Posted on 12/05/2012 9:41:12 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
An artist's concept of NASA's Voyager spacecraft, which is now about 11 billion miles from the sun, NASA said.
(CNN) -- Are we there yet? If you're Voyager 1 and you're looking for a spot beyond the end of our solar system, the answer is no.
NASA officials have been saying for months that Voyager 1 is almost there when it comes to interstellar space as it continues the longest road trip in the history of mankind.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 took off 16 days apart in 1977, and Voyager 1 is now about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun.
On Monday, project officials said new information sent back from the ship yielded a surprising result.
"If we would have only looked at particle data alone, we would have said we're out of the solar system," said Tom Krimigis, a scientist from Johns Hopkins University who examines data on low-energy charged particles. "But nature is very imaginative, and Lucy pulled up the football again."
The Voyager team believes this region is where lines of magnetic particles from the solar system are meeting particles from interstellar space.
(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...
it’s beeeg....rilly beeg!
Thank you for this post. Now just imagine if we had politicians who would be blessed with similar great minds, just think where we could be. Instead we have some of the dumbest imbeciles money could buy.
Apparently it’s not just rilly rilly beeg, as we thought.
It’s absolutely ginormous!
WOW that makes sense...still amazing longevity of nuke power...I guess it requires minimum thrust to propel through not much gravity.
“But nature is very imaginative, and Lucy pulled up the football again.”
This is the kind of figurative thinking I’d prefer people with the word “sciences” in their job title, not to have.
Hopefully I figured this out right:
Distance from the sun in earth orbit radii = 11 billion/93 million = 118.3
So the sun would appear 1/118^2 = about 1/14000 as bright at this distance.
This would imply an increase in apparent magnitude by log(14000)/(log(2.512) = 10.36.
This would give the sun an apparent magnitude at this distance of -26.74 + 10.36 = -16.38
which is still 25 times as bright as the full moon.
So the sun would look like a very bright star indeed.
Congratulations to you and your father’s fantastic accomplishment!
Voyager received the bulk of it’s velocity from the rockets that
launched it and the rest from using gravity of the gas giants to
impart velocity via directional change.....i.e slingshot method.
The thermal generators are to power the electronics....not for
propulsion.
Voyager received the bulk of it’s velocity from the rockets that
launched it and the rest from using gravity of the gas giants to
impart velocity via directional change.....i.e slingshot method.
The thermal generators are to power the electronics....not for
propulsion.
“Amazing that the solar powered spacecrafts are still operating.”
I’m pretty sure that these spacecraft are powered by plutonium.
Brag all you can... Your Dad did a great service to help expand our knowledge. I get discouraged sometimes by the some of the folks that we share this planet with who are fascinated with the Kardashians, etc.
They don’t realize that we are in a race against time(at best, we’ve got until the sun starts expanding as it nears the end of its life). We need to figure out hOw to live and work and survive out in space.
Anything that helps us gain knowledge towards that goal is a benefit for all mankind. Your Dad is a hero in my book.
Looks like my granny’s pressure cooker.
As well you should be. Too bad that the Democrats have destroyed the NASA that he was typical of. It has truly lost its way.
The democrats are already counting the newly found denizen’s votes.
All deep space probes are thermonuclear battery powered.
Plutonium as a heat source and peltie effect thermocouples to generate a voltage and current accross the heat of the plutonim and cold of space.
I think it's about the size of a roll of paper towels. It is located on the end of the boom to keep it's particle emissions out of the space probes sensors.
"WHAM!"
That picture is funny but at the same time a bit disturbing.
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