75 replies
11h34m
Seeing this news is a nice tribute to Ed Stone, who was one of the core project scientists for Voyager and recently passed [1] (and all those who work/worked on the program).
I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Stone at a public NASA event many years ago. I asked him, perhaps a silly question: "what does it feel like to know you built the furthest man-made known object in the universe?".
He paused for a moment, after which he responded, with a smile: "Pretty darn good".
RIP, Dr. Stone and go Voyager go!
[1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ed-stone-former-director-of-jp...
Not so silly, considering it’s almost certainly always going be the furthest man-made object in the Universe.
A very cynical take. I expect we’ll pass it in 20-30 years.
Voyager 1 has had an almost 50 year head start, and it was launched with a series of gravitational assists that are only possible every few hundred years. There is 0 chance anything will catch up to it in the next 50 years, and probably for several hundred more years after that, if ever.
That’s a really pessimistic take. Voyager 1 moves at ~17 km/s (and slowing down but it doesn’t really matter). That’s on the order of 0.0001 c and indeed just a half of Earth’s orbital speed, so a part of the year the probe is actually getting closer in Earth’s frame.
A one-kg nanoprobe attaining 0.001 c would be perfectly feasible with today’s tech and would overtake Voyager 1 within a decade. Breakthrough Starshot proposes laser sail acceleration of gram-scale probes to > 0.1 c, a thousand times faster than V1, and nothing in the design requires fundamentally new tech. Such probes would claim the distance record in a few weeks of travel, no matter whether they’re launched twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now.
What scientific return are we getting from a gram sized probe moving at 30,000 km per second?
Modern silicon design with mems sensors I suspect could do an awful lot with a gram.
Also, at this scale, not much can be done by hand, so you can make hundreds of them for not much more cost than doing one.
Doesn't modern electronics require massive shielding?
e.g. you would need too much shielding and would go over the 1 gram restriction.
If you have enough of them you can just lose some fraction and still function.
Also it may work out that a lighter, faster probe with a shorter service life could have a greater effective range, if the service life is less sensitive to weight changes than the speed is
And how do you get the data back from these probes? The voyagers have antennas that are close to 4 meters in diameter and ~25-watt radio transmitters. You aren't doing that in a gram, and you aren't powering that in a gram either.
Just go read the starshot proposal. They address all of these issues, some more convincingly than others but they have thought it out in great detail.
In short, it’s a swarm of gram-scale probes and they work together to transmit.
that comes after 'someone out there' misinterprets our super fast gram probes as weaponry and conquers our world for the sake of their own spacecraft safety.
it's ingenious really, let's antagonize a greater power into wormhole-bridge hopping over here so we can reverse engineer their tech.
/s , hopefully.
If they are so much as inconvenienced by our probes, they are not a greater power but bumbling roboticists like us.
1 gram at an appreciable amount of c is about as much energy as a nuke. Getting hit by a swarm of these while on a Sunday drive would fuck you up, no matter how powerful you are.
The real reason there isn’t a moon colony? Person gets fired and loses their shit, starts tossing 1-2 km sized rocks down the gravity well and … we all die.
Throwing shit in space is a sure fire way to piss off any species.
It would take an insane amount of energy to throw that rock.
But you only need one. Maybe two for good measure
The claim was that it would always be the furthest man made object in the universe. Nothing about it being useful or scientific.
If its not useful, it's not going to be launched and accelerated that long.
People do things for shits and giggles all the time. SpaceX literally launched a model Tesla for absolutely no reason other than advertising both themselves and their sister company.
Doubly so if they can now become “the furthest man made object”. That’s massive free marketing.
It may also be exponentially easier to do so in the future, lowering the expenditure needed to make it happen.
It might not be reasonable right now, but, once again, the bar was set at always. That is an exceptionally high bar with very little reasoning behind it.
They absolutely had way more of a reason than no reason. Za reason for the Tesla launch was that it was the first falcon 9 heavy launch, and no company was willing to gamble that large of a payload on a untested rocket. So they made the best of it with a PR stunt.
Today: almost certainly nothing In a decade: almost certainly very little In a century: almost certainly more than the Voyager
Assuming climate change doesn't prevent any kind of launch or most further research.
If you have enough of them, you get data from Alpha Centauri within a human (natural) lifetime. Plus the bragging rights, I guess, Starshot is after all a private endeavour.
I don't see a date announced for launch, and I see a lot of technology that needs to be invented for this to be feasible. How likely is it to happen within the next 10 years?
I'm just thinking about my old roommate, a space science postdoc, who told me about all these cool propulsion projects that sounded very feasible. That was—sheesh—20 years ago, and I keep waiting for any of them to be real.
nothing in this universe has 0 chance.
Plugging a USB cable into the back of a monitor on the first try without looking is as close as we've ever come to zero chance.
USB-C fixes this, only to replace the problem of orientation with the greater specter of alternate mode support, or lack thereof. This is why we can’t have nice things.
USB-C only mostly fixes the what side is up problem. I've had devices that degraded to only working with the right side up. Usually from pocket fluff accumulation that can be cleaned out, but still.
If I understand the spec properly, the cable isn’t truly symmetrical internally and relies on switching to determine which pins are used for which function. It all seems needlessly complicated to my reading, and it seems like Apple’s Lightning connector is superior in these respects, although I don’t know if it would be capable of performing at USB C’s USB3/4 speeds and implement all its modes, but we're unlikely to get a new connector standard anytime soon, possibly a few USB generations at least. By then, the use case for USB is likely to be much different also, so different design choices are likely to be made to respond to future market conditions that are difficult for me to predict, but I hypothesize that by then ad hoc wireless power delivery and data transfer will be much more mature.
Another unfortunate blunder resulting from the complicated design is that usb C female to usb A male adapters are unsafe and prohibited by the usb C spec (because they can be used to make unsafe connectors)
You still see those adapters frequently because this stupid decision would hobble usb C adoption (since it would prevent you from making a usb C peripheral with backwards compatibility for usb A using an adapter) so manufacturers have largely ignored that part of the spec
I’m somehow failing to understand the use case you’ve described and I don’t think it’s your fault. I’ve seen devices with female USB C ports, and they’re perfectly backward compatible - you either use a C to C cable or A to C cable depending on what is on the other end.
I sometimes see nonstandard A to A cables, however, possibly for the same reasons you’ve mentioned above, but I think it’s usually a cost-saving measure and perhaps easier to implement type A female connectors rather than mini/micro type B, but I have no experience with designing devices, only operating and repairing them.
What is your experience with devices that are backwards compatible with an adapter like you describe? Do you have an example of one, because I can’t think of any, not that I doubt they exist.
If you have a usb NIC, chances are it has a male plug so it can connect directly to a computer without an extra cable.
If it has usb A male, it can connect to a large number of computers, but nothing from Apple recently. If it has a usb c male, it can connect to recent Apple computers but has limited ports on other computers and can't connect to older computers.
If it has a usb-c and a usb-a male to usb-c female dongle (often attached to the little bit of cable between the device and the plug), then it will work with everything.
If you clip off the dongle, then you can use it to connect usb c male devices to usb-a female ports in lots of useful applications. It violates the spec, but it's super handy. If you have a usb a male to usb c male cable, you can use the forbidden dongle and the allowed cable to make a forbidden usb a male to usb a male cable which is probably not useful for much.
The real life USB C experience has replaced the "which side is up" problem with the "is this cheaply made garbage electronic device going to charge at all with my $80 MacBook USB C charger", which it often does not (and instead requires a USB A to USB C charging cable)
I have also seen these issues and always wondered why this happened. There seems to be an issue with the tolerances of USB C compared to A that make C more susceptible to damage and also dirt and dust.
The main issue seems to be lack of resistors in some devices, which leads to USB C not seeing the device to be charged as such, as it isn't negotiating the USB-PD part. USB A doesn’t officially implement a power delivery negotiation spec, it’s just always on at the charger end, with more amps possibly being negotiated if I’m reading properly.
People seem to be able to resolve this issue with a daisy chain. Devices that usually only work with A to C cables might be able to use a C charger connected to a C to A (female) cord or A to C adapter, which is then connected with a standard A to C cable to the device to be charged.
It’s probably easier to keep a USB A charger and A to C cable, but hopefully this helps put your mind at ease that there is a rational explanation.
https://acroname.com/blog/why-usb-c-connections-sometimes-do...
https://plugable.com/blogs/news/understanding-usb-c-charging...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
The Reddit post below actually explains how to work around the problem as I mentioned above:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/w1ismo/how_co...
The odds do not increase all that much with looking either.
Third try always
Exception that proves the rule! Plugging USB-A on the first try equals excalibur out of the stone. Our Arthur is out there, somewhere.
That is a bit pessimistic. There is this paper [1] by JPL and Nasa folks discussing the possibilites of sun-diving solar small satelites. They think that speeds of around 7 AU/year are possible. Voyager 1 is escaping the solar system at 3.6 AU/year. With those speeds catching up to Voyager 1 withing 50 year would be doable. Realistically since we are not quite ready to launch it just yet it is more likely we would miss that 50 year window but I feel better about our odds in the window beyond 50 but within “several hundred years”.
1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.14917
Don’t forget that sun-diving at high warp speed also gives us more time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_IV:_The_Voyage_Home
But if we are warp capable, then we can definitely catch up with V’Ger, I mean Voyager.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%27Ger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture
Voyager 1 only gravity boosted at Jupiter and Saturn. That's not a particularly special alignment. Doing the same thing doesn't need a "grand tour" alignment, which happens every almost-two hundred years by the way.
Also it got most of its speed from Jupiter, and we can do a gravity assist with Jupiter any year.
And check out this plan for a double Jupiter gravity assist. https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2020/eposter/1110.pdf
Is the assist multiplicative or additive?
Well, you’re probably right since it seems like the US govt is foaming at the mouth to start ww3 with both Russia and China.
I will bet you literally all the money ever printed that we don’t.
That’s not how betting works. How much would you really bet, your own real money? For example, I’m totally ready to take the bet at merely 1:1000 odds. In 30 years, let’s say, I’d owe you a $100 if a probe hasn’t broken V1’s distance record, and you’d owe me a hundred grand if we have. In today’s dollars. Should be a no-brainer if you really think it’s impossible.
It does't work to get fair odds (estimated value 1) when the gains are a nice dinner downtown and a loss might be financial servitude.
One thing's for sure, $100,000 in today's dollars won't buy you dinner by the time the bet's resolved.
If we're going to worry about inflation, we might as well worry about the climate burning up our planet.
Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, but the next ~100 years we'll be bothered trying to have enough food and water and killing ~80% (or more) of humans of the planet who want our food, water, and shelter from the extreme weather that we won't be sending anything to chase the Voyagers...
Nah. This is basically the worst of the worst IPCC scenarios, highly unlikely but for some reason the preferred ones by journalists and self-serving politicians as well as big green industry grifters.
Back of the napkin math shows it to be the most likely, especially with some of the more recent discoveries in regards to water evaporation and co2 emissions.
IPCC is sorely outdated by this point.
The only solution is technological advancement.
If humanity doesn’t rise to the challenge (degrowth) this could happen.
Fortunately there are smart people all over the world solving problems everyday and that is likely to continue.
Doesn't the phrase "today's dollars" imply the practical value will stay the same?
I could take the bet at 1:100 odds too.
And that’s not how long term bookmaking works, as you’ve proposed a wager where I am guaranteed to lose at least the time value of my money on either outcome, and I’m extremely confident I’d lose exactly and only that. But I’ll happily put down $100 in today’s money if a win in 30 years returns a 10% profit over inflation, on the conditions that the probe must be launched from the Earth’s surface after the book is made, that it must overtake Voyager 1’s then distance inside 30 years, and that it must be actively transmitting at least one piece of meaningful local-condition scientific data back under its own power (for validation of ranging purposes, at least) at that time.
I will bet you 10 times more to the contrary, literally, absolutely :D
On our way to where exactly?
One target would be about 500AU out, where you can use the sun as a gravitational lens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft)
I hope not-- it may take a long time, but I hope we laser accelerate some probes really fast.
Eh - to send it where? Even laser accelerated, even if it gets to 0.1c, where is it gonna go?
Edit0:typo
Alpha Centauri. See Breakthrough Starshot and other such potential missions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
Obviously, no need to answer further, I'm just being grumpy I imagine.
Man - why go there? What are we looking to learn?
Do they have the kilometer Gw phased array yet?
The meterwide/gram weight sails?
The chips that weight one gram with comms and cameras and all that?
And just to clarify, they can't flip and slow down, so it's a 0.15c flyby of alphacentauri, entirely automated. So hopefully the code does't fuck up in this alien environnement without human help.
What do they expect to learn at that speed and with such small sensors? Like a picture of the planet, like we get telescopes? I sure wonder the speed at which that's going to transmit data.
I'm just seeing "proof or concept" but this is mostly concept and no proof.
And if this is "step one" of interstellar travel, what's step two?
Edit0: Just reading the wiki this is so absurd -atmospheric turbulence is a challenge to deliver te GW laserb- so were planning on building a km phased array in space to accelerate the swarm. Just this itself is way way beyond realistic. Doesn't this breakdown at napkin math levels?
Only in terms of cost; there's nothing that seems to be fundamentally unobtanium here. The question is whether it can be come cheap enough to be viable.
I think the gram class probes with gram class sails that are a meter wide are outside the scope of feasibility today and would require unobtanium. Shielding too.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and its code hasn’t broken.
Construct a stack of starships in orbit and you would be able to get a probe there. It’s never about the technology, it’s about whether someone cares enough to spend the resources.
What do you mean about the starship stack? That's the array?
For Voyager, I'll argue that it's mission is much simpler (doesn't need to aim forthe position of something 30 years in the future) and that we keep transmitting to it (the sheer distance will limit our involvement as the delays between transmissions grows). It's also not going at 0.15c, where it needs to do the calcs very quickly.
I'm not sure how easy it would be to make a km wide Gw array on Earth, but building and powering it in space seems much, much harder. Just harvesting the GW takes 3 million solar panels. Just getting that to orbit seems unlikely. Even with very generous 1kg per panel we get 3 million kg to put in orbit, or 21 Falcon Heavy at max payload, or two years of putting nothing but solar panels up. It's so much.
And then how much money is going to make the gram scale probe appear?
Edit0: to clarify, the probe will have less time than the duration of the blink of an eye to take measurements. That's limiting what you can learn AND makes it very hard to aim correctly.
The how is a much bigger problem than the why. It would be great to have some closer sampling of Proxima b, such as images, spectroscopy, etc. You won't get much on a 0.15c flyby, but you'd get something, hopefully. No room for error of course, with a several year round trip for commands.
Having some sense of the planet could inform a colonization plan that's likely to have even bigger problems with the hows rather than the whys.
But the whys are clear. Even if it's not actually feasible.
You know the ultimate answer.
Because we can.
That’s the major problem with generation ships. Unless you have a propulsion lab and scientists on the ship, earth will just keep making faster ships and when you arrive at your destination you may discover it has been inhabited for generations by people who left a hundred years after you did.
The power of procrastination is great.
I mentioned this point on a HN post a few months ago and someone said that the Voyager was launched at a very beneficial time, leveraging some gravitational pull of some celestial body, so it’s unlikely we can just make a faster ship and catch up/surpass it.
Is there any reason that a new generation of ships couldn't leverage the same (or similar, if not better) gravitational pulls that benefited Voyager?
The "Grand Tour" alignment that Voyagers were initially intended to take advantage of only happens once every 175 years (although if the goal is just max speed I don't know if favorable conditions happen more often than that)
That’s just a standard chemical rocket for the initial push and then a few gravity assists right?
Couldn’t an ion engine with a nuclear reactor providing the electricity accelerate more over that period? I’m genuinely curious, I don’t know the answer.
Even an ion engine needs fuel. We shot out Voyager 1 in 1977. It has traversed 47 years of distance.
There has been the talk of solar sails as well, but gravity assist propulsion is already so much easier to achieve for satellites.
"Always" is a pretty big leap (I hope).
Yes, but it will always be like that
The nuclear launched manhole cover is likely further