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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: 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