Off Topic: Voyagers

[scaesare]

Just in case folks were unaware... Voyager 1 has had a communication issue with garbled telemetry since late last Nov. The last JPL update was Dec 12th. We got a bit more detail in an Ars Technica article a couple weeks back... but that's it.

There have been issue before that have taken a while to resolve, but we are at 3 months now, and I'm afraid it's not looking good.

Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles from earth. Or about 22-1/2 light hours. I really would have liked to see it hit 50 yrs, which would have put it at about 1 light-day from us.

Recently watched It's Quieter in the Twilight... I recommend it if you are a fan of these workhorse craft, like I am...

 

[ecarfan]

Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles from earth. Or about 22-1/2 light hours.

Interstellar distances are beyond the comprehension of my puny human brain.

Voyager 1 has performed above and beyond expectations.

 

[JB47394]

Interstellar distances are beyond the comprehension of my puny human brain.

Just think in terms of light. Light is slow, but we're just that much slower. I've always loved this visualization.

 

[scaesare]

Just think in terms of light. Light is slow, but we're just that much slower. I've always loved this visualization.

Yeah, I like that vid too.

Along the same lines... this demonstrates jsut how unfathomable distances are at the extremes of what we (think) we know...

 

[CapsEngineer]

Yeah, I like that vid too.

Along the same lines... this demonstrates jsut how unfathomable distances are at the extremes of what we (think) we know...

There are both great videos.

At work I teach an intro to space focused on the work we do and I show this to show orbital altitudes relative to the moon. I'll be adding these video to my pre-work for the class.

source (with much higher res pictures) File:Orbitalaltitudes.svg - Wikimedia Commons

My take way on the slide is
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams,

 

[scaesare]

There are both great videos.

At work I teach an intro to space focused on the work we do and I show this to show orbital altitudes relative to the moon. I'll be adding these video to my pre-work for the class.

View attachment 1022959

source (with much higher res pictures) File:Orbitalaltitudes.svg - Wikimedia Commons

My take way on the slide is
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams,

That is a cool illustration too. Too bad it doesn't include the LeGrange points (on one side of the earth anyway), especially as JWST is parked out there.

 

[JB47394]

That is a cool illustration too. Too bad it doesn't include the LeGrange points (on one side of the earth anyway), especially as JWST is parked out there.

The full SVG is about 8km per pixel. Even the closest Lagrange points, L1 and L2, are 1.5 million km away. That would make for a really big image.

As the man said, space is big.

 

[scaesare]

The full SVG is about 8km per pixel. Even the closest Lagrange points, L1 and L2, are 1.5 million km away. That would make for a really big image.

As the man said, space is big.

Well, they did it by having a different scale in the bottom segment for the moon... just do similar for the Lagrange points...

 

[scaesare]

Continuing my vigil for Voyager I... watched this last night... also a good treatise on the program, and outlines some of the issues/challenges/failures they had to overcome:

The Farthest (2017) ⭐ 8.1 | Documentary, History

2h 1m | PG

www.imdb.com

 

[scaesare]

Forgot to post that JPL posted an update last week...

NASA Engineers Make Progress Toward Understanding Voyager 1 Issue – Voyager

blogs.nasa.gov

"So they're saying there's a chance...."

 

[ecarfan]

Voyager 1 transmitting data again after Nasa remotely fixes 46-year-old probe​

The computers on Voyager 1 and its sister probe, Voyager 2, have less than 70 kilobytes of memory in total – the equivalent of a low-resolution computer image. They use old-fashioned digital tape to record data. The fix was transmitted from Earth on 18 April but it took two days to assess if it had been successful as a radio signal takes about 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1 and another 22 and a half hours for a response to come back to Earth. “When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on 20 April, they saw that the modification worked,” JPL said.

The JPL Voyager team never ceases to amaze me with their dogged persistence and innovative problem solving skills!

 

[scaesare]

Voyager 1 transmitting data again after Nasa remotely fixes 46-year-old probe​

The JPL Voyager team never ceases to amaze me with their dogged persistence and innovative problem solving skills!

OUSTANDING!

Not completely out of the woods yet, as they aren't yet getting unscrambled scientific data, but now getting engineering data back is a huge step...

 

[Grendal]

I can't wait for a Voyager upgrade. These things are amazing and just imagine if we have a modernized version(s) sent out there. I'd like to see a dozen of them sent in many different directions. Maybe with video and pictures that people 50 years from now can get.

 

[scaesare]

I can't wait for a Voyager upgrade. These things are amazing and just imagine if we have a modernized version(s) sent out there. I'd like to see a dozen of them sent in many different directions. Maybe with video and pictures that people 50 years from now can get.

And with the discussion we are having in other threads about the possible velocities with nuclear propulsion and the Oberth effect ... we only have another 129 yrs before we get a planetary alignment to do multiple gravity assists and REALLY get a couple probes cookin'!

 

[ecarfan]

Ars technica report on Voyager coming back to life, with a very cool graphic. My brain experiences buffer stack overflow trying to envision the scale involved.

 

[JB47394]

My brain experiences buffer stack overflow trying to envision the scale involved.

Scale everything down. Assume that Voyager is leaving the Statue of Liberty in New York (Sol) bound for Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles (Proxima Centauri).

Earth is 16 meters away from the statue (it's on the statue base), and Voyager is 2.5 km away, having just made it ashore in New Jersey. And it takes light a day to get from Sol to Voyager, at a scale speed of about three times the top speed of a garden snail.

Voyager itself is moving at about 1.5 microns per second, covering 130 mm per day. A bit less than the length of a smartphone.

 

[scaesare]

The thing is twenty three and a half light hours away... it's crazy to think a man-made object is that far away. I'm really hoping we'll be able to still talk to it in 3 years... that will be 50th anniversary and right about at the 1 light-day point....

Repeating myself in this thread... these are really worth a watch for the Voyager fanbois like me:

The Farthest (2017) ⭐ 8.1 | Documentary, History

2h 1m | PG

www.imdb.com

It's Quieter in the Twilight (2022) ⭐ 7.3 | Documentary

1h 23m

www.imdb.com

 

[Max Spaghetti]

with a very cool graphic

I like this logarithmic graphic on Wikipedia, which helps visualise scale if you can cope with log scales:

Heliosphere - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[ggr]

trying to envision the scale involved.

Wow, those voyagers are HUGE!

 

[ecarfan]

Scale everything down.

Thanks, but actually I’m more boggled by the fact that the graphic only shows about 0.06% of the distance to the nearest star. Check my math.