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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!