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NASA is planning an interstellar mission that could last more than 100 years:
When the famous Voyager twin spacecraft left Earth in the 1970s, their mission was originally meant to last only five years. Although they’re 14 billion and 11 billion miles, respectively, away from Earth, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are continuing to provide invaluable scientific data.
However, the Voyager twins can’t go on forever. Scientists estimate that the last instruments onboard the spacecraft will shut down by 2031 at the latest, if some malfunction doesn’t happen before then. This is why NASA wants a replacement — and this time, this new interstellar mission will be designed to run for a long time from the get-go. In fact, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) who have been tasked with designing the new mission, believe this Voyager successor could function for more than a century.
The new project, known as the Interstellar Probe, could launch sometime in the 2030s. It’s meant to travel faster and farther than any man made object has and probably ever will in the foreseeable future. While still in the solar system, the plan is for the spacecraft to visit one or more of the 130 known dwarf planets in the outer reaches of the solar system. There are some clues that some of these icy worlds may have formed as ocean worlds.
According to early design projections, the Interstellar Probe should travel at a speed at least twice as fast as Voyager 1, which should help it travel about 375 astronomical units (34 billion miles) in its first 50 years. If it manages to travel another 50 years, the spacecraft could end up covering more than 800 astronomical units, which amount to a staggering 74 billion miles.
As a point of comparison, the Parker Solar Probe
... is a NASA space probe launched in 2018 with the mission of making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. It will approach to within 9.86 solar radii (6.9 million km or 4.3 million miles) from the center of the Sun, and by 2025 will travel, at closest approach, as fast as 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph), or 0.064% the speed of light.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday October 27 2021, @11:27AM (7 children)
It's a dwarf planet flyby mission that will be overengineered to last longer than Voyager 1+2. Even if it gets to 800 AU by 100 years, that's not interstellar. 1 light year is 63,241 AU and that's still within the Oort cloud.
I just noticed these updated estimates for Planet Nine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine#Updated_model [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday October 27 2021, @02:31PM
You're right, of course. I was just doing the math myself: the probe will travel (lots of rounding) about 0.01 light-years/century. So it could potentially reach our nearest neighbor star in around 40000-50000 years.
It will be nice to explore the outer reaches of the solar system, but this is a very long ways from interstellar, for any useful definition of the term.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @03:12PM (5 children)
I guess NASA's definition of interstellar space is a little less ambitious than what you and I picture in our minds when we hear that term.
NASA considers interstellar space to be anything outside of the heliosphere, that big tear-dropped bubble that the solar wind creates, and it's border can begin as close as 100AU away from the sun. Inside the heliosphere the solar wind particles mostly come from the sun, whereas outside the heliosphere the particles mostly originate from interstellar space.
Actually Voyager I & II are considered to be in interstellar space since they both passed beyond the heliosphere during the past 10 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @04:35PM (4 children)
I think almost all of us would think "interstellar" means "between the stars," no? That is defined to be space outside of the heliosphere. I don't see what you are getting at here. What picture, in your opinion, am I supposed to have in my head when I hear that word?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Wednesday October 27 2021, @04:58PM (3 children)
Well pedantically, anything not literally inside a star is 'between the stars', but we'd hardly call a trip from earth to the moon 'interstellar' even though it clearly doesn't take place inside a star, and must therefore take place in "inter-stellar space" right? Meanwhile I wouldn't even consider that inter-planetary. :)
I don't even know what I picture in my mind when I hear the term interstellar. Something 'beyond the planetary system' for sure...so past uranus. But what's the precise boundary? Beyond the kuiper belt? Beyond the heliosphere? Beyond the oort cloud?
NASA apparently chose the heliosphere, and that's pretty reasonable.
Personally, I think heliosphere is pretty reasonable as a boundary with a good scientific basis, but I think a lot of people, including me, intuitively think of inter-stellar space travel as "having a destination associated with another star".
The heliosphere is kind like virgin and blue origin's trips to the 'edge of space'; is that "really" space travel?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:55PM (1 child)
This thread is one of the gems of SN.
I too originally thought of outside heliopause was "interstellar", given many objects even 1-2 light years out would still be affected by out star's influence gravity-wise. Does that make an object running at escape velocity interstellar, even though it may be inside the orbit of the inner planets? Maybe it is only the point at which another star exerts enough influence to draw an object away from 'here'?
Gonna go with a combo in my mind - an object is "interstellar" outside the heliopause, but also retaining potential to move to another star. Unfortunately that relegates any of our probes out there now, and in the next couple of centuries, to "dwarf-intra-stellar" status, in my mind eye.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Wednesday October 27 2021, @09:46PM
I think what is getting called as interstellar varies between beyond the orbit of the planets, beyond the heliopause, and beyond the material orbiting the sun--which is assumed to be the far edge of the Ort cloud. TFA's definition is somewhere beyond the planets but well within the Ort cloud. This upsets the space enthusiasts who want to pursue ambitious interstellar missions that target nearby stars, distance and mission duration be damned. While I'd like to see a mission to another star, I don't think that will be ready to launch in my lifetime. We need more experience launching things into deep space and accelerating spacecraft to larger fractions of lightspeed.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @10:05PM
I'm going to start a new intercity train service. The train goes in circles in my rural backyard. What, you thought intercity trains were supposed to travel from city to city? Fuck you, I shit on your linguistic expectations!
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday October 27 2021, @12:52PM (2 children)
Shouldn't something that is supposed to hang out with that many dwarfs be called Snow White?
Still it's not bad for a couple of probes sent in 1977 with tech then that is even older to go until the 2030s, that said they were not built or assumed to last this long so I guess they could be wrong on this estimate to. One would think it would just be improving, shielding and strengthening that is in order to make a new one last a few decades more. But I'm sure they are going to over-engineer that so it breaks in record time. After all it seems to be the wave of the future.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @01:40PM (1 child)
Reminds me of Neil DeGrasse Tyson saying how the aqueducts were an engineering failure (from memory so this may be imprecise):
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 28 2021, @06:02PM
FWIW, civilization != empire. The civilization of the romans continue(s/d), the empire fell.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 27 2021, @01:40PM (11 children)
My head says exploring the dwarf planets out there past Pluto represents important science. It could tell us a lot more about how our solar system formed.
My heart sinks a bit, though, when they write "interstellar" and don't at least mean a mission to Alpha Centauri. That would be cool. They could even take a peak along the way at the primordial stuff that lies beyond Pluto.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday October 27 2021, @02:09PM (4 children)
Well, at the speeds we're likely to get, it wouldn't get within observation distance of Alpha Centauri within your grandchildren's lifetimes. That would probably require a nuclear powered ion rocket that was continuously thrusting, and slowing down as you got there so that you were moving slowly enough to see anything would be a real project.
FWIW, I'm all in favor of such probes, but I think they need to wait until we've got a lot better AI.
(For what it's really worth, I'd prefer a manned expedition, that wasn't intended to land, and planned to just keep on going forever, living off the interstellar medium, but that requires a LOT of development, some in AI, some in virtual reality, some in sociology, and some in environmental tech. [It requires a nearly closed eco-system.])
(P.S.: If people have made a STL flight to another star, don't expect them to land. They'll have adapted to life in space, or they'll be dead. This is probably true even for something as close as Alpha Centauri unless you figure a way to use continual high acceleration...and that's quite unlikely if only because of energetic considerations.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:19PM (3 children)
No matter how well adapted you are to life in space, if you approached a habitable world the temptation to stop and check it out would be too great. I think it'd have to be a collective agreement too. Imagine the children of people who stayed on the ship. They'd have to wipe the ship's logs. Their kids would be furious to know that their parents condemned them to stay on a little island in space when a whole new world was beckoning. For that matter, the 2nd generation might want to return to Earth in the first place. I don't know what kind of sociology would make people cruise past habitable worlds and/or neglect the Earth in favor of an indefinite journey, but I think they'd have to effectively be no longer human.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:36PM
The habitability of the world should be well studied with telescopes in advance of any manned interstellar travel. They can use rotational gravity to keep in shape.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @07:59PM
You would have a very long time to think about it. If it took you a year of constant thrust to get up to the speed you're at, it would take at least as long to slow down to visit the planet.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday October 28 2021, @01:51PM
Think a bit seriously about what it means to be "habitable". If you approach a planet that *could* be habitable, then you would need to spend multiple centuries terraforming it to achieve a planet that one could move around on without an airtight suit. And that's if everything worked out as you planned. (Fat chance of that!)
If it's already got a biosphere, the first thing you'd need to do is kill off all the life on the planet down to the microbes to avoid extreme allergen poisoning. If it hasn't, then you need to create an atmosphere with enough Oxygen in it. In both cases you'd need to establish a terra-normal chain of microbes, and hope that they didn't evolve something you couldn't live with in the process of spreading out over the planet.
Now if you just want to live in domes, that could probably be done. But the benefits of that over a space habitat that's been designed to suit you, and which you've grown up in are rather questionable. You're basically just choosing an immobile habitat over a mobile one.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday October 27 2021, @03:14PM
This thing is looking to cover 800 au in 100 years. That won't even be past the Oort Cloud.
Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away, which is over 250000 au.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday October 27 2021, @03:22PM
Well, technically... /s
But seconded. I would say, those darn journalists love to screw up technical terms like this, but...c'mon. This isn't even a technical term.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @05:06PM (3 children)
I'm still rather pissed that they insisted on naming that 'dwarf planet' Eris and its moon Dysnomia, instead of keeping the original suggestion of the discovery team, Xena and Gabrielle.
I guess the sky has no place for a fucking sense of humor.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:36PM (2 children)
Did you read the section on Wikipedia?
Personally, I find Discordianism very funny. And that you felt the need to swear about this incredibly trivial complaint tells me that *you* could use a bit more of a sense of humor about the whole thing.
Hail Eris
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @07:22PM
I, too, partake of no hot dog buns. To think that Eris can be appeased with a mere dwarf planet is clearly blasphemy on your part.
Why are you believing the drivel that WikiLies puts forth anyway? I suggest you acquire a few tons of flax.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @07:52PM
Brown is a complete arrogant ass and a legend in his own mind. The "Lila" affair is most certainly right up his alley.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @02:26PM (2 children)
I hate this horrible wording that gets used so often. It is often used to show how unexpectedly long missions last, but it also suggests that these missions should have broken down decades ago. This just isn't true. These mission lifetimes are primary mission objective limits, not expected hardware or even mission limits. They are the lengths of time such that one can declare mission success. The mission has a certain cost, it has certain science or other mission objectives, and it has a maximum amount of time budgeted to get them done. The Voyager probes were built to study Jupiter and Saturn, and hence "designed for five years," but the launch was planned to take advantage of the planetary alignments that would allow them to study all of the planets (which, if I recall correctly, a delay(s) that took Pluto out of the "Grand Tour" of planetary alignment). The primary mission was five years, but it was expected to last much longer and hit all of the planets. The extended mission(s) are programmatically different projects and have different funding sources and timelines (and budgets).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:58PM (1 child)
oh is that why Kirk kept taking back the Enterprise!
(Score: 4, Funny) by DECbot on Wednesday October 27 2021, @10:13PM
Kirk kept getting command posts despite his constant breaches of protocol and loss of capital equipment due to a programing glitch and his scores for the Kobayashi Maru scenario. Despite how much the admirals tried, they could not convince Command that he scores should be thrown out and Kirk stripped of command. AI made the important decisions and perhaps because of the glitch, they couldn't revoke the scores of the Kobayashi Maru and just prayed Kirk would go down with the ship during some impossible mission.
What other navy, spacefaring or otherwise, would send command offices as members of the initial away team? Perhaps they would send just one command officer in the case diplomacy or potential combat with a new found intelligent species is a concern and a quick decision is needed, but rarely should the CO be included in the team with boots on the ground first. Likely Kirk was briefed by Command with this idea, to deploy command officers first, and encouraged him to use it. And Kirk agreed because it stroked his ego. To the Command's regret, the odds always ended up favoring Kirk.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Wednesday October 27 2021, @03:30PM (1 child)
Emphasis on "could"...
While I hope it doesn't happen, I half-expect that they'll launch this thing, then an unrecoverable glitch/hardware failure will somehow kill it in the first 10 years. We couldn't even build probes back then that would last that long, and now, when everything's made to be disposable? While we keep cutting NASA's budget?
I'd imagine that the biggest engineering hurdle is making an RTG that can provide enough power for that long.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @03:42PM
> I'd imagine that the biggest engineering hurdle is making an RTG that can provide enough power for that long.
And can provide a transmitter power output that can manage better than Voyager2's 160 bit/s downlink rate...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:24PM (3 children)
That's so much time, it seems like there's a good chance for this thing to get passed by something that moves ten times faster at least.
Committing to this mission is like saying they won't be able to develop considerably faster propulsion during that time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:28PM (2 children)
Keeping saying this is what prevents the mission from ever getting launched.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:39PM
It's a dwarf planet flyby mission. The heliosphere exploration is just a bonus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @08:03PM
You're missing the most important part of this 100-year mission. It is at least a century of sustained funding for JHU/APL! (Which is why JPL will do everything it can to shut the concept down and resurrect it in five years as their great idea!)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:38PM (1 child)
When the famous Voyager twin spacecraft left Earth in the 1970s, their mission was originally meant to last only five years.
Like Star Trek. If you think we can't make machinery that lasts a century, think again. The last century's steam locomotives had hundred year warranties. They became obsolete before the warranties expired, which will likely happen with this. Remember, fifty years ago all of the technologies in Star Trek were fantasies, but most are common today. In seventy five years they'll probably sail right past this mission.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 1) by Mockingbird on Wednesday October 27 2021, @10:23PM
Or worse, one of the Voyagers will return to Earth, after having encountered a machine planet, searching for the Creator, and only find ugly bags of mostly water. One of the more interesting motifs of TOS was how machines could be really stupid, and take commands literally, like Nomad in The Changeling [wikipedia.org].