• Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    2 years ago

    Instead of sending messages home in binary code, Voyager 1 is now just sending back alternating 1s and 0s. Dodd’s team has tried the usual tricks to reset things — with no luck.

    It looks like there’s a problem with the onboard computer that takes data and packages it up to send back home. All of this computer technology is primitive compared to, say, the key fob that unlocks your car, says Dodd.

    “The button you press to open the door of your car, that has more compute power than the Voyager spacecrafts do,” she says. “It’s remarkable that they keep flying, and that they’ve flown for 46-plus years.”

    Wow. I mean, yeah, but. Crazy.

  • DigitalTraveler42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    261·
    2 years ago

    It’s going to be like that Star Trek episode where they find Voyager and it’s evolved and achieved sentience.

    • Zron@lemmy.worldEnglish
      27·
      2 years ago

      Space travel is very expensive and NASA has a very small budget these days.

      Back during the space race, NASA could afford to launch multiple missions per year. Now they can barely afford to maintain existing missions and are lucky to launch a major missions every few years. Which is why they’ve moved to buying space on commercial missions, as it’s cheaper to only pay for a spot on a rocket/craft than to pay for the whole thing.

      NASA also has to justify its missions to congress. Sending rovers to mars and probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have actual scientific interest and can answer questions about the formation of the solar system, and the viability of life off of earth.

      Slingshotting something really fast sounds cool as fuck, but there’s not much data to be gathered there. We’ve also recently beaten the “fastest man made object” record with the Parker Solar Probe, as it’s currently whipping around the sun at ludicrous speeds while it collects data about the solar atmosphere and magnetic fields. It’s moving a lot faster than voyager ever did, as it needs an insane amount of speed to orbit so low to the sun. It’s actually much cheaper, fuel wise, to travel to Pluto than the sun.

      So why waste billions of dollars to fling something out into deep space? We have barely even seen all Of the celestial bodies in our own star system, and there’s not much to be learned about the empty vacuum beyond the sun. The only justifiable reason would be to send a probe to another star system entirely. But that probe alone would have to be the largest, most expensive space craft humanity has ever built. It would need to be able to power itself for centuries, have a communication system capable of sending data over interstellar distances, and likely need a way to autonomously harvest its own fuel, as there’s very little point in sending a probe screaming past Proxima Centauri and taking a few hazy pictures of planets as it goes. We’d want the probe to be able to stay in and explore the new star system, and the only way to do that is to have enough fuel to move around an entire system, or create more fuel as it goes. Something like that has never even been tried before, and the risk is high when you won’t know if it worked or not for a few hundred years.

      • evranch@lemmy.caEnglish
        6·
        2 years ago

        I believe there was a case made to chuck something out perpendicular-ish to the ecliptic to see what shape the heliopause and solar wind take out there, what gases are kicking around etc. Maybe check out one of the high inclination objects kicking around out there as they tend to be odd ones. Almost all exploration has been done in-plane for obvious reasons.

        Commercial launch providers have made launching everything way cheaper, so I can see an agency doing this one someday even if it has to take a pile of gravity assists from the sun. As a bonus you also get a new Voyager traveling in a new direction.

        I also can see a lot of people being confused as to why it couldn’t take pictures of the solar system from up there that look like the textbooks… Possibly creating a whole new generation of flat-earth-esque conspiracies lol

        • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
          9·
          2 years ago

          Another important factor with the Voyager probes is that they got their solar escape velocity with the help of a very fortunate alignment of the outer planets that only happens once every 176 years. It was much cheaper to fling something out that far under those conditions, and we won’t see them again until 2153.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      The planets needed to be in a certain alignment for the Voyager launches to work out like they did. The slingshot only works in one direction (if you go backwards, you lose momentum). Maybe we haven’t seen another such alignment since, or didn’t have a mission ready to launch if we did.

  • northendtrooper@lemmy.caEnglish
    11·
    2 years ago

    Crazy that after all this time we can still communicate with Voyager 1. Even though it is babbling back now.

  • Pretzilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    Geek out question: is radiation much of a factor in degradation given:

    • It’s moving further away from the Sun
    • It’s traveling down solar wind so the total exposure is less than something in solar orbit

    And how damaging is background cosmic radiation compared to our Sun’s?

    Fun to ponder