for an entire day you can
be quite far away indeed by the time you pass it.

I can't run the numbers in my head like above, but even 1/100th G slices a
very substantial amount of time off a Mars mission. Some unverified google
results imply 1/100th G means Mars in a month not a year and a half.

At least as a back of the envelope calculation its quite a useful vehicle.

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ars
It's sad to think they only have about 9 years of life remaining before they
run out of power.

And only a couple of years of useful life remaining.

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hanoz
This is all very well, but where are they in the night sky is what I would
like to know.

And no I'm not expecting to see them, just to think about them in the right
direction.

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civilian
Right Ascension: 17h 11m 31.0s Declination: 11° 57' 50.9" (J2000)
[http://theskylive.com/voyager1-tracker](http://theskylive.com/voyager1-tracker)
It's in the constellation Ophiucus.

It'll be doing a flyby of Gliese 445 in 40,000 years, but it'll be brick'd by
then. [http://www.space.com/22783-voyager-1-interstellar-space-
star...](http://www.space.com/22783-voyager-1-interstellar-space-star-
flyby.html)

~~~
netsharc
Geez, I wonder if anyone will find it.

And since we won't even survive this century due to climate change, it'll be
"a relic of a civilization long gone."

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civilian
We are totally gonna survive climate change! Humans are adaptable as fuck. We
might lose 90% of life and our global economy might temporarily go away, but
we'll survive.

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cyberferret
Anyone know why in the second video (side plane view of solar system), they
show 4 separate items moving out into deep space? I could pick Voyager 1 and
2, but no idea what the other 2 probes are?

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ars
Probably Pioneer 10 and 11.

See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_leaving_the_Solar_System)

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pkituu
You can ride along with Voyager in "Eyes on the Solar System"
([https://eyes.nasa.gov](https://eyes.nasa.gov)) It's an open world Solar
system with NASA missions and imagery.

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secfirstmd
I love NASA's work but I find it's websites are very messy and without a
decent standard framework or layout. I really wish someone go to a GOV.UK job
on them and get some decent standardisation going with them.

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rootbear
There are some standards for NASA websites, but I think they have more to do
with responsibility for content and other bureaucratic matters than design
concerns. The group I used to be with, the Scientific Visualization Studio, at
svs.gsfc.nasa.gov has a pretty decent website, in my biased opinion.

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milansuk
I wish my code runs without maintenance for so long as these "babies" fly.

~~~
blauditore
I recently experienced a VxWorks system completely crashing due to a sequence
of simple ftp (reading) commands. We had to go and manually restart the
machine on-site.

Then I read about VxWorks being used for space exploration and was glad they
never tried to read data from curiosity through ftp...

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Normal_gaussian
Would be really cool to stick some velocity numbers on there as well, I find
it hard to relate to such huge distances. 62 thousand kilometres per hour
feels larger because I can kind of comprehend it.

Though really cool anyway, I was going to say that Voyager 1 managed short of
30 light seconds a year until I realised the question is one of acceleration
and deceleration not velocity. If I wasn't on my way to bed I would dig around
for some data to make acceleration graphs for them (hint hint :P ).

~~~
ars
> Would be really cool to stick some velocity numbers on there as well

Bottom of this page: [http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-
reports/index.htm](http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-
reports/index.htm)

~~~
Normal_gaussian
That is a great resource, thank you

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Animats
Leaving the solar system, as usual.[1]

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1189/](https://xkcd.com/1189/)

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parish
Eventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars. In about 40,000 years....

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Waterluvian
I love that you can almost reasonably measure their distance in lightyears.

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0942v8653
Um, what about Voyager 6? I'm worried...

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run_kmc
It's programmed to learn all that is learnable, then return to the creator. I
wouldn't worry.

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Jaruzel
> I wouldn't worry

Yeah... what could go wrong, eh?

