Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Science Data(blogs.nasa.gov)
blogs.nasa.gov
Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Science Data
https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/05/22/voyager-1-resumes-sending-science-data-from-two-instruments/
52 comments
> Are Voyager 1 & 2 the greatdst scientific achievement of the human race? I think it's an easy argument to make.
I can't really agree. Voyager 1 & 2 have been extraordinarily successful machines but that's aided by the simplicity of their mission and their design. The core scientific purpose of the missions (visit and survey the outer planets) has been repeated many times over by other craft (Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini–Huygens, New Horizons, Juno) with greatly improved instruments.
Compare Voyager to the Large Hadron Collider, the Manhattan Project, sequencing the genome, or even the Opportunity rover. All of these projects were successful despite being massively more complex undertakings.
It's comforting to know that the human race will leave a trace beyond the gravity well of our own star, but hurling a chunk of metal away from the sun is not an inherently great achievement.
I can't really agree. Voyager 1 & 2 have been extraordinarily successful machines but that's aided by the simplicity of their mission and their design. The core scientific purpose of the missions (visit and survey the outer planets) has been repeated many times over by other craft (Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini–Huygens, New Horizons, Juno) with greatly improved instruments.
Compare Voyager to the Large Hadron Collider, the Manhattan Project, sequencing the genome, or even the Opportunity rover. All of these projects were successful despite being massively more complex undertakings.
It's comforting to know that the human race will leave a trace beyond the gravity well of our own star, but hurling a chunk of metal away from the sun is not an inherently great achievement.
Does simplicity in their design really detract from the feat of their accomplishments? There’s a tendency to gravitate towards expensive big budget missions. Is success measured by the biggest budget or the complexity of the problem? The deserving accomplishments here are the length of time and distance traveled while still returning useful scientific data that has never been done before and may not be done again for some time.
> Is success measured by the biggest budget or the complexity of the problem?
Certainly not by the budget, spending money isn't hard -- but by success in the face of complexity, yes, absolutely.
Certainly not by the budget, spending money isn't hard -- but by success in the face of complexity, yes, absolutely.
How is success tied to a budget or complexity? Success doesn't care how hard/easy it was. It just means it was able to do the thing it was made for. If the task was to be able to write in space, a pencil would be just as successful as a newly developed pen that writes in 0g.
Until graphite dust shorts the emergency hatch release switch. I do agree though that making a sensor and datalink that lasts half a century outside the magnetosphere and can even get updates over that time is extremely impressive and might not be replicable with today's mindset.
I think complexity should be seen in proportion to the challenge at the time. Yes, the main feat has been repeated - later. For their time, the Voyager probes are state of the art devices, and their design has clearly proven durable and forward-thinking. (Not an entirely empty opinion, either - a couple of months ago I went on a bender and read journal write-ups of bugs they fixed over time, etc.)
Sure, with this line of thinking perhaps you'd have to compare them more with the Pyramids or Antikythera-type devices, and I think I'd be comfortable with that.
Sure, with this line of thinking perhaps you'd have to compare them more with the Pyramids or Antikythera-type devices, and I think I'd be comfortable with that.
> but that's aided by the simplicity of their mission and their design.
Simplicity is a property of good engineering, especially where reliability and longevity is concerned. Weighing the achievement of a project by it's complexity alone ignores the wisdom of the process that arrived at that solution.
Simplicity is a property of good engineering, especially where reliability and longevity is concerned. Weighing the achievement of a project by it's complexity alone ignores the wisdom of the process that arrived at that solution.
I'm not going to argue about the many other fantastic achievements. How about figuring out the atom, the components of that, then the subcomponents of electrons, etc. That's pretty amazing, figuring out electromagnetism in general, then using all those things together. Figuring out evolution and how it basically worked, well before we could use all the other discoveries to figure out the actual mechanism of genes.
That this hurling chunk of metal still communicates with us is mind-bogglingly impressive…
booi(3)
Well it's not just how much delta-V but all the gravity assists. The planets were in a "grand tour" alignment which happens every 175 years, so voyager would have an even longer lead. But doing something like that with an ion drive, on some of our more powerful rockets, and another hundred years of space tech, that thing would be amazing!
New Horizons was launched without being part of the alignment used for the grand tour, but it is moving much faster than Voyagers. The Parker Solar probe is moving even faster. These are just examples showing the gravity assists work very well. It would be interesting to see how long it took Parker to get up to speed, and then add that to the time to the Voyager distance and compare that to the nearly 50 years of Voyager as the baseline.
Nuclear pulse engines for 2151-2154!
Antibiotics: less than 100 years ago, you could die from a splinter in your finger. (I read an article in the past month or two with the title "My Grandmother Died of a Splinter", but damned if I can find it.)
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That's the one, thanks!
"The printing press" has got to be up there. No single invention caused a faster shift in the knowledge level of humanity.
It's tempting to suggest the latin alphabet, too. Thank the Phoenicians.
It's tempting to suggest the latin alphabet, too. Thank the Phoenicians.
While great inventions, neither of those are "scientific achievements" IMO. The silicon transistor on the other hand is a good example of an invention that came directly as a result of science.
Mechanical engineering and paper science are sciences too.
That we're had them for so long shouldn't diminish the fact that they have specific physical characteristics that need to be discovered and optimized.
That we're had them for so long shouldn't diminish the fact that they have specific physical characteristics that need to be discovered and optimized.
Smallpox vaccine is by far the most impactful scientific achievement.
Imagine something deadly enough that the first solution variolation killed 1-2% of those who took it and people still lined their kids to take such lifesaving medicine. Historically, Smallpox killed ~1/3 of the infected and the survivors were often blind and or horrifically scared and it was literally doing this for thousands of years. And yet it’s been almost completely forgotten about today.
Something like a billion lives saved and counting.
Imagine something deadly enough that the first solution variolation killed 1-2% of those who took it and people still lined their kids to take such lifesaving medicine. Historically, Smallpox killed ~1/3 of the infected and the survivors were often blind and or horrifically scared and it was literally doing this for thousands of years. And yet it’s been almost completely forgotten about today.
Something like a billion lives saved and counting.
Not just the vaccine – the complete _eradication_ of smallpox, too. One of humanity's finest moments.
The eradication was a major achievement, but not strictly a scientific achievement IMO.
I find it hard to imagine 300-500 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century. Yet we both eliminated it May 8, 1980 and had drastically reduced the number of cases well before that point. The last US case was in 1949 and the vaccine was being administered starting in 1796.
I find it hard to imagine 300-500 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century. Yet we both eliminated it May 8, 1980 and had drastically reduced the number of cases well before that point. The last US case was in 1949 and the vaccine was being administered starting in 1796.
I think that's pretty bold, but in my mind I have trouble ranking Apollo, Voyager, and Hubble. They are all just so darn impressive.
That is what I call “or” thinking. Sometime ther is a tendency to rank because like the other post we all naturally want to rank and compare. And even worst may have to say one is the best, in exclusion of others. Market, government, community, public goods, knowledge …. Down to these 3 you have mentioned.
Can all good? Have they have their different impact and their contribution? And can we have all, as we have them all already.
As said it is interesting to have you with us. All of you.
Can all good? Have they have their different impact and their contribution? And can we have all, as we have them all already.
As said it is interesting to have you with us. All of you.
This is the most obtuse comment I've read in quite some time.
It's up there, but for the greatest, also hard to beat vaccines and a couple others.
I’ve tooted this horn before, and I would love to toot this again: I’d love to see a Fabien Sanglard style breakdown of Voyager’s hardware - or even some sort of simulation. If we want to aspire to build things with as much longevity, it behooves us to know the details…
Right, I want to know what metals were used for the chassis and why, how many layers the PCBs have, if solder or crimping was used for connectors, the chip packages - ceramic? plastic? - what kind of ROM and RAM are used, the CPUs, what kind of shielding there is, what protection against cosmic rays is there (apparently not enough to prevent the recent issues), and then on the software, lets see some code walkthroughs, comparison to Apollo computer and operating systems, etc.
4k video of the innards of the engineering model still present in the lab at JPL (I think they have one of those, right?)
4k video of the innards of the engineering model still present in the lab at JPL (I think they have one of those, right?)
>4k video of the innards of the engineering model still present in the lab at JPL (I think they have one of those, right?)
They don't, this is why the recent fix took so long and was so risky, they were testing in production. They didn't make engineering models for that mission, the Voyagers were their own prototypes, which makes them more amazing.
They don't, this is why the recent fix took so long and was so risky, they were testing in production. They didn't make engineering models for that mission, the Voyagers were their own prototypes, which makes them more amazing.
Even more so seeing the recent indefinite delay of Starliner, again. The Voyager team(s) had 1 shot, similar to JWST, to get it right. They did it twice. All of these kinds of examples make it that much more insulting that Starliner is such rubish.
Makes the recent "saves" all the more amazing.
Voyager 1 is on borrowed time.
It’s expected that over the next decade it won’t have enough power for a single scientific instrument, and by 2036 it will be out of range of the deep space network.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/
It’s expected that over the next decade it won’t have enough power for a single scientific instrument, and by 2036 it will be out of range of the deep space network.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/
Which are all further accomplishments in my opinion.
In my life time, we've gone from having no imagery of the outer planets to what we have now. For people born after Hubble, this is probably hard to understand how fast we've moved in imaging our own solar system. With all of the data available now at the click of a button, it is sometimes even hard for me to remember that the Voyager crafts were the first images and were essentially "hot off the press" when I was seeing them in school.
Does anyone know if there's an article that explains the technical details of how they fixed the problem?
The NASA post a month ago described it [0] (780 points, 206 comments)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117599
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117599
Serious question: Are we learning anything new from this now? Or is this merely a novelty?
We're receiving real readings of the interstellar medium instead of just hypothesizing it's make up. So, I'd consider that new
You would assume that, yes, we will learn lots from the only spacecraft that is continually travelling further and further into unexplored space...
yes even lack of data is new data: The outer space behaves exactly as we predicted is still valuable information
and then there is always the faint hope of unexpected surprises
and then there is always the faint hope of unexpected surprises
I would not assume that. You could equally well assume that:
1) There are diminishing returns on investment, as we go further out. We'd need to go exponentially further out to get useful information.
2) The sensors on the craft are old, and modern methods can tell us more from far away then ancient sensors from deep space.
... and so on. I'm not going to argue about which assumption is best, because intuitions will differ. I was hoping to get a concrete answer from someone who might know rather than was speculating.
Ergo, the question.
I was hoping for an answer of the form "Nope. It's not worth throwing it away, but it's pretty obsolete now." or "Yup. We recently learned that ____" (fill in the blank).
1) There are diminishing returns on investment, as we go further out. We'd need to go exponentially further out to get useful information.
2) The sensors on the craft are old, and modern methods can tell us more from far away then ancient sensors from deep space.
... and so on. I'm not going to argue about which assumption is best, because intuitions will differ. I was hoping to get a concrete answer from someone who might know rather than was speculating.
Ergo, the question.
I was hoping for an answer of the form "Nope. It's not worth throwing it away, but it's pretty obsolete now." or "Yup. We recently learned that ____" (fill in the blank).
Still wonder why we have emulator for lunar module but not voyager. It is important step to understand and if we send more again about remote operation like that until we can’t.
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I'm very impressed about figuring out this problem and working around it. It would take 50 years to repeat, because it would take so long to send another mission that far out (47 years, depending on how much delta-V we could give it), and the odds that it survives that long is low anyway. We are too poor, too involved in arguing about other stuff to come close. There are the interesting ideas to send tiny specs of space ships using lasers to another solar system.