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NASA is Planning an Interstellar Mission that Could Last More than 100 Years

posted by martyb on Wednesday October 27 2021, @11:18AM   Printer-friendly

AnonTechie writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Wednesday October 27 2021, @03:30PM (1 child)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday October 27 2021, @03:30PM (#1190997)

    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.

    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.

    Life span

    Most RTGs use 238Pu, which decays with a half-life of 87.7 years. RTGs using this material will therefore diminish in power output by a factor of 1 – (1/2)1/87.7, which is 0.787%, per year.

    One example is the MHW-RTG used by the Voyager probes. In the year 2000, 23 years after production, the radioactive material inside the RTG had decreased in power by 16.6%, i.e. providing 83.4% of its initial output; starting with a capacity of 470 W, after this length of time it would have a capacity of only 392 W. A related loss of power in the Voyager RTGs is the degrading properties of the bi-metallic thermocouples used to convert thermal energy into electrical energy; the RTGs were working at about 67% of their total original capacity instead of the expected 83.4%.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @03:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @03:42PM (#1190999)

    > 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...