
30 years ago: Voyager 2's historic Neptune flyby - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2019-08-years-voyager-historic-neptune-flyby.html
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trentnix
I was 10 when Voyager 2 flew by. I was certain trips to Neptune, pictures, and
further exploration would become common. And 30 years later, we haven’t gone
back. It’s far, expensive, priorities, and all that. And now enough time has
passed I may never see us get there again.

 _sigh_

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gedy
There's hope, the New Horizons to Pluto was much faster, and before that I was
_sure_ I'd never live to see Pluto.

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trentnix
The price of that speed is don’t blink or you’ll miss it. We should have
something orbiting Neptune, _now_.

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ambulancechaser
Why? How should we decide to spend the resources it orbit Neptune? Why not
Saturn or Jupiter; why not land on a comet? Why not put a human on the moon
again or perhaps spend the money or medical research or nuclear fusion. What
about Neptune seems so compelling to you? I would never have thought it an
important or memorable goal and just want to hear why Neptune is so alluring.

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trentnix
Because the 10-year-old me was teased with pictures and mysteries I want
answers to. Because it’s so far. Because it can’t see more than a pale dot in
my telescope. Because it’s so alien. And because we have been there, done that
on everything you mentioned.

Perhaps if I’m ever granted the opportunity to present my case before NASA and
Congress, I might offer a more well-thought-out explanation. But right now,
“because it would be awesome” should suffice.

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Rebelgecko
Check out the recently proposed Trident mission, and I guess write your
congressperson while you're at it

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Zitrax
Live broadcast from that day:
[https://youtu.be/Y11CVuxfvPE](https://youtu.be/Y11CVuxfvPE)

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jcims
Wow, we really took for granted having Carl Sagan on tap for this kind of
thing.

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baggachipz
I'm kind of relieved he's not around to see what's become of everything these
days. Though the rise of the private space enterprise and its associated new
space race would give him a lot of hope.

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ursusarcanum
I remember "Neptune All Night" on PBS from WHYY that night. It was one the
first things I ever videotaped. It was awesome seeing the images coming down.

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mikeash
I stayed up, well, all night watching it with my father. Amazing experience.

Sometime around then, we also got a computer modem, and one of the first
things we did with it was find some NASA BBS where you could download images
from Voyager 2. At a blazing 300bps. The long-distance charges were probably
more than what I pay for a week of gigabit internet service at home now.

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lizknope
My dad and I would set the VCR to record the daily press conferences and watch
them in the evening. Good times.

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sehugg
I remember reading in a 1986 SciAm about how the team worked around spacecraft
failures, like compensating for temperature and the doppler effect in the sole
functioning radio receiver, and slowly rolling the entire platform to
compensate for seizing motor shafts:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=rYIJJP7audkC&pg=PA42#v=one...](https://books.google.com/books?id=rYIJJP7audkC&pg=PA42#v=onepage&q&f=false)
(New Scientist)

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caseyf7
We need another Voyager mission with updated cameras/sensors.

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krilly
The voyager program was made possible by a very specific alignment of the
planets which only occurs every 175 years

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lizknope
The joke the JPL crew always say is that the last time the planets aligned
like that was when Thomas Jefferson was President and he blew it.

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melling
That joke was actually used on President Nixon. It’s mentioned in the movie
The Farthest.

[https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.2017081...](https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20170811a/full/)

