[HN Gopher] NASA Shuts Off Voyager Science Instrument
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NASA Shuts Off Voyager Science Instrument
Author : 01-_-
Score : 140 points
Date : 2025-03-06 17:14 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I hope & wonder that if some spaceship find this space object a
| thousand or a million years from now (a-la Star Trek), the
| captain will tell with a stern voice (ofc like Patrick Stewart's)
| to the Science Officer "calculate the trajectory of the object,
| and give the coordinates to the Helm. then engage with Warp 9. I
| will be in my quarters getting some tea".
|
| EDIT: I hope it's Jean-Luc and not The Borg!!
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It's spooky to know that it will outlive Earth and likely be
| the last remaining physical evidence that humans were ever
| here.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| Why do you think it's particularly likely that two tiny
| objects running out of power will not only outlive Earth, but
| also any future objects sent from Earth to do the same things
| they're doing now? Or are you betting on the lack of future
| space exploration probes and relatively quick destruction of
| the Earth?
| f001 wrote:
| If I were to guess it would be the latter. We seem to be
| heading for it rather quickly at least.
| misnome wrote:
| The chance of them hitting anything in the time it takes
| the sun to swallow the earth is probably tiny?
|
| As for more probes - getting more speed than these did
| efficiently is probably hard, let alone the fact that they
| don't generate personal profit probably stops them being
| politically viable for a while...
| hackeraccount wrote:
| I was just reading a book that touched on Ancient Rome.
| The author tried to convey the significance of the
| Council of Nicaea by comparing it to the furor over
| Global Warming.
|
| I only mention that to say that the motivations of people
| in the future will probably seem odd to us and it's
| possible ours may seem equally odd to them. Not odd in
| the sense that they are intellectually inscrutable but -
| like people getting excited over the matters theological
| - that they're emotionally inscrutable.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > getting more speed than these did efficiently is
| probably hard,
|
| A new probe wouldn't necessarily need to travel faster
| than these to not be on Earth when the sun dies.
|
| The idea of there being a minuscule chance the Voyager
| probes hit anything is fair, but even a third one of the
| exact same model launched in the exact same direction has
| just as much chance of surviving just as long, barring
| wild speculation that could easily go either way.
| floxy wrote:
| >getting more speed than these did efficiently is
| probably hard
|
| Here is one approach using solar sails that would get up
| to 22 AU/year (~6 times faster than Voyager 1):
|
| https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?si=Ol20sGMnsEMhRVf1&t=883
|
| ...and then further down in TRL: using laser pushed light
| sails to get over 10% of the speed of light:
|
| https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=
| /24...
| mystified5016 wrote:
| IIRC we've projected that there's nothing in their path for
| millions of years, as far as we can reasonably predict.
|
| Whether humans will still exist or our planet is a glowing
| radioactive waste by the time the voyagers encounter a new
| star is _not_ a given.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > It's spooky to know that it will outlive Earth and likely
| be the last remaining physical evidence that humans were ever
| here.
|
| Although eventually a rather obscure form of evidence as
| it'll gradually become a melted blob of constituent materials
| from cosmic rays.
| ars wrote:
| Actually that's pretty unlikely - Earth will last longer than
| Voyager. The Sun becoming a red giant is the risk for Earth.
| We're talking 5 billion years here.
|
| But the voyagers have interstellar particles and dust to
| contend with, 5 billion years of abrasion from particles will
| wear them away to nothing.
|
| On top of that they will eventually come near a random star
| which will eat them, or at least damage them. For example in
| 40,000 years they'll come pretty near some stars. In 5
| billion years? Lots of stars.
|
| Earth will easily outlive them.
| immibis wrote:
| "We determine that previous generations of earthlings believed
| spacecraft could be powered by lumps of lead. Silly
| earthlings."
| smolder wrote:
| Unfortunately the sort of exponential advance of technology we
| imagined through Star Trek seems to have been overoptimistic.
| If humans ever leave the solar system it'll be on something
| like a generational ship, or in some kind of
| freezedried/informational form where we're reconstituted _much_
| later at our destination.
| rob74 wrote:
| I assume you are aware of the plot of the first Star Trek movie
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur..
| .)? Picard was not involved however...
| ilamont wrote:
| Voyager 6!
| hackeraccount wrote:
| What would be found here in a thousand years much less a
| million?
|
| My attitude is that it's something similar to getting ready for
| the end of the world by putting money in a savings account. If
| the money (or gold under your bed, cans of beans in the
| basement or even a pistol in your nightstand) does any good
| then it's not the end of the world.
|
| If the universe is so crowded or so good at finding things like
| voyager that it's found in a meaningful (i.e. before humanity
| goes extinct or joins the godhead) time frame then we would
| have that encounter if voyager existed or not.
| HankB99 wrote:
| > What would be found here in a thousand years much less a
| million?
|
| Possibly an advanced civilization that says "No, not ours."
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| It might also be used by the Deceptions to record history in an
| attempt to prevent the Autobots from winning the war in
| Cybertron.
|
| (Assuming my hazy memories of Beast Wars are correct)
| outworlder wrote:
| > calculate the trajectory of the object
|
| Easier said than done. The Earth will be nowhere near where it
| is today. I assume such advanced civilization would be able to
| do the calculations, but it's going to be tricky. I hope they
| share with us their ways to solve the n-body problem.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43274184
| picafrost wrote:
| I highly recommend "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022), a
| documentary about the team maintaining these spacecraft as the
| end of their mission draws nearer. It adds a tremendous amount of
| context to articles like this.
|
| The engineering involved in making these spacecraft durable for
| as long as they have been is truly awe inspiring. As a software
| engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in
| fifty years. I wish it wasn't.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Trailer: https://itsquieterfilm.com/trailer
| ndiddy wrote:
| That documentary was fantastic. Another good resource is this
| paper from 2016 on what all the equipment/computing systems on
| Voyager do and what the team had done to keep the mission going
| as of that point.
| https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf
| procarch2019 wrote:
| As an OT systems architect I am totally floored. We design and
| plan for systems lifecycle on a ~20yr scale, with OT hardware
| (not the controls hardware, that's closer to 10-20) lifecycle
| much shorter (~5 yr). Obvious on Earth we can afford luxuries
| of adopting new things, which actually shortens a total system
| lifecycle since new tech drives new designs.
|
| I wish (and don't) I could work on something that had a
| dependency of "design it once because it's relatively
| inaccessible after its go live." I'll def check out the
| documentary.
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| Video games used to be like this. Once you built the "gold
| master" CD/DVD/cartridge/etc it was out of your hands. It was
| kinda nice to have a concrete end to the project [1].
| Nowadays, everything is on the 'net, you can send patches,
| dlc, etc and the notion of a game being "done" is murky.
|
| [1] There was, however, one game I worked on where they had
| to pull the boxes from stores (delivered, but not yet for
| sale) and swap out the disk in order to release a critical
| fix that was discovered too late. Fun times (:
| ge96 wrote:
| The error correction on the signal must be great for 15 billion
| miles+ distance
| rich_sasha wrote:
| When I saw the headline, I was briefly worried this is DOGE...
| sampton wrote:
| Beep twice to resign.
| chgs wrote:
| It didn't respond within 24 hours...
| JackFr wrote:
| "Ok Voyager, 5 things you did last week! You only have 3
| instruments? Boo-hoo. You're fired!"
| gblargg wrote:
| Same concept, to keep things operating.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Shhhhhh... seriously ... don't give the clowns ideas
| niwtsol wrote:
| Both voyagers have golden records on them - a copper disk that is
| gold-plated that has a bunch of images and messages from earth.
| Carl Sagan was the lead on picking what was on the disk. It shows
| some basic math, phoots, and has recordings of people saying
| hello from across the world in different languages-
| https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Reminds me of the opening to one of my favorite games of my
| childhood!
|
| https://youtu.be/dlBJaKSSOXU?t=31
| JackFr wrote:
| Love everything about Voyager, but some lazy editing in the
| article. It opens with them "cruising through interstellar space
| for more than 47 years" and then later mentions that they only
| reached interstellar space in 2012 and 2018. The project deserves
| better, even in a puff piece!
| vzaliva wrote:
| I wonder if they could use a time-sharing approach. Instead of
| permanently shutting down instruments, they could run different
| sets, with a maximum of three at a time.
| outworlder wrote:
| Take a day for them to send commands. If anything goes wrong
| and they use too much power, that's it.
| rglover wrote:
| It's mind blowing that engineering that took place almost 50
| years ago is still floating through space, giving us valuable
| data. It's depressing to realize that the style of engineering
| that accomplished such a feat is all but dead.
| bgirard wrote:
| Look up golden age fallacy. Different projects have different
| requirements. You're selectively remembering the pieces of
| software that survived 50 years and forgetting the ones that
| didn't. I'm sure some projects written today will survive 50
| years.
| me_me_me wrote:
| yeah... but there is a counterargument. we can't go back to
| the moon. We did, now we can't.
| Bjartr wrote:
| But that's incorrect, we can go back to the moon any time,
| there just hasn't been a strong enough incentive to really
| make the cost worth it for either science or commerce until
| recently.
| redeux wrote:
| We can land robots on Mars and a private company just
| landed a craft on the moon, but we can't go back?
| protocolture wrote:
| They cant rebuild Saturn V (well they can now they reverse
| engineered the engine) but they literally are going back,
| its just the most junkyard expensive nonsense in Artemis.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| [delayed]
| ilamont wrote:
| > It's depressing to realize that the style of engineering that
| accomplished such a feat is all but dead.
|
| The engineers behind the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on
| Mars and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter operating overhead may
| like to have a word with you.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Unfortunately, that word is probably going to be "Are you
| hiring?"
| amelius wrote:
| Curious how many people were still working full-time on that
| mission.
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