Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Voyager has left the building

Phys.Org:Voyager 1 spacecraft reaches interstellar space, study confirms
According to this study the detectors on Voyager are receiving information that there has been a rise in electron density to levels that are expected outside the heliopause. This is being interpreted as proof that Voyager has at last left the Solar system. Now they plan to continue looking at the data to see what free space outside the Solar system is like. They expect to get a lot more information from Voyager in the years ahead. Not bad for a spacecraft that started its journey 36 years ago. That is a long time for something to just keep on working.

Bill Gill

OR to our alien neighbours just another example of humans littering


Now so long as the don't throw a bigger thing back over the fence

They don't build them like they used to. I think they went to great efforts to make them last as long as possible. It's exciting to know we have now penetrated interstellar space for the first time. I hope it doesn't meet up with an alien ship and get transformed into something dangerous. I know Star Trek is just fiction, but, ... the mind boggles at the potential fate of the voyagers. I wonder if in 300 years we will still be able to communicate with them when they reach the Oort cloud? Or will they be forgotten completely? I hope we have not sent them out to bring back our doom.

I doubt if they will ever be found by anybody once they wear out, and they will wear out. Keep in mind that space is big and the Voyager space craft are small. I expect that the only reason we can still track them is because they are emitting a signal pointing in our direction and we have a very good idea where they are. By the time they get to the Oort cloud they will be essentially undetectable.

As far as finding them is concerned I expect that they have to use some pretty sophisticated software just to keep track of where to point their antennas to locate them. I have been doing some programming for a calendar lately. Figuring the dates of non-gregorian calendars is a hassle. That's things like the Islamic and Hebrew calendars. The Chinese calendar is a real bug-a-boo. But to figure them out you have to know very precisely where the Sun and Moon are. I have a book "Astronomical Algorithms" by Jean Meeus. It has all the algorithms you need for tracking various heavenly bodies. The book uses shortened functions that are good enough for most "normal" tracking. To figure the longitude of the Sun at a given time you have to perform a calculation using 193 constant terms. The author provides the terms and they provide good enough accuracy to be used for general purposes. That is for just the Earth and Moon. The long calculation to give full accuracy uses something like 2500 terms. For something that is as far out as Voyager I can't imagine what it would take. But if we lose it I wouldn't bet on being able to find it again.

Bill Gill