Voyager 2 has restored its communication with Earth months earlier than expected.
  • Cryptic Fawn@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    552·
    1 year ago

    Once both spacecraft run out of power - expected sometime after 2025 - they will continue roaming through space.

    Why does thinking about this make me a bit sad?

    • GeekFTW@kbin.social
      361·
      1 year ago

      If we take a moment to anthropomorphize Voyager here - It kinda is. Think of the pure vastness of space. Remember that all of the planets in our Solar System can fit between the Earth and our own Moon with a little space to spare.

      Look up to the sky, point in any direction and (with the magical ability to fly up and through space) go in that direction without changing course, and there is an almost 100% guarantee you will never run into anything. Sure you may see things go by as you travel, but its just…never ending travel, fast as shit, through endless space until you just…stop and die.

      Voyager’s just gonna keep going, and going…and going. It’s material will eventually break down I assume, due to exposure, and perhaps fall to pieces, but…it’ll keep going.

      • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        30·
        1 year ago

        Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

        • Matt@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          1 year ago

          I would suspect at some point it will come into contact with other matter but yea… That could take a very, very long time.

            • Puppy@kbin.social
              6·
              1 year ago

              Given an infinite amount of time, I would say the chance are not just likely, but certainly 100% chance of happening

              • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                1 year ago

                Not neccasarily. You have to remember that space is expanding. That means that eventually the probes would undergo the big rip where they are torn apart. Prior to that however, they would be so far from anything that it would be impossible for them to interact with anything.

              • arefx@lemmy.mlEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                Definitely, it will happen at some point. Probably not for an unfathomably long amount of time, however.

        • GeekFTW@kbin.social
          63·
          1 year ago

          Space exposure. I’m not what anyone would typically classify as “smart” by any stretch but I have to imagine being out traveling in interstellar space for (eventually) centuries will end up in some kind of eventual damage, be it either from idk fuck ass Space Radiation™, or micro asteroid impacts, or anything else.

    • Zalack@startrek.websiteEnglish
      26·
      1 year ago

      The cool thing about Voyager is that it has a record of information about Earth, etched in gold, with instructions on how to read the data it contains back.

      Even once it powers down, it’s still on a mission. If millions of years from now intelligent alien life ever encounters it, they will know who we were and that we existed.

      It’s our handprint on the cosmic wall.

    • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
      242·
      1 year ago

      They will likely be the last evidence that the human race ever existed.

      In 2-3 billion years the sun will leave the main sequence steady state it has been in. This will end in it turning into a red giant, and engulfing earth and destroying all record we existed.

      Meanwhile, the journey of Voyager 1 and 2 will have only just begun. They will continue moving through the expanding universe for at least 3,000,000 Billion years.

      • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.netEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        Wouldn’t friction (however little in deep outer space) eventually decay the crafts way before Earth is engulfed by the Sun?

        • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
          30·
          1 year ago

          Interspace is empty on a level that is hard to imagine.

          There are 2.652×10^25 molecules in one m^3 of air.

          That is 26520000000000000000000000.

          In intellar space?

          The is 1.

          IE: the probe would hit more atoms in one second on earth moving at 1 m/s than it would travelling the entire age of the universe so far through interstellar space.

          Even the space between the planets is thick with matter by comparison.

          • mustardman@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            11·
            1 year ago

            I don’t think this comparison is really valid. If you are going through the molecules of air at the speed voyager is currently going it would vaporize. If you’re comparing it to more terrestrial speeds, It also ignores the amount of energy imparted by that 1 atom due to the high velocity. The high velocity also means it encounters those singular atoms and a higher rate.

      • LiiTheBaddie@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        If we are lucky the earth might survive after the sun becomes a red giant. As the sun expands because its gravity is weakening which means the hold on earth will be weaker and the earth will move away from the sun. Hopefully the speed we move away is equal to or faster than the suns expansion.

  • elgordio@kbin.social
    241·
    1 year ago

    I’d recommend anyone interested in the Voyager program to check out “It’s Quieter in the Twilight”. A film about the people involved in the project and how they’ve dedicated their lives to make it happen.

  • Scanzy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    1 year ago

    Pretty crazy that it takes over 17 hours just to send a signal all the way to Voyager 2.

    • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
      201·
      1 year ago

      Each way. It would take 34 hours to get confirmation that your signal has been received.

      And Voyager 1 is even further away.

      Relevant XKCD: Tau Ceti is farther away, so it took me 36 years to start the war over updog.

  • shadowspirit@lemmy.worldEnglish
    172·
    1 year ago

    I wish we were ready for another Carl Sagan. If we are then I’m waiting to be awed.

    A casual post on the interwebs about losing/gaining communication with an object that uses less power than my NVIDIA 2080 beyond the gravitational pull of our Sun.

    Lawl. Fuck that. Crazy. People looking for a miracle well just read the fucking article. Mankind can do amazing things when we just put our minds to it.

    (Pre-edit: I was thinking I should use the ever wise internet to verify claims about gravitational pull. I’m 100% wrong but the point still stands. Damn it we can do anything if we just agree and put our minds to it. [From: NASA Despite the probe entering interstellar space, Voyager 2, along with Voyager 1, have not left the solar system and won’t for quite a while, NASA said. The space agency said Voyager 2 will leave the Oort Cloud, “a collection of small objects that are still under the influence of the Sun’s gravity,” in approximately 30,000 years, so it is still being influenced by the Sun’s gravity to some extent.])

  • faethon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    151·
    1 year ago

    Are we sure it is the same thing? Alien-in-the-middle attack succeeded… 😁

  • omnius@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    The fact that we can maintain communication with something so far away boggles my fucking mind. Technology is some good shit, sad that NASA keeps getting funded less and the military keeps getting funded more.

  • golli@lemm.eeEnglish
    131·
    1 year ago

    interstellar shout

    Seems like they haven’t read the “remembrance of Earth’s past” trilogy, otherwise they might have known better than to shout into the universe

    • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.socialEnglish
      181·
      1 year ago

      Realistically, the universe is very unlikely to operate under the scenario that series depicts, because if an alien species existed with sufficient technology to wipe out other intelligent species from a distance, and desired to take out any other species they knew about like the whole dark forest idea implies, then they shouldnt need active proof of intelligence like an attempt at communication, it should be simpler to just look at planets for signs of planetary biospheres, in their atmospheres for example, and launch whatever planet-sterilizing weapons they planned to use at lifebearing planets before anything intelligent ever evolves. If they get powerful enough (which given the age of the universe they probably should be, it would seem fairly unlikely for all spacefairing aliens in a given area of space to have come about within even the same million years, even if sci-fi likes to portray it this way) then they dont even need to look for biosignatures, they could just preemptively attack every planet in the galaxy with relativistic projectiles. There are a lot of planets, sure, but a finite amount, and they’d have a lot of time to do this in. Hiding should be essentially impossible, because your location is almost certainly compromised before you even exist. Given that we exist, this implies that nobody in this general side of the galaxy behaves this way, either because there are no species in this region with the capacity to do this, or because they do not behave in such a hostile manner. Further, a species that does have the capacity to operate this way should at least consider that, if other intelligent species exist with any frequency, then it is very unlikely that they are the first intelligent species to exist, and therefore that as their territory or general area of contact and influence expands, they will inevitably encounter some civilization more powerful than theirs. When they do encounter that more advanced civilization, then having a history of destroying every intelligent species they find immediately is not going to give them a very good impression, and probably would get them seen as a threat, far more than they would if they were not overtly hostile to everything they encounter.

  • benwubbleyou@lemmy.worldEnglish
    124·
    1 year ago

    Based on comments and stuff I read, isn’t this sooner than expected? I thought I read somewhere it wouldn’t be until October until contact would be possibly back.

    • TheAndrewBrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      They planned on trying a command to fix it but they didn’t expect it to work and said that October when the system reset happened was the best shot. Seems like the command ended up working though.

    • Gr8fulZach@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Yes! Very glad they were able to reestablish contact. It makes me happy knowing that both Voyagers are still out there sending useful data still after all these years. Absolutely incredible. I think Carl Sagan would also be very pleased.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Nasa is back in full contact with its lost Voyager 2 probe months earlier than expected, the space agency said.

    A signal was picked up on Tuesday but thanks to an “interstellar shout” - a powerful instruction - its antenna is now back facing Earth.

    Staff used the “highest-power transmitter” to send a message to the spacecraft and timed it to be sent during “the best conditions” so the antenna lined up with the command, Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd told AFP.

    After communications were lost, the probe had been unable to receive commands or send back data to Nasa’s Deep Space Network - an array of giant radio antennas across the world.

    On Monday, the space agency said its huge dish in Australia’s capital, Canberra, was trying to detect any stray signals from Voyager 2.

    The probes were designed to take advantage of a rare alignment of outer planets, which occurs about every 176 years, to explore Jupiter and Saturn.

    I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • Kinglink@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      1 year ago

      This is making me think…

      1. Some guy hates his job, which is to fly to Voyager from Space station Gamma 32 and clean it off, because kids like to take their spacecraft out and tag it with rude names. Voyager still continues on it’s trek. The guy hates his job, it’s just what was known as a Janitor on Earth, which has almost no purpose in the post-consumption society.

      And yet we sit here in 2023 and would be utterly fascinating with every single part of that idea. I don’t know if we’ll ever reach it, but I could see a future that is so far ahead of where we are today, that it would be unrecognizable.

      I hope we have a chance to get there.