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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: 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!)