So long Voyager 1

[Siz]

 

http://www.npr.org/2012/06/22/155582844/voyager-1-bids-farewell-to-the-solar-system

[Tank]

To boldly go where no piece of human engineering has ever gone before!

[AnimatedDirt]

To boldly go where no piece of human engineering has ever gone before!

Has it not been doing that for a while now?  Pretty amazing stuff.

[Siz]

I think 'Pale Blue Dot' was Voyagers' most important gift to humanity. It gives us an incling of perspective allowing us to drink-in the real meaning of our existence.



Carl Sagan commented thus:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

[Asmodean]

Hm... I wonder if we can't put some spacecraft together that can catch and overtake the old bird, photograph it, send the pic back and get to the aliens before Voyager does? Just to stick it to the scientists from half a century or so ago 

[Siz]

I don't think we've moved on enough in terms of accelleration and speed that it'd be achievable. Maybe something like Moores Law might apply whereby there'd be no point in launching anything for several centuries (for example) as any prior launches would be overtaken by subsequent superior craft.

According to Wiki, it'd take Voyager at its current speed 73,600 years to reach Proxima Centauri - if it was even heading that way. I take great comfort in knowing that it'll be still whizzing away from Earth at it's pathetically slow speed long after we've killed Mother Earth and most things on it. How beautifully sad... and how beautifully wonderful!

[Asmodean]

How's about one of them ion drives? Those could accelerate for decades, no?  ???

[markmcdaniel]

How's about one of them ion drives? Those could accelerate for decades, no?  ???

A light sail would probably be better. What a fantastic mission and its not over yet!

[xSilverPhinx]

How's about one of them ion drives? Those could accelerate for decades, no?  ???

A light sail would probably be better. What a fantastic mission and its not over yet!

Didn't it have one of those? Lots of free solar wind going to waste there

Anyways, it's been 35 years and Voyager is only just now leaving the solar magnetic bubble?  :oThat really (sorta) puts things into perspective. Our immediate neighborhood is huge.

[Ecurb Noselrub]

Our immediate neighborhood is huge.

11 billion miles. A hop, skip, and a jump compared to other cosmic measurements.

[Asmodean]

Our immediate neighborhood is huge.

11 billion miles. A hop, skip, and a jump compared to other cosmic measurements.

Eh... Just the skip, really. A tiny one. 

[Tank]

How's about one of them ion drives? Those could accelerate for decades, no?  ???

I would agree.

[markmcdaniel]

How's about one of them ion drives? Those could accelerate for decades, no?  ???

A light sail would probably be better. What a fantastic mission and its not over yet!

Didn't it have one of those? Lots of free solar wind going to waste there

Anyways, it's been 35 years and Voyager is only just now leaving the solar magnetic bubble?  :oThat really (sorta) puts things into perspective. Our immediate neighborhood is huge.

I Think you are thinking of a solar panel which is used to generate electrical power. A light sail is used to harvest light photons to provide thrust.

[OldGit]

A light sail is used to harvest light photons to provide thrust.

Read that good old SF story The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, in which aliens send a light-sail powered craft on an interstellar voyage by shining massive batteries of lasers on it for centuries.

[Tom62]

Read that good old SF story The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, in which aliens send a light-sail powered craft on an interstellar voyage by shining massive batteries of lasers on it for centuries.

I loved that book !!!