So cold. So very cold.

I’m actually getting a little teary thinking about it. Both of them have been such troopers. Launched in 1977, and still dutifully sending back their data, they are now the most distant man-made objects in the universe.

It can’t be long before the power runs out, and they just go silent, and keep drifting outwards 🙁

I think NASA should go into the smartphone battery business.

The Voyager programme really is a little bit of awesomeness. It’s a testament to NASA over-engineering that it’s still going twenty-odd years later. I like to think that, in a couple of millennia maybe, it’ll crash-land on an inhabited alien planet and really put the willies up someone.

35 years 😉

The science that has come back from them has been amazing. And what’s so cool is that most of it was never dreamed of by the original designers. They just repurposed the various detectors and programs and said “What can we find out now”.

If anything deserves to be in a museum, it’s these, and yet they’re basically gone forever.

And there was me thinking, after years of patience, that we finally had a Star Trek thread on a friday afternoon.

Pfft. This stuff is way more interesting than any science fiction.

+1 for Voyager awesomeness.

They were conceived in the wake of post Apollo budget cuts using 1960s technology and they’re still out there, sending signals home. Remember that 285watts is about the same amount of energy as the average STWer expends pedalling a bike up hill or arguing the toss on the internet.

I rather hope they do wind up outliving humanity though.

Brian Cox was talking about them on Stargazing Live the other night. They’ve apparently disabled some of the on-board systems recently to eek out some extra life and now hope for them to to be able to carry on sending data back till 2025!

If anything deserves to be in a museum, it’s these,

Hehe, good luck getting ’em back… (-:

I just had a quick sniff round the web to see how far ahead their trajectory has been projected – Voyager1 will get within 1.6 light years of another star in around 40,000 years and Voyager 2 will get (relatively) close to Sirius in just under 300,000 years.

On that basis they should see humanity out by a fair bit.

Is it voyager(s) that have the gold plated “records” on board? Was talking about this with my daughter and had to explain what a record is and dug out an old LP for her to see. Then realised I haven’t had a working turntable for years so if voyager crash landed in my back garden tomorrow I wouldn’t be able to play the disc – good luck to any alien civilisation that may find it!

I dunno. The great thing about vinyl (or gold in this case) is that the pattern etched onto the surface is a direct, analog representation of a sound wave. It should be easy for any civilzation to work this out – they won’t have to go in worrying about compression and encoding techniques, making assumptions about what number base we use etc.

Plus, I think there are even some symbols that act as instructions as to where to look on the disk, and what it’s for. In fact, it’s very clever in its simplicity.

EDIT: Here you go

I’m sure that by the time an alien civillisation catches up with one of the Voyagers, they’ll have long since received recorded all of the top telly we’ve broadcast to the heavens.

But that’s not the point, they’re two very evocative messages in bottles.

Have y’all read Carl Sagan’s piece ‘The Pale Blue Dot’?

Stuff like that should make you feel small, insignificant and abandoned but instead it makes my heart soar. Why is that?

I’d like to think that in millenia to come, some post-human starship will catch up with the Voyagers, think about catching it and taking it home to a museum, but then just leave them to carry on. Maybe give them a wee recharge and a polish.

The Voyager programme really is a little bit of awesomeness

+2

This was talked about by Brian Cox on Starwatch, fascinating.

Stuff like that should make you feel small, insignificant and abandoned but instead it makes my heart soar. Why is that?

Because the universe is a pretty astonishing, complex, ever changing thing. Its cool.

I’m trying to find a quote by a famous guy about if the earth was an unchanging, flawless crystal, it would be so much less beautiful than what we’ve got.

@Northwind you’ve describeb a fair few of the various Star Trek series’ episodes there!

Its cool

My feeling is that there’s a bit more to it than that. Whilst ripping up some carpet in the last hour I’ve come up with 2 theories.

1. Thinking about the vastness and complexity of the universe taps into that part of us that responds to religion. We need something bigger than us. This is the basis of Scientific Pantheism.

2. If you’re going to be abandoned in the sense that there is no benevolent deity watching over us then you might as well be properly abandoned and what better way to achieve that than musing on the cold, empty vastness of space. In for a penny in for a pound eh?

That’s quite a long way away.

No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small.

A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dab of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least.

Now imagine if you can (and of course you can’t) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe.

I’m assuming of course that you wish to build an inflationary universe. If you’d prefer instead to build a more old-fashioned, standard Big Bang universe, you’ll need additional materials. In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is—every last mote and particle of matter between here and the edge of creation—and squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a singularity.

In either case, get ready for a really big bang. Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no where. When the universe begins to expand, it won’t be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.

It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no “around” around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there—whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.

And so, from nothing, our universe begins.

Bill Bryson.

portlyone – Member

@Northwind you’ve describeb a fair few of the various Star Trek series’ episodes there!

Heh, sounds like I might like this “Star Trek” which you speak of

the most distant man-made objects in the universe.

Aren’t they also the fastest? Seem to recall reading that Voyager 2 is now travelling at about 250,000km/h?

RANGE, VELOCITY AND ROUND TRIP LIGHT TIME AS OF THIS REPORT

Voyager 1
Voyager 2
Distance from the Sun (Km)
17,326,000,000
14,099,000,000
Distance from the Sun (Mi)
10,766,000,000
8,760,000,000
Distance from the Earth (Km)
17,429,000,000
14,221,000,000
Distance from the Earth (Mi)
10,830,000,000
8,837,000,000
Total Distance Traveled Since Launch (Km)
22,717,000,000
21,687,000,000
Total Distance Traveled Since Launch (Mi)
14,115,000,000
13,476,000,000
Velocity Relative to Sun (Km/sec)
17.060
15.469
Velocity Relative to Sun (Mi/hr)
38,161
34,603
Velocity Relative to Earth (Km/sec)
29.265
35.304
Velocity Relative to Earth (Mi/hr)
65,464
78,972
Round Trip Light Time (hh:mm:ss)
32:16:54
26:21:10

Thanks Dibbs – so if my maths is correct I make that over 127,000 km/h an hour, relative to earth.

Now imagine if you can (and of course you can’t)

Speak for yourself Bill.

I normally like Bill Bryson but I think he falls down here.

Thanks Dibbs – so if my maths is correct I make that over 127,000 km/h an hour, relative to earth.

An interesting thing is that sometimes when you look at the voyager figures the distance from the sun is increasing but the distance from the earth is decreasing.

I like to ask kids in my classes why that is. Someone always gets it right.