[HN Gopher] 'Voyager on steroids.' Mission would probe region be...
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'Voyager on steroids.' Mission would probe region beyond our Solar
System
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 167 points
Date : 2022-07-29 10:28 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| [deleted]
| kregasaurusrex wrote:
| What sort of instrumentation would be onboard? The last mission
| destined to leave our solar system was New Horizons[0] and its
| equipment was designed in the early/mid-2000s with the express
| goal of imaging the outer planets. Both Voyager probes have some
| instrumentation still sending data back to Earth[1] as well,
| though current projections estimate we may only be receiving data
| from them for until the end of the decade. Sending a probe out
| that only improves on a few areas such as ionized plasma
| detection and gas chromatography to determine what elements are
| in the heliosphere seem to arbitrary improvements on a short
| timeframe; but these are systems designed with a 50+ year
| lifespan. The 500 page report published by NASA[2] for a future
| insterstellar probe is a bit much for a layperson to understand,
| but such a program can also be done over a longer timeframe to
| justify its continued funding.
|
| It's been over 40 years since we last launched a probe with the
| express purpose of exploring interstellar space, and technology
| has improved to the point of enabling these missions to be multi-
| generational by planning further launches to create a networked
| constellation. When I was a kid seeing the 'Pale Blue Dot' image
| in the book Cosmos, it gave a perspective of looking at
| humanity's achievements on a cosmic timescale instead rather than
| only the human timescale, and I think setting long-term goals of
| exploring our universe are held by everyone regardless of
| nationality. Delivering tangible results to the public like
| JWST's fantastic images and the 'Pale Blue Dot' photo are
| arguably just as important as the scientific data gathered.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Science_payload
|
| [1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
|
| [2] https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Interstellar-Probe-
| MCR....
| mchusma wrote:
| I would hope we actively plan for much cheaper launches with
| Starship coming online. It seems like we can do many more
| projects, at lower cost and higher risk than before, because
| launch costs are low.
|
| Instead of $1-$10B projects focus on things <$100M. Or at least
| focus on platforms to enable cheap probes without so much
| customization. It should be possible to pull off things like this
| soon without even government funding. Just buy a stock probe with
| some modifications and launch it cheaply in a direction you want.
| simonh wrote:
| The problem with that is the launch costs are a small fraction
| of the total cost of these big missions. A launch on an Ariane
| 5 costs $177m, that's a small slice of the total $10bn cost of
| the JWST. Starship will really shine for cheap heavy payloads.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| A huge portion of the JWST cost was specially designing it to
| fold and unfold in a certain way due to the size of the
| rocket and the size of the spacecraft. First, smaller probes
| wouldn't have that restraint, and second, SpaceX's upcoming
| bigger launch vehicle won't have that restraint for JWST-
| sized craft.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > Instead of $1-$10B projects focus on things <$100M
|
| The entire mission budget for ISRO's _Mars Orbiter Mission_ /
| _Mangalyaan_ probe was a mere US$74 million. Modi famously
| boasted that this was cheaper than the budget of the Hollywood
| film, _Gravity_ (2014).
|
| There are countries in the world besides the US which can
| reliably and _very_ cheaply place satellites in orbit. India
| has been a launch provider for many other countries in the
| region (Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, etc) which do
| not have their own launch capability, and their PSLV /GSLV
| rockets are workhorses, having launched hundreds of satellites
| for customers worldwide.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Probes could be mass produced and then shipped to space once a
| year with a Starship launch. A thousand probes per year would
| be great. Most of them could use the same gravity assist routes
| and then take off from there in slightly different angles.
| Space is huge.
|
| Any billionaire looking for being remembered for millennia?
| Lev1a wrote:
| Maybe even some strategically placed [1] satellites as
| communication relays?
|
| [1]: Maybe on lagrange points?
| exo762 wrote:
| > I would hope we actively plan for much cheaper launches with
| Starship coming online.
|
| (disclaimer: I'm a SpaceX fan) Savings that was supposed to be
| generated by rocket reuse with Falcon 9 haven't trickled down
| to clients, if I understand situation correctly. What makes
| everyone think that Starship will bring cheap kg-to-orbit era?
| LooseMarmoset wrote:
| What are you talking about? Do you have any idea how much
| money SpaceX has saved Nasa?
|
| https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/05/the-numbers-dont-
| li...
|
| Program | Cargo Dragon | Commercial crew | Constellation
|
| Type | Private, fixed-price | Private, fixed-price |
| Government, cost-plus
|
| NASA costs | $396 million | $5 billion | $34.5 billion
| mdorazio wrote:
| I think you're misinformed.
| https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/05/how-much-
| cheaper-a...
| tusslewake wrote:
| I found this aside on one of the graphics rather surprising:
|
| > Sometime in the next 2000 years, the Sun is expected to leave a
| local cloud of gas and dust. After that, it may enter the G
| cloud. If it is denser, it would squash the protective magnetic
| bubble of the heliosphere, potentially exposing the Solar System
| to a barrage of cosmic rays.
|
| Mostly surprised that I hadn't heard more about this. 2000 years
| is practically tomorrow in cosmological time!
|
| A little more here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Interstellar_Cloud
| jorgesborges wrote:
| Whoa.
|
| I'm assuming our solar system has moved through various
| interstellar mediums throughout history, and from reading above
| it sounds non-trivial. Is it? Do we know anything about how
| this may have influenced the development of Earth?
|
| Learning this gives me a very "oh my god we're hurtling through
| space!" feeing that I haven't felt in a long time.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Thanks for bringing this to our attention. "The G-Cloud
| contains the stars Alpha Centauri (a triple star system that
| includes Proxima Centauri) and Altair (and possibly others)"
| [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-Cloud
| nuccy wrote:
| Due to stochastic nature of interstellar magnetic fields,
| cosmic rays, trajectory of which are bent by those, are
| practically observed from all directions, so even if solar
| system distorts its own magnetic field this will have almost no
| effect on vosmic rays flux. Magnetic field is not a shield, for
| the charged particles it is rather a lens which converges or
| diverges their trajectories.
| crawshaw wrote:
| There is a detailed Mission Concept Report PDF linked on the
| probe's website: https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu. It looks
| like they're targeting being functional at 400 AU, though it will
| take 50 years to get there.
|
| Fun networking measurement: they describe the antenna bandwidth
| as ~150 Mbit/week at 400 AU.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I think we should be trying to do this kind of thing, but...
|
| it does make you wonder whether in 30 years, we'll have the
| infrastructure (fusion, much larger LEO refueling capacity,
| etc) to put it there in 10 years instead.
| simonh wrote:
| 5x faster is a spectacular improvement, the launch systems we
| have today are not much more capable than the ones we had 30
| years ago. I don't see any reason they will be all that much
| better again in 30 years, even with something like Starship.
|
| The problem is the rocket equation is brutal. The more
| propulsion system you add to increase the speed, the more of
| it you have to accelerate up to the original speed before you
| start getting any improvement. We do have some nice advances
| like hall thrusters, but they don't actually help much for
| heavy duty payloads like this, and there are no huge multi-
| order of magnitude engine efficiency breakthroughs on the
| horizon.
| feoren wrote:
| Are these probes micro-accelerating the whole time with ion
| engines? You'd need 4 times the average velocity to cover the
| same distance*, which means 8 times the final velocity, which
| means accelerating from 0 to 8 over 10 years instead of 0 to
| 1 over 40 years. That means 32x more acceleration over the
| whole period. No: we won't have that technology in 30 years,
| nor in 100 years.
|
| Maybe, maybe, maybe if you were able to refuel in orbit and
| strapped a ginormous multi-stage chemical rocket onto the
| thing in orbit. Maybe. But we're not going to be doing that
| in 30 years either.
|
| * Higher velocities can mean shorter distances though,
| because your trajectory is less warped by the curvature of
| space. The biggest time saver would be avoiding time-
| consuming gravity assists, if there are any (I assume there
| are, but I didn't download the 500-page PDF).
| arriu wrote:
| Thanks for this. When was the document published? It's nearly
| 500 pages!
| DrBazza wrote:
| Not sure I like the "Voyager on steroids" - I strongly associate
| Voyager with the Grand Tour of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and
| Neptune. Seeing those pictures come back when I was a child made
| me do astrophysics at university. "Mission would probe the region
| beyond our Solar system" is fine though.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Yep! The only people I've ever known who were (literally) "on
| steroids" were uniformly and without exception psychopathic
| jerks. It's a stupid epithet, frequently used to describe the
| _exact opposite_ of the sentiment it tries so pathetically to
| convey. Phrase ought to be retired.
|
| More on topic: I'd _love_ to see a mission or more focussed on
| exploring interstellar regions. I 'll bet there's a whole lot
| more we'll learn there, even though I'll be long dead by the
| time it rolls around.
| mlindner wrote:
| Steroids are used for a lot of medically important uses. I
| used steroidal inhalers to heal my throat/lungs after a flu-
| like something several years ago. Worked wonders.
| DrBazza wrote:
| > I'd love to see a mission or more focussed on exploring
| interstellar regions.
|
| Yes. I did like the article, eventually, buried in the
| details, was "twice the speed of Voyager", and "can't gravity
| assist past the Sun, no real saving and might go wrong".
| mc32 wrote:
| Heh it was that as "Voyager on Asteroids" I was intrigued!
|
| But this sounds even more interesting getting modern instruments
| aboard a new generation of voyagers to probe the heliosphere and
| beyond with better instruments.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Slight OT, but I wish "on steroids" wasn't used in serious
| publications to refer to improvements and overall positive
| evolutions. I know it's colloquially accepted, but we also
| wouldn't express someone being very focused as "being on
| Adderall", or a very creative idea as being "on shrooms" in a
| scientific publication.
| bseidensticker wrote:
| IDK seems fine to me.
|
| > we also wouldn't express someone being very focused as "being
| on Adderall", or a very creative idea as being "on shrooms" in
| a scientific publication.
|
| We don't because nobody does, and many people might not know
| what you mean.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| For anyone not familiar with the Voyager missions I highly
| recommend the 2017 documentary _The Farthest_
| jmyeet wrote:
| While I'm all for more of these space missions, my personal #1
| priority is return missions to Uranus and Neptune in the next
| window for favorable planetary alignment to get there in
| reasonable time. That's the same window as this (mid-2030s). It
| would mean such probes wouldn't reach their targets until the
| mid-2040s.
|
| Time is actually rapidly running out to launch in this window
| because such a mission can easily take a decade to plan, design
| and build. Missions to Mars might be a few hundred million but
| Cassini or Juno style missions are in the billions. Getting such
| a mission funded is a far more onerous task. It's generally a
| flagship joint mission for ESA and NASA and then adds all the
| politics of that (eg using Ariana launch vehicles to mollify
| Europeans).
|
| We've only been to the ice giants once and it was the Voyager
| missions. I hope we go again in my lifetime.
| liotier wrote:
| > using Ariana launch vehicles to mollify Europeans)
|
| "Ariane". I would rather have you mollify us with proper
| spelling.
| SicSemperUranus wrote:
| "return to Uranus" sounds like a SpaceX kind of mission!
| ck2 wrote:
| Whatever happened to those microprobes at like 10% speed of
| light? (or was it 50%)
| vkou wrote:
| The same thing that happened to Khalessi (played by Emilia
| Clarke) and her dragons. Which is to say, nothing happened to
| them at all, because they are all fictional.
| whatrocks wrote:
| I had a weird dream about a secret Voyager probe recently, the
| Voyager III, and wrote a short story about it, if anyone's
| interested: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/
| It's fairly "Contact" by Carl Sagan inspired.
| everyone wrote:
| The voyager mission was originally planned to be with a no-
| expense-spared Cadillac of a spacecraft, however they ended up
| going with the bargain bin absolute cheapest possible option.
| spicyusername wrote:
| One of the best knock-on effects of these kinds of missions is
| that they provide the rare chance for news outlets to feel like
| they can report on something optimistic, hopeful, and positive
| for a change.
|
| Something so desperately needed.
| Rebirth-0822 wrote:
| One can add "future oriented" to that. Seems like the only
| visions for the future in vogue these days involve harming crap
| tons of people for the sake of past imagery.
| jdsully wrote:
| There's a lot of good stuff to report on: Ozone Healing
|
| Acid Rain is not really a thing anymore
|
| There is 2.24 million more square kilometers of forestland than
| 35 years ago
|
| Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty and the
| trend is accelerating
|
| Renewable energy has finally become cost effective
|
| By most metrics we're better off than the 90s except for
| people's sentiment.
| hinkley wrote:
| GenZ: Your parents are fucked up because they were kids in
| the 1980's. Today we worry about fucking up the environment
| so bad that all humans and higher mammals die out. In 1985 we
| were worried about sterilizing the entire planet with nuclear
| fallout.
|
| If you think things are dire now, search Spotify for 70's,
| 80's, and 90's songs about how the world was going to end.
| Maybe every crisis is a little worse than the last, but they
| aren't out of the blue transitions from an idyllic age.
| That's just a bunch of pastoralism from older people who have
| suppressed a bunch of memories (memories that still affect
| their behavior in various situations).
|
| Worrying is a rite of passage. You don't steward something
| until you realize it needs stewardship, and that it's soon
| going to be your turn to contribute. That epiphany can be
| traumatizing.
| mhh__ wrote:
| One probably coincidental thing is that the move to
| margarine and other more "sustainable" foods happened
| roughly in the same period as books and thoughts like "the
| limits to growth" came about.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Hey bud, didn't we just talk about not being grim?
|
| Please sit down on this melted glacier and have a Coca-Cola
| (tm) with the drowning polar bears. As Santa once said,
| "Life tastes good!"
| hinkley wrote:
| In the immortal words of Ron Finley:
| Plant some shit.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| "There is 2.24 million more square kilometers of forestland
| than 35 years ago"
|
| How can this be true when our rate of deforestation is
| accelerating? The state of deforestation is nothing to
| celebrate, it's horrific as far as I understand it.
|
| "By most metrics we're better off than the 90's"
|
| Except for economic metrics and people's material well
| being??
|
| This sounds like Steven Pinker stuff.
| googlryas wrote:
| > How can this be true when our rate of deforestation is
| accelerating
|
| Where are you getting this from?
|
| In any case, tropical deforestation may be accelerating,
| but perhaps temperate reforestation is accelerating even
| faster.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Well it seems we were both wrong.
|
| According to this link the rate of deforestation is
| decreasing. But still, they say there is less forest now
| than there was in 1990.
|
| "Since 1990, it is estimated that 420 million hectares of
| forest have been lost through conversion to other land
| uses, although the rate of deforestation has decreased
| over the past three decades. Between 2015 and 2020, the
| rate of deforestation was estimated at 10 million
| hectares per year, down from 16 million hectares per year
| in the 1990s. The area of primary forest worldwide has
| decreased by over 80 million hectares since 1990."
|
| https://www.fao.org/state-of-forests/en/
| hinkley wrote:
| Based on our current understanding of fungally dominated
| soils, restoring temperate forests will do far more per
| acre for atmospheric carbon levels than restoring the
| same acreage of tropical rainforest.
|
| Which we also need to do soon because the longer you
| wait, the wider the band around the Tropics where
| fungally dominated ecosystems cannot thrive.
|
| Not that we shouldn't have people working to slow
| tropical deforestation, but we can't and shouldn't put
| all our eggs in that basket.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Replying to myself since I can no longer edit, but with so
| many questions I finally dug up the author who I was trying
| to think of as a source to go against this kind of rosy
| picture of the status quo. It's Jason Hickel and he has
| written a critique of Steven Pinker's optimism.
|
| https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-
| global-...
|
| Where Pinker looks at some arbitrarily defined numbers to
| decide that extreme poverty has gone down, and capitalism
| is the reason, Hickel criticizes those poverty numbers for
| being artificially low due to a poor selection of the
| poverty line, and points out that most of the reduction in
| poverty happened in china, where the system Steven Pinker
| argues for is not being used.
|
| Finally anyone who is paying attention to the economics of
| people in just the USA for example must know that real
| wages in the USA have been stagnant for the average person
| since 1980, while living costs continue to rise. So the
| average person is NOT better off than they were in the
| 1990's, they are actually worse off.
|
| People like Bill Gates LOVE Steve Pinker because Pinker
| provides an excuse to say the status quo is fine and
| everything is great. But in reality time is not a linear
| path towards nirvana, and real people are currently stuck
| working Uber and Door Dash to try to survive while in the
| 1990's they could have had a steady job. I'm struck by this
| notion that in the 1990's the janitorial staff at Apple
| were Apple employees who got treated with respect, but now
| they are contractors working for a company Apple has hired.
| So things are great for the engineers at Apple but in the
| 90's success for those people also meant success for the
| janitors. But we have managed to break that off so those
| people no longer get to see the gains that others see. We
| are stratifying the world more.
|
| Things are not better for the average janitor.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| You don't strike me as convinable by facts, but for those
| who are:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Actually I just didn't share data because I forgot the
| name of the author who has best spoken to this critique,
| but I dug him up and it's Jason Hickel. He responded
| directly to Steven Pinker's rosy optimism about the
| world, in particular pointing out that our bar for what
| is extreme poverty is a made up number that is too low.
| If you use a more reasonable measure for extreme poverty,
| the situation looks a little different. It has improved
| in some areas and expanded in others. Notably, people
| like Pinker use their argument to say basically that
| capitalism is good. But Hickel points out that most of
| the gains were in China, where the economic system that
| led to all this growth was a very mixed system of
| capitalism combined with heavy state control. So under no
| circumstances can we conclude that free market capitalism
| is the main driver of reductions in extreme poverty.
|
| https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-
| global-...
| goldenkey wrote:
| The only facts I will accept are Cat Facts provided in a
| court room operating under Bird Law.
| nightshift1 wrote:
| Indeed. The rich countries are gaining forestland but it is
| only because everything is imported now. Including the
| deforestation.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation
|
| Same thing for the acid rain.
|
| https://www.britannica.com/story/what-happened-to-acid-rain
| goldenkey wrote:
| 3rd world tears are much cheaper, and they also taste
| better, saltier. I can't go back to drinking the American
| stuff anymore.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The issue Is that for every single topic, there's a cadre of
| crazies who deny that it is true or that it was ever an issue
| or claim that it's made up or claim some conspiracy theory or
| yada yada.
|
| The refuse of the media to actually shoot those people down
| means if they can't actually report on anything.
|
| Climate and anti-pollution in particular.
| Bloating wrote:
| the news isn't about reporting facts
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >By most metrics we're better off than the 90s except for
| people's sentiment.
|
| And temperature
| worker_person wrote:
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Is your argument here that average global temperature is
| not in fact increasing?
| sp332 wrote:
| We have wide surface temperature coverage from satellites
| since the early 1980's. All global readings show a clear
| warming trend.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I think that this "Heartland Institute" cited may be a
| biased source.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > The Heartland Institute is an American conservative and
| libertarian public policy think tank known for its
| rejection of both the scientific consensus on climate
| change and the negative health impacts of smoking.
| Founded in 1984, it worked with tobacco company Philip
| Morris throughout the 1990s to attempt to discredit the
| health risks of secondhand smoke and lobby against
| smoking bans. Since the 2000s, the Heartland Institute
| has been a leading promoter of climate change denial.
|
| Utterly junk source.
| scohesc wrote:
| Maybe someone with more knowledge/experience can chime in here
| since I'm fairly ignorant of the Voyager program - was a bit
| before my time.
|
| From what I understand the voyager probe(s) did some pretty crazy
| gravity assists to launch themselves out of the solar system -
| flying close enough to different planets in our solar system to
| build up great speed.
|
| Could we not throw a giant solar sail onto a probe and send it
| out? I guess the acceleration would be smaller and smaller when
| you get further and further out with the sun being further away,
| but at least you'd still be gaining velocity, right?
| thechao wrote:
| This is directly addressed in the paper:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03005
| scohesc wrote:
| Thank you for mentioning this!
|
| I don't have the time and mental resources to browse through
| these research papers all the time but knowing that what I'm
| asking is actually in the paper, maybe I'll give it a browse.
|
| Thanks :)
| floxy wrote:
| If you like solar sails, you might like:
|
| https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?t=858
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