Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters after 37 Years

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
Staff member
Joined
Aug 20, 2006
Messages
13,000
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is 21 billion kilometers from Earth, but we can still communicate with it across that distance. This week, scientists and engineers managed to command the spacecraft to fire a set trajectory thrusters for the first time in 37 years to determine their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses.

Voyager 1, NASA's farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or "puffs," lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet.
 
amazing in 40 years the damn thing has found NOTHING.... Assuming NASA even has it out there... I'm surprised an asteroid hasn't hit the damn thing, again assuming it even exists.
 
amazing in 40 years the damn thing has found NOTHING.... Assuming NASA even has it out there... I'm surprised an asteroid hasn't hit the damn thing, again assuming it even exists.

Are you joking?

It’s in interstellar space. It would be amazing if it actually had found something.

Peddle your conspiracy theories elsewhere.
 
Are you joking?

It’s in interstellar space. It would be amazing if it actually had found something.

Peddle your conspiracy theories elsewhere.
Stop with your nonsense! It doesn't exist, the moon landing never happened and Andy Kaufman is in Hawaii - just look at the "facts"! Oh and 2pac hologram concerts, well we all know this, are just him rapping from the Caribbean!

On a serious note this is amazing that the communication technology on Voyager, installed half a century ago, is still capable of receiving communication. Even if it is just "farting" it's thrusters all of us on a forum like this should be impressed!
 
amazing in 40 years the damn thing has found NOTHING.... Assuming NASA even has it out there... I'm surprised an asteroid hasn't hit the damn thing, again assuming it even exists.

5 years. Voyager 1 actually documented a lot on it's trip, it was only in 2012 that it passed into interstellar space. And has given information on what space is like outside of the impact of local solar winds etc. measurements of interstellar fields and particles are only possible here and were unknowns. And while it is in interstellar space, it is still in the solar system. And outside of particles etc, we were not expecting to run into planets and space ships or even asteroids for a long, long time, think hundreds or thousands of years.
 
amazing in 40 years the damn thing has found NOTHING.... Assuming NASA even has it out there... I'm surprised an asteroid hasn't hit the damn thing, again assuming it even exists.
Please tell us all that you were being sarcastic and that you haven't been on this tech site for years while still managing to foster your conspiracy theories.
 
I check the Voyager site from time to time, as well as the position of the ISS, because I love watching it fly overhead.
 
You can see voyager? Wow! Those are some impressive peepers! ;-)

7b80wTW.gif
 
This is one of those times I'm proud to be a human, you know most times feeling nothing but utter contempt for humanity......but this, this we can all be proud of. Dead Silence for 40 years, sub-zero temperatures and it still mostly works. Sad to say they predict 2-3 years left in the power packs and then it's off forever, I think the other one is now dead as well....but you know those rovers are out ther eon mars, right now, doing shit....rolling around autonomously doing SCIENCE! on a frickin different planet after having landed on it.....haven't needed a human beings touch in what....a decade? Two? (Full Autism EdgeLordery Defined)..... That little rover was back in the early or mid 90's I think..pretty sure I drove out the day it landed in those balloons and bought the MicroMachines version of it that was out at the time.

Why can't Ford build a car that lasts that long :D
 
If we ever develop a method for fast interstellar travel I hope somebody goes to fetch these craft. It would be a shame for them to just fly off never to be seen again.

As a real life rocket scientist I disagree. The greatness of voyager's 1 and 2 is their enduring, never ending mission. Let them plot their course to some distant solar system or even perhaps galaxy. They're the ultimate "Brooks was here."
 
As a real life rocket scientist I disagree. The greatness of voyager's 1 and 2 is their enduring, never ending mission. Let them plot their course to some distant solar system or even perhaps galaxy. They're the ultimate "Brooks was here."

You're not wrong and I suppose if we are ever able to reach them then its likely we've overcome a lot of the issues that are likely to doom mankind. The way things are going they might one day be the only evidence left that humanity had the potential to be great.
 
yes i was being an asshole about Voyager, but I believe than we are a freak of nature and people can't deal. Besides do you really believe if we were visited by an intelligent race what do you think most people would do? L.A. riots x 1,000,000. No thanx. If Aliens show up great if not who cares? There are plenty of plenty of stars, atoms, gas, planets, etc but yet only one of us. Doesn't that tell you something?
 
What service do they use. My phone carrier is terrible compared to them.
it took 19 hours+ to send a message and took another 19 hours+ to received the message and your carrier is terrible? Da fuck!o_O
 
yes i was being an asshole about Voyager, but I believe than we are a freak of nature and people can't deal. Besides do you really believe if we were visited by an intelligent race what do you think most people would do? L.A. riots x 1,000,000. No thanx. If Aliens show up great if not who cares? There are plenty of plenty of stars, atoms, gas, planets, etc but yet only one of us. Doesn't that tell you something?

"I believe that we are a freak of nature"

Based on what evidence do you believe this? We still aren't entirely sure how life forms so we have absolutely no way of knowing how rare it is.

What we do know is that there are 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe and each galaxy has about 100 billion stars. Couple this with the fact that there are estimates that upwards of 20% of sun-like stars have planets orbiting in their habitable zone and it stands to reason that some of these will support SOME form of life.

Our situation in the universe is NOT unique, so it seems likely that WE are not unique.
 
Life exists even in the most hostile environments on this Earth. That alone should tell you that our incomprehensively vast universe is teeming with life. We will find intelligent life elsewhere when they decide we're ready to find it.
 
As a real life rocket scientist I disagree. The greatness of voyager's 1 and 2 is their enduring, never ending mission. Let them plot their course to some distant solar system or even perhaps galaxy. They're the ultimate "Brooks was here."

That's absolutely fucking beautiful and hits right in the heart, man.
 
yes i was being an asshole about Voyager, but I believe than we are a freak of nature and people can't deal. Besides do you really believe if we were visited by an intelligent race what do you think most people would do? L.A. riots x 1,000,000. No thanx. If Aliens show up great if not who cares? There are plenty of plenty of stars, atoms, gas, planets, etc but yet only one of us. Doesn't that tell you something?

Well it does confirm my above post.

In order:
1. Most people would pause, a few would go batshit and riot and if we where smart we would know who to remove from the genepool.
The reality here is we are violent, we are competitive, and we are THE apex predator of this planet. Nature made us this way, nature made all life on the planet this (competitive and violent, life demands a sacrifice of life) way. aliens give us a great target that is an easy them.

2. If aliens show up, life changes forever.

3. Yeah, that space is really fucking huge, it is to our knowledge completely hostile to life, and you have no grasp of that basic concept. Without some magic technology, anything that would come here would be more like Rama and less like the movies you watch.
 
Man; impressive piece of hardware. We are still so far from getting anuwhere. We are not even close to the next star deapite launching this 40 yeats ago.

Exciting but aort of depressing. We always over estimate the future.

Lol look at Back to the Future!

2017 and we are still in shuttles and consider a trip to Mars as the next big milestone.

If you would have told that to someone in the 1970s, they would have asked "what the fuck have you guys been doing??"
 
If you would have told that to someone in the 1970s, they would have asked "what the fuck have you guys been doing??"

....Making smartphone apps, Facebook & oh, A.I that will ultimately destroy us.:( We're setting out sights high!
 
amazing in 40 years the damn thing has found NOTHING.... Assuming NASA even has it out there... I'm surprised an asteroid hasn't hit the damn thing, again assuming it even exists.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. "
-Douglas Adams
What service do they use. My phone carrier is terrible compared to them.
I'd be interested as well. I bet it gets less lag than when a bunch of Brazilians join a multiplayer FPS game server.
 
amazing in 40 years the damn thing has found NOTHING.... Assuming NASA even has it out there... I'm surprised an asteroid hasn't hit the damn thing, again assuming it even exists.
I . . . what? You . . . uh . . .

I'm going to bed.
 
amazing in 40 years the damn thing has found NOTHING.... Assuming NASA even has it out there... I'm surprised an asteroid hasn't hit the damn thing, again assuming it even exists.

Do you even venture outside of your mothers house? Because if you do, it's really the Matrix.
 
Back
Top