
Voyager 1 spots new region at the edge of the Solar System - Reltair
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/voyager-1-spots-new-region-at-the-edge-of-the-solar-system/
======
jlgreco
_> Researchers suspect it may take several years for Voyager 1 to clear this
area entirely, after which it will finally reach interstellar space._

The RTGs in Voyager 1 are only good until about 2025 iirc, ~12-13 more years.
Here's hoping it makes it through in time.

~~~
Wingman4l7
Strictly speaking, the RTGs will continue generating power past that time --
it just won't be enough to power any of the instruments or the radio; the
thermocouples also degrade, which further impacts the power produced.
_(tomato, tomahto)_ Attitude propellant is also an issue. Around 2020, they'll
start to turn off instruments until they don't have enough power to run any of
them anymore. Apparently, they haven't picked the shutdown order yet -- but
they have 10 years to decide, so no rush. =)

NASA's timeline for the Voyager lifetimes:
<http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html>

~~~
giulianob
It would be cool if they could shut it down for a long time then have it wake
up and send some data back with the remaining power.

~~~
Wingman4l7
Neat idea, but I don't think there were any onboard batteries -- AFAIK power
was just fed straight from the RTG thermocouples, more or less. Batteries
would have just added weight, would have had a crappy recharge capacity after
a while, and wouldn't have made much sense for a deep space probe which relied
on an RTG instead of solar panels.

Also, the RTG might be powering instrument heaters, keeping them at warm
enough temperatures to prevent failure. If that's the case, once those are
shut off, there's no turning those instruments back on.

EDIT: It appears that Voyager 1's ultraviolet spectrometer instrument, at
least, is pretty tough: as of January 2012, it has survived having its heater
shut off for power conservation:
[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20120117.ht...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20120117.html)

That's one hardy spacecraft! =)

------
ra
Oh man I get so excited every time I hear news from the Voyager program.

What an amazing achievement to do what those guys did back in the 1970s.

~~~
justincormack
Don't diss the 70s. The 50s went to space. The 60s went to the moon. The 70s
left the solar system. Progress...

~~~
btilly
The 70s went to space. The 80s shifted right.

~~~
rdl
The 1970s essentially carried on from the 1950s and 1960s. The Vietnam war,
resource shocks, etc. seem to have killed any real innovation during the 70s
(in government/aerospace -- obviously it was better in other fields like
microcomputers), and then the shift toward military in the 80s went even
farther.

(there was a shift right overall, but it was mostly just a shift down in space
funding, I think)

------
felideon
I was trying to visualize the so called 'magnetic highway' and found this
along with further explanation.

[http://phys.org/news/2012-12-voyager-encounters-region-
deep-...](http://phys.org/news/2012-12-voyager-encounters-region-deep-
space.html)

------
ghubbard
> _A few models did have a feature like this, but it was only a transient one
> that appeared at certain times of the solar cycle._

How transient is transient? 30 days is not a large fraction of an 11 year
solar cycle.

~~~
ggchappell
I'm wondering about that, too. Shouldn't the article say something like, "The
new data lend support to models predicting that a region with the observed
properties will appear during certain parts of the solar cycle." Is that
statement not true?

------
xyzzyb
So instead of a hard delineation between solar wind and cosmic rays we're
seeing something more like velcro?

------
brador
How fast is Voyager travelling? Could we send out a Voyage X at a faster speed
and with better tech to catch up and surpass it?

~~~
darklajid
Catch up and surpass something we launched decades ago, travelling (according
to Wikipedia, entry was last edited .. today) 3.595 AU per year [1].

The question you're asking is hard to answer: When do you want to catch up? If
we send a new object to space today, which travels 5% faster, is that good
enough? It won't pass Voyager 1 for a looooong time, but will eventually.

Is that what you're aiming for? Why? Or are you asking for a magical way to
cross that distance (35 years of traveling) 'instantly'?

1:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.595+AU+per+year&d...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.595+AU+per+year&dataset=)

~~~
Jach
Considering c is 63,198 AU/yr, and Voyager 1's only about 123 AU away, there's
still a lot of room left for future engineers in increasing the speed of our
devices to very quickly surpass it. Will we achieve even a hundredth of c
within the next 100 years? Depends.

~~~
iuguy
Just wondering, is there any technology we've seen actually used today that
could produce a hundredth of c within the next 100 years? Would this be
something we could see with ion propulsion for example?

~~~
madaxe
Not used, but planned. Nuclear propulsion. No real limit on speed, apart from
C, although as you go farther/faster you need REALLY big ships to carry enough
fuel. c.f. project Orion.

------
rdl
I wonder how hard it would be to do purely private (or maybe university-
consortium) deep space probes. I assume almost any of the standard rockets
could accommodate an extra stage to do escape, especially if you just need
earth escape and can steal mv from other bodies to escape the solar system.

The expensive part would be operating it indefinitely, right? I assume you
could outsource to a satellite TT&C facility.

------
laacz
What I find most interesting about Voyager-1 and 2, that these crafts went to
the outskirts of our Solar system because of funding cuts for Mariner program
(Venus and Mars research). Marvelous what you can achieve even when you are
given less money.

------
wiradikusuma
I have mixed feeling every time I read this kind of news. I envy those people
who made it happen 35 years ago, they produced stuff that's still
sophisticated by today's standard, while I'm here writing crappy websites.
Man, I feel small.

------
JoeAltmaier
Could it be instruments degrading? 35 years in the cosmic wind is a long time.

------
mylittlepony
I had to double check when I read that the Voyagers started their mission 35
years ago, it's hard to believe.

Why aren't we sending more of these, in every direction?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Well the ESA is going to send one, but the answer is simply budget. It takes
money to run one of these missions, it competes with other missions. Not only
is there the space craft cost, the launch cost, and the team cost, since its
going to take a long time to get out there you've got to have 50 years of time
reserved on the deep space network etc etc.

A good question would be "Why are the space sciences so under funded?" and
that policy question is best addressed with your legislators. Lately I've been
positioning space as a 'back up plan' [1] for the Global Warming crisis.

[1] Motivating politicians is hard, especially if they can't point at what
they've done and say "See how impressive is that!" Space sounds like a 'waste'
to a lot of voters, so I've been taking the tack, "Global Warming is a crisis,
and we don't yet know how to control the climate on our planet, we may get to
a point where we are seriously thinking about moving off planet and this
information will be invaluable, there is also the asteroid threat which space
craft "out there" where the most likely earth killing asteroids are hiding
(the Ooort cloud) would be a tremendous early warning, you might be saving the
entire human RACE by funding these projects at NASA, how cool is that?!"

~~~
avar
It's not just budget ,the Voyager program took advantage of a favorable
planetary alignment that wouldn't recur for 175 years:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Grand_Tour>

I have no idea how favorable this was, i.e. whether you could get the same
effect today with more propulsion, but it's quite possible that we don't have
the technology to do this in any reasonable timeframe today.

~~~
abecedarius
They do: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons>

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
"New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006" ... "with an estimated arrival
date at the Pluto–Charon system of July 14, 2015"

~~~
losvedir
Holy shit! Only 9 years to pluto? That's waaaaayyyy shorter than I would have
imagined possible with our current technology.

------
bobsoap
> Today's announcement clarifies that the confusion was caused by the fact
> that nature didn't think much of physicists' expectations.

LOL

------
speedyrev
Maybe it's V Ger! Look out Capt Kirk!!!

