V'Ger Lives!
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Vger has been flying for about 46 years at about 610,000 kph.
If we flew twice as fast as Vger we would catch it in roughly 92 years.
I wonder if we will ever catch up to it.
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@George-K said in V'Ger Lives!:
He's just coasting now, right?
Yes, I think he is basically just coasting.
And I think it has gone beyond the edge of solar influence.
I wonder if there is still some very minimal solar wind or gravity, although I think that being beyond the heliosphere means the end of that influence. Maybe some interstellar wind. I suppose there is at least a little friction.
It will run out of electricity in 5 or 6 years, so we may never know.
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@Mik said in V'Ger Lives!:
So cool.
Yeah, very cool!
@Copper said in V'Ger Lives!:
It will run out of electricity in 5 or 6 years, so we may never know.
is it running on nuclear power or just rechargable battery power? I assume rechargable battery power, and the further away from the sun, the harder to recharge?
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@Mik said in V'Ger Lives!:
So cool.
Yeah, very cool!
@Copper said in V'Ger Lives!:
It will run out of electricity in 5 or 6 years, so we may never know.
is it running on nuclear power or just rechargable battery power? I assume rechargable battery power, and the further away from the sun, the harder to recharge?
@taiwan_girl said in V'Ger Lives!:
is it running on nuclear power or just rechargable battery power? I assume rechargable battery power, and the further away from the sun, the harder to recharge?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1
Voyager 1 has three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) mounted on a boom. Each MHW-RTG contains 24 pressed plutonium-238 oxide spheres.[24] The RTGs generated about 470 W of electric power at the time of launch, with the remainder being dissipated as waste heat.[25] The power output of the RTGs declines over time due to the 87.7-year half-life of the fuel and degradation of the thermocouples, but they will continue to support some of its operations until at least 2025.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@taiwan_girl said in V'Ger Lives!:
is it running on nuclear power or just rechargable battery power? I assume rechargable battery power, and the further away from the sun, the harder to recharge?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1
Voyager 1 has three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) mounted on a boom. Each MHW-RTG contains 24 pressed plutonium-238 oxide spheres.[24] The RTGs generated about 470 W of electric power at the time of launch, with the remainder being dissipated as waste heat.[25] The power output of the RTGs declines over time due to the 87.7-year half-life of the fuel and degradation of the thermocouples, but they will continue to support some of its operations until at least 2025.
@George-K Impressive!!
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@taiwan_girl said in V'Ger Lives!:
is it running on nuclear power or just rechargable battery power? I assume rechargable battery power, and the further away from the sun, the harder to recharge?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1
Voyager 1 has three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) mounted on a boom. Each MHW-RTG contains 24 pressed plutonium-238 oxide spheres.[24] The RTGs generated about 470 W of electric power at the time of launch, with the remainder being dissipated as waste heat.[25] The power output of the RTGs declines over time due to the 87.7-year half-life of the fuel and degradation of the thermocouples, but they will continue to support some of its operations until at least 2025.
@George-K said in V'Ger Lives!:
The power output of the RTGs declines over time due to the 87.7-year half-life
I assume the guys that built them figured that was plenty of time.
Because interstellar space would have lots of man-made machines flying around by now.
It really is a shame that we don't.
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The engineers did not plan for it to last this long -- it was originally planned to operate for '5 years.'
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The engineers also were not given instructions to deliberately limit its operational longevity.
I think we are just getting the unexpected residual benefits from #2.
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5 years was a goal, it was never a limit or an expectation. The expectation is always higher.
When the government buys hardware like that, every component probably has an expected mean-time-between-failures. Everything is going to break, the question is when. The MTBF is a prediction, an educated guess. So, if the plan is 5 years of life, they would select an appropriate minimum MTBF, something more than 5 years.
Of course all that is guesswork, very good guesswork, but still guesswork. But they did know the fuel has a real limit.
The same is true of presidents, there are limits.
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The Voyager is probably one of the most amazing space missions ever.
Voyager 1, the most distant human object that is now flying through interstellar space, had thruster issues making it difficult for the spacecraft to stay pointed at Earth when calling home. Unless Voyager 1 could make a switch to a different thruster set, the 47-year-old spacecraft would sail on alone without help from Earth. Making matters worse, Voyager 1 is so old that sudden changes could damage the spacecraft.
and
On Voyager 1, a fuel tube in the first attitude propulsion branch began to clog in 2002, necessitating a switch to the second branch, NASA officials wrote in the same statement. When the second branch began acting up in 2018, Voyager 1's orientation maneuvers all switched to the trajectory correction maneuver branch.
But with use, this single branch of the trajectory correction system has been clogging severely, to an even worse extent than either attitude propulsion branch did before.
JPL therefore decided to switch back to the attitude propulsion system, but they had to do so with less power available than in 2002. Voyager 1 is running on essential systems only, and even some of its heaters have turned off.
Between that necessary loss of some heaters — and the diminished radiant heat from fewer systems running on the spacecraft — Voyager 1's dormant attitude propulsion thruster branch was so cold that even turning it on could cause damage.
Scrutinizing Voyager 1 carefully from afar, JPL engineers determined switching one of the heaters on for an hour would be enough. The command worked and on Aug. 27, one of the attitude thruster branches successfully reoriented Voyager 1 towards Earth for the first time in six years.
