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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   

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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Original Submission

• Re:Interstellar Re:Interstellar (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:36PM (2 children)

  by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday October 27 2021, @06:36PM (#1191048)

  Did you read the section on Wikipedia?

  Choosing an official name

  According to science writer Govert Schilling, Brown [Mike Brown, one of the discoverers] initially wanted to call the object "Lila", after a concept in Hindu mythology that described the cosmos as the outcome of a game played by Brahman.[32] The name was very similar to "Lilah", the name of Brown's newborn daughter. Brown was mindful of not making his name public before it had been officially accepted. He had done so with Sedna a year previously, and had been heavily criticized. However, no objection was raised to the Sedna name other than the breach of protocol, and no competing names were suggested for Sedna.[43]

  He listed the address of his personal web page announcing the discovery as /~mbrown/planetlila and in the chaos following the controversy over the discovery of Haumea, forgot to change it. Rather than needlessly anger more of his fellow astronomers, he simply said that the webpage had been named for his daughter and dropped "Lila" from consideration.[32]

  Brown had also speculated that Persephone, the wife of the god Pluto, would be a good name for the object.[2] The name had been used several times in science fiction,[44] and was popular with the public, having handily won a poll conducted by New Scientist magazine[45] ("Xena", despite only being a nickname, came fourth.) This was not possible once the object was classified as a dwarf planet, because there is already an asteroid with that name, 399 Persephone.[2]

  With the dispute resolved, the discovery team proposed Eris on September 6, 2006. On September 13, 2006, this name was accepted as the official name by the IAU.[46][47] Brown decided that, because the object had been considered a planet for so long, it deserved a name from Greek or Roman mythology, like the other planets. The asteroids had taken the vast majority of Graeco-Roman names. Eris, whom Brown described as his favorite goddess, had fortunately escaped inclusion.[42] "Eris caused strife and discord by causing quarrels among people", said Brown in 2006, "and that's what this one has done too".[48]

  I guess the sky has no place for a fucking sense of humor.

  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?"

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• Re:Interstellar (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @07:22PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @07:22PM (#1191071)

  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.

  Parent

• Re:Interstellar (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @07:52PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @07:52PM (#1191083)

  Brown is a complete arrogant ass and a legend in his own mind. The "Lila" affair is most certainly right up his alley.

  Parent