:'(
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/22/155582844/voyager-1-bids-farewell-to-the-solar-system (http://www.npr.org/2012/06/22/155582844/voyager-1-bids-farewell-to-the-solar-system)
To boldly go where no piece of human engineering has ever gone before!
Quote from: Tank on June 26, 2012, 06:03:41 PM
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.
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.
(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sikhnet.com%2Ffiles%2Fnews%2F2011%2F12-December%2Fpalebluedot.jpg&hash=74aa269a52c9fba2d87c749706317f4119fe8b47)
Carl Sagan commented thus:
Quote"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."
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 ;D
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!
How's about one of them ion drives? Those could accelerate for decades, no? ???
Quote from: Asmodean on June 26, 2012, 09:56:55 PM
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!
Quote from: markmcdaniel on June 26, 2012, 10:23:37 PM
Quote from: Asmodean on June 26, 2012, 09:56:55 PM
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.
Quote from: xSilverPhinx on June 27, 2012, 03:36:08 AM
Our immediate neighborhood is huge.
11 billion miles. A hop, skip, and a jump compared to other cosmic measurements.
Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on June 27, 2012, 04:47:11 AM
Quote from: xSilverPhinx on June 27, 2012, 03:36:08 AM
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. :-\
Quote from: Asmodean on June 26, 2012, 09:56:55 PM
How's about one of them ion drives? Those could accelerate for decades, no? ???
I would agree.
Quote from: xSilverPhinx on June 27, 2012, 03:36:08 AM
Quote from: markmcdaniel on June 26, 2012, 10:23:37 PM
Quote from: Asmodean on June 26, 2012, 09:56:55 PM
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.
Quote from: markmcdanielA 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.
Quote from: OldGit on June 27, 2012, 05:24:39 PM
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 !!!
Quote from: markmcdaniel on June 27, 2012, 05:13:59 PM
Quote from: xSilverPhinx on June 27, 2012, 03:36:08 AM
Quote from: markmcdaniel on June 26, 2012, 10:23:37 PM
Quote from: Asmodean on June 26, 2012, 09:56:55 PM
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.
No, I was talking about a "sail" for particles coming from the sun. I feel too lazy to google, it. :P
Quote from: Tank on June 27, 2012, 07:45:44 AM
Quote from: Asmodean on June 26, 2012, 09:56:55 PM
How's about one of them ion drives? Those could accelerate for decades, no? ???
I would agree.
Ion propulsion...slow to get up to speed, but man it will gogogo and keep on accelerating.
Yes... I was reading this incredibly long article about that. The tech is surprisingly simple (I can understand it quite well, as opposed to many other weird new techs), but it shows potential. What if we combine it with some good old rocket boosters to give it the highest possible α0? That would mean it would go even faster even sooner, yes?
Even though it's an awe-inspiring thing to think that one of our spacecrafts is accomplishing this, it really can be quite discouraging when you realize it's been traveling for roughly 13k days, and yet if it sent us a message, it would get here in less than 1 day. We really have a practically Sisyphean task ahead of us to travel to the stars. We've gone such a short distance so far, in a galaxy and universe measured in 6 trillion mile increments -- very few of which are in the single digits. Still, this fills me with hope and giddy wonderment. :)
Our fastest rockets today take several days to the moon, six months to Mars (if optimum alignment occurs) and years and beyond to further planets.
To try and comprehend getting to another star system light years away is baffling. ???