[Newsbot]

Title: Voyager near Solar System's edge
Category: Science
Posted By: Hyack
Date: 2010-12-13 22:26:27
Canadian

[Hyack]

Scape's link might not work, but this one from yesterday does....

[Brenda]

$1:

Voyager 1 was launched on 5 September 1977, and its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2, on 20 August 1977.

So I was thinking... typo?
But no:

$1:

Although launched first, Voyager 2 was put on a slower path

And then this...

$1:

and is currently just over 14bn km from Earth.

JUST??
Like it is nothing!

Stories like this are always humbling

[Brenda]

Hyack Hyack:

Scape's link might not work, but this one from yestaerday does....

Thanks Hyack

[Curtman]

Destroy it now, before it's too late..

[DrCaleb]

Brenda Brenda:

Stories like this are always humbling

Isn't it an amazing time to be alive?!?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

Carl Sagan Carl Sagan:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

[Scape]

And if you look closer to that blue dot you'll see facebook has control over it:

[CDN_PATRIOT]

I had thought for some time that Voyager 1 has already accomplished this passage into interstellar space, and that Voyager 2 wasn't far behind. I swore I read somewhere earlier this year that V1 was passing into the Oort could at that time.

Either way, this is beyond cool. Interstellar space here we come!

-J.

[Khar]

Brenda Brenda:

$1:

and is currently just over 14bn km from Earth.

JUST??
Like it is nothing!

Stories like this are always humbling

Indeed, only 41.486 trillion kilometers to go until it reaches the closest solar system to our star! Or a little over 277,500 AU (1 AU is the average distance from the sun to Earth). The soonest "flyby" of one of our currently active probes to a system will take approximately 40,000 years, if I remember correctly, with Voyager 1 and a few light-years of the constellation Camelopardalis (which is near our "Northern Star," Polaris).

I'm actually following two projects right now, TSSM and IBEX. TSSM is besides the topic of this thread, but IBEX is using a probe called New Horizons, which is set to leave the solar system sometime in 2029. It will never overtake either of the Voyager probes but will eventually overtake both of the Pioneer probes, neither of which have encountered the heliopause (and both of which are out of contact with us anyways) either. Both Voyager probes will encounter it, hopefully, before the missions likely ends in the early to potentially mid 2020s.

Proposed probes which would go outside of the solar system have not been approved as of yet, as far as I know. Many of these would have potentially many times the speed that Voyager 1 currently has, which is over 61 thousand kilometers per hour, 17 kilometers per second, or 3.6 AU a year (all approx. values). Some of these included plans for ion engine technology support by nuclear energy production.

I'm, uh, a bit of a space dork. For the record, the Oort cloud is not near where we would hope the edge of our solar system would be, since it's estimated to be 50,000 AU away from us (science fiction has made it sound closer than it is -- if we have two balls, one the sun and one the Earth, a meter away, or about three feet, you'd have to drive 50 kilometers to get to the balls representing the Oort cloud). The Kuiper belt, on the other hand, is only 30-55 AU away from the sun, but is well within the solar system. All four of our probes (Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 1 and 2) which are headed for interstellar space are well beyond the Kuiper belt and have been for a few years, although some objects do extend to around 100 AU in their orbits so it's possible you did read something about that. IBEX still has missions within the solar system which the New Horizons probe won't even begin until 2015.

[BartSimpson]

Imagine, the USA used to be able to do stuff like that.

[hurley_108]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Imagine, the USA used to be able to do stuff like that.

Still could if the Republicans would believe in science again and the Democrats weren't all pissed scared of spending.

[ShepherdsDog]

As we break out of the Oort cloud, alarms across the galaxy will be going off, "Damn, there's been a breakout attempt!"

[Scape]

Brenda Brenda:

Stories like this are always humbling

[ASLplease]

Scape Scape:

Brenda Brenda:

Stories like this are always humbling

thats one minute of my life I'd like to have back

[sandorski]

ASLplease ASLplease:

Scape Scape:

Brenda Brenda:

Stories like this are always humbling

thats one minute of my life I'd like to have back

Don't like Evolving?