After Nearly Half a Century in Deep Space, Every Ping From Voyager 1 Is a Bonus

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

Brajeshwar

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32 comments

theregister.comSciencestory

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Voyager 1Space ExplorationAstrophysics

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Voyager 1

Space Exploration

Astrophysics

Voyager 1 continues to send signals after nearly half a century in deep space, sparking discussion about its scientific contributions and the challenges of detecting signals from distant spacecraft.

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Discussion (32 comments)

Showing 32 comments

captainkrtek

4 months ago

1 reply

“The Farthest” is a great PBS doc on Voyager, some amazing photos and history of the program.

https://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/

marcusb

4 months ago

It’s Quieter in the Twilight is really good as well.

https://itsquieterfilm.com/

dylan604

4 months ago

1 reply

I really wish these bon voyage articles about Voyager would talk more about science learned after the planet flybys. There were plenty of unknowns regarding the heliopause and the readings before and after crossing it[0]. The readings showed it wasn't just a fade to black kind of experience, and proved to be quiet a bit of activity going on there.

[0]https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/voyager-1-2-discovers-evidence...

zenmac

4 months ago

1 reply

Like this: https://www.iflscience.com/nasas-voyager-spacecraft-found-a-...

There apparently are hot plasma at edge of our solar system.

iszomer

4 months ago

Or the exhaust plume of a cloaked Klingon wessel.

MattSayar

4 months ago

1 reply

The power from a digital watch is billions of times more powerful than the signal we get from Voyager 1. It blows my mind that we're still able to sense it.

https://public.nrao.edu/ask/how-strong-is-the-signal-from-th...

TriangleEdge

4 months ago

1 reply

From a quick search: Voyager 1 is 25B km from earth and runs on 240 watts of power.

I'm no physicist, but I don't understand how a signal is detectable from that far. Also, am very impressed that voyager can aim at earth from that far away too.

317070

4 months ago

3 replies

The antenna has a beam width of 0.3°. So it only needs to aim that accurately in the general direction of earth. In general, antennas don't need to aim more or less accurately as they get closer or further away, it is only in function of their beam width.

I'm pretty sure, at that distance, it doesn't even matter anymore whether it is pointing at earth, the moon or the sun.

busymom0

4 months ago

2 replies

Can you provide some details on how we on earth are able to pick up such a signal amongst all the noise?

ahazred8ta

4 months ago

According to https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240604-voyager-1-photons-... they have a really big 70m dish which collects about 60 RF photons per second per square meter.

dylan604

4 months ago

The transcript from this podcast has some answers:

https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/invisible-network/bonus-dsn-yo...

stogot

4 months ago

1 reply

How does it locate earth to .3 accuracy while they’re both moving ?

317070

4 months ago

Voyager is so far away that from its perspective, earth isn't moving. There is also no force acting on voyager. So practically speaking, compared to the distance between them and the 0.3° beam width, both are hanging pretty still.

It does have an AACS system, which is tracking the sun and a bright star (Canopus) to orient itself earlier in the mission.

A quick search indicates it is still doing about 1 puff per hour to keep pointing the right way. The biggest problem seems to be that the lines for those puffs are clogging.

wkat4242

4 months ago

2 replies

0.3 degrees is pretty narrow :) I would not consider that "in the general direction".

dylan604

4 months ago

1 reply

.3° at 25B km is still a pretty large distance. Some random calculator online says that would be 1.3090e+8 kilometers or 130,900,000km. The earth-moon distance is roughly 240,000km. 1AU ~= 149,597,900 So .3° is just under 1AU, and essentially to cosmological scales .3° = 1AU. And it's only getting bigger as it continues to get further away. So essentially, just point at the sun and it'll hit earth

pipe01

4 months ago

1 reply

Of course, the sun will amplify the radio waves!

dylan604

4 months ago

1 reply

What the huh? That's not even funny if I tilt my head sideways and squint at it.

wkat4242

4 months ago

1 reply

You didn't watch the three body problem, I gather :)

pipe01

4 months ago

I'm glad someone got it :)

317070

4 months ago

The apparent size of the moon is 0.5 degrees. So 0.3 degrees is not _that_ narrow. You can point your finger at the moon.

ck2

4 months ago

1 reply

I don't think it passed the "light day" marker yet but close?

centuries from now we'll launch a drone that will pass by it in 50 days

then many more centuries someday in 50 minutes

staplung

4 months ago

1 reply

No no. In 2287 it will be destroyed by the Klingons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kscm2_RCcA&t=50s

EDIT: n/m. The famous plaque is borne by Pioneers 10 and 11. Not Voyager.

nyc_data_geek1

4 months ago

1 reply

Slow your roll, first we have to get through the Bell Riots, the Irish Reunification and the Eugenics Wars.

5555624

4 months ago

> the Eugenics Wars.

May only be another Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad away...

nashashmi

4 months ago

1 reply

> One of the Voyager scientists, Dr Garry Hunt, told The Register that the idea of doing a Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune mission had never really gone away, and engineers fueled the spacecraft fully expecting to be granted an extension.

> "We knew that if you filled up to brimming point the spacecraft with all the fuel it ever needed, it'd be OK," recalled Hunt. "We did. But we never told anybody."

The mission was supposed to only do two planets even though it was known to be the only opportunity to do 4 planets in one launch. But the new Nixon Administration was not excited by a rapidly changing field of science. So the NASA administrators proposed limiting it two planets. In the next administration, they were like OK keep exploring. And sure enough the launch went on to explore four planets.

treyfitty

4 months ago

2 replies

I’ve been thinking a lot about a similar concept, but orthogonal application of that concept: when immediate/short-term incentives are not there, how do you reward workers in the trenches (scientists and engineers in this case) to push forward and make the best decision for science, even if it’s not the best decision for the business/entity?

dylan604

4 months ago

1 reply

Isn't that kind of the default position for these types of builds? Nobody wants to be the team that built a thing that died on day 101 when the mission was designed for 100 days. Everyone wants the science to stop not because the platform stopped working but because bean counters shut it down. Everyone wants to be the team that built Curiosity long outliving its mission duration while continuing to do science. Otherwise, the bids will go to the teams that build Voyagers or Curiosity and never come to the team that builds systems that last exactly mission duration

euroderf

4 months ago

> Nobody wants to be the team that built a thing that died on day 101 when the mission was designed for 100 days

Maybe nobody in the science world. But in the commercial world, it's the requirement so it's not a bug it's a feature.

justinrubek

4 months ago

Where does the "best decision for the business" come into play here? It's not the best decision just because the top level leadership decided it.

Razengan

4 months ago

1 reply

Some questions I've had since forever:

1. Would our current technology be able to detect life on EARTH ITSELF from "just" as far as Pluto?

2. If an alien probe was sending pings towards Earth, deliberately or not, from as far away as Voyager, would we be able to, detect of course, but notice it?

justin66

4 months ago

Regarding 1, yes, we think we can identify based on their atmosphere's composition and temperature habitable planets orbiting other stars, so the distance from Pluto to Earth is easy, and one could certainly identify Earth's radio broadcasts and so on from the distance of Pluto with the right antenna.

Regarding 2, depends entirely on the pings. Their doing it deliberately would certainly increase the odds. :)

LABerthier

4 months ago

Are there any recs for books on the history/science of these space programs? Akin to The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes?

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