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Voyager surfs Solar System edge

Rockrae78

By Rockrae78
in The Astro Lounge

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Rockrae78

Rockrae78

Posted
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For anyone who is interested in Voyager's continuing journey, I thought that the following news story might be of some interest:

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-23075332

I can't help but still be amazed at both the achievements and the journey of these 2 probes: I'm not sure whether its because their creation took almost 2 decades to plan, or because they were launched in 1977 - the year before i was born, or because of the inclusion of the gold disc...

Whatever.... I wait with bated breathe for confirmation that they have entered interstellar space!

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AlexB67

AlexB67

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Thanks for posting, good story. Amazing to think of the computing power back in 70s, and by today's standards what limited info they can send to and fro as well, but the old hardware will not die. They don't make them like that anymore :)

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Stu

Stu

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Amongst the many amazing things about the Voyagers, the thing I find astounding is that we can still receive and understand the signals from them. The transmitter is only 20w apparently, and this paragraph shows how low the signal power is when received!

'The sensitivity of our deep-space tracking antennas located around the world is truly amazing. The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level.'

Amazing!

Stu

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ronl

ronl

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It's hard to imagine that sort of distance 18.5 billion km from earth,

and it takes 17 hours for data to travel back to the receiving network,

it really is mind blowing, I watched a documentary a couple of weeks

ago about the Voyager mission hope they repeat it as it was excellent.

Thank's for the post

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K3ny0n

K3ny0n

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It takes me roughly 20 minutes to travel to work which is about 7 mile away, which gives me a average speed of 18mph. Put that into context with Voyager 1's journey it would take me, errr, 72,748 thousand years to get to V 1's position it is at now.

It would take Voyager 0.51 seconds to complete my journey to work.

(Calculations courtesy of the BBC ;))

Rob.

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Rockrae78

Rockrae78

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I just hope it has enough fuel left to make it out of the solar system officially, maybe we can finally see what is really out there in interstellar space...

I watched a documentary on this that said they still have 5 systems running in order to send data back to us. There is approx 10 years of power left (as of 2012), but may last until 2025. NASA also said that they would have to continue to turn off certain systems to ensure that there would be enough power left to transmit data back to us.

Lets just hope that the 10-15 (supposedly a millionth of a billionth - my OH did the maths so this could be wrong!) watt of power that it is currently transmitting is enough to reach us once it has reached interstellar space!

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