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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: 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.