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Five NASA Spacecraft That are Leaving Our Solar System for Good

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 30 2020, @10:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the to-infinity-and-beyond! dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

5 NASA Spacecraft That Are Leaving Our Solar System for Good:

For millennia, humans have gazed up at the stars and wondered what it would be like to journey to them. And while sending astronauts beyond the solar system remains a distant dream, humanity has already launched five robotic probes that are on paths to interstellar space.

Each of these craft was primarily designed to explore worlds in the outer solar system. But when they finished their jobs, their momentum continued to carry them farther from the Sun. Astronomers knew their ultimate fate was to live among the distant stars. And that's why all but one of these spacecraft carries a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find it along the way.

They are:

  • Pioneer 10
  • Pioneer 11
  • Voyager 1
  • Voyager 2
  • New Horizons

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by nishi.b on Wednesday September 30 2020, @09:41PM (1 child)

    by nishi.b (4243) on Wednesday September 30 2020, @09:41PM (#1059225)

    I was disappointed not to see in the article their speed and distance relative to the sun .
    I found rough answers from wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for those interested:

    - Pioneer 10: 122 AU, 12 km/s from this graph. [wikipedia.org]
    - Pioneer 11: 104 U, 11.2 km/s
    - Voyager 1: 150 AU, 17 km/s from this graph. [wikipedia.org]
    - Voyager 2: 121 AU, 15.4 km/s
    - New Horizon 49 AU, 14 km/s from this graph [wikipedia.org]

    Finally a global trajectory of all those probes [wikimedia.org] (each dot on the line is the position at the start of each year, with the year written every 5 years).

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01 2020, @02:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01 2020, @02:59AM (#1059333)

    Cool question/answer with plot here [stackexchange.com].