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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: 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.