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NASA's Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Space
For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars. NASA's Voyager 2 probe now has exited the heliosphere - the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun.
Members of NASA's Voyager team will discuss the findings at a news conference at 11 a.m. EST (8 a.m. PST) today at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington. The news conference will stream live on the agency's website.
Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on Nov. 5. This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium. Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.
Voyager 2 now is slightly more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth. Mission operators still can communicate with Voyager 2 as it enters this new phase of its journey, but information - moving at the speed of light - takes about 16.5 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. By comparison, light traveling from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Monday December 10 2018, @10:10PM (8 children)
What really impresses me, aside from the longevity of these probes and the solid engineering that must've gone into them, is that it's still managing to transmit data back to us across these distances. With that directional dish I imagine it wouldn't take more than a sliver of a degree of error to completely miss our tiny pale dot.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @10:39PM (1 child)
It actually gets easier to aim at earth the farther away you are since the beam is wider:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13227/how-earth-communicates-with-voyager-i [stackexchange.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @11:58PM
I think all you have to do point at the sun.
(Score: 4, Informative) by legont on Monday December 10 2018, @10:43PM (3 children)
The source code is, at least partially, lost https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/technology/voyager-nasa/ [cnn.com]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:31AM (2 children)
I wonder what'd happen if voyager patches were publicly done online through github or something. I bet lots of really smart programmers would jump at the chance to push code to voyager.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:34AM
Yeah but within two weeks the Ruby on Rails code pushed by a millennial programmer would break because of a dependency problem and then the Voyager would be lost forever.
(Score: 3, Informative) by legont on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:01AM
It would be nice to look at... but meantime one could get a job. The requirements are assembler, Fortran (without numbers:) and, believe it or not, COBOL https://www.geek.com/news/nasa-seeks-programmer-fluent-in-60-year-old-languages-to-work-on-voyager-1638276/ [geek.com]
I am, or should I say used to be, proficient in all.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @12:31AM (1 child)
Duh, they've been faking the whole thing. The data is created in North Hampford, Sussex, then bounced off the moon and picked up by a receiver in New Zealand from which it is fed into a delay circuit to simulate distance from earth before being rebroadcast one last time. Similar to how they did the video "from the moon".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:33AM
The only honest money left since the voyager project began is the nickle. Quarters, dimes, half dollars, dollars should all be silver, and all higher denominations gold.