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  #1  
Unread 03-02-2015, 04:33 AM
Stephen Hampton Stephen Hampton is offline
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Default Can Voyager Escape?

Our first attempt at leaving this solar system, is not yet half way out to where Halley's comet flies among the imperceptible unknown matters and energies of space-time. Will she survive? Will she return? what information (or unknowns) will she bring back to us (our posterity) when, and if, she does return? Is this not a good subject for poetical expression? Maybe some poet has already addressed this... if so, I'd like to read their effort.
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  #2  
Unread 03-02-2015, 06:34 AM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
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Here’s an excerpt from this NASA article, 'Pale Blue Dot' Images Turn 25:

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Today, Voyager 1, at a distance of 130 astronomical units, is the farthest human-made object from Earth, and it still regularly communicates with our planet. In August 2012, the spacecraft entered interstellar space – the space between the stars -- and has been delivering data about this uncharted territory ever since. Its twin, Voyager 2, also launched in 1977, is also journeying toward interstellar space.

Voyager 1 is more than three times farther from Earth than it was on Valentine's Day 25 years ago. Today, Earth would appear about 10 times dimmer from Voyager's vantage point.

Sagan wrote in his "Pale Blue Dot" book: "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4484
And a link to a poem I wrote a few years ago about the Voyagers (second poem on page):
http://www.the-chimaera.com/July2011...ms/Elster.html
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  #3  
Unread 03-02-2015, 07:48 AM
Stephen Hampton Stephen Hampton is offline
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Thank you, Martin. Another question; As halley's comet cannot escape the gravity of our Sun, and must return, how can either of our sister Voyagers?
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  #4  
Unread 03-02-2015, 08:50 AM
Jim Burrows Jim Burrows is offline
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This one is about Voyager II, not Voyager I, but still. It's by John Updike.


An Open Letter to Voyager 2


Dear Voyager:

This is to thank you for
The last twelve years, and wishing you, what’s more,
Well in your new career in vacant space.
When you next brush a star, the human race
May be a layer of old sediment,
A wrinkle of the primates, a misspent
Youth of some zoomorphs. But you, your frail
Insectoid form, will skim the sparkling vale
Of the void practically forever. As
The frictionless light-years and aeons pass,
The frozen points that from Earth’s vantage held
Their mythic patterns firm will shift and melt;
No wide-dish radios will strain to hear
Your whispered news, nor poets call you dear.

Ere then, let me assure you, you’ve been grand —
A little shaky at the outset, and
Arthritic in the swivel-joints, antique
In circuitry, virtually deaf, and weak
As a refrigerator bulb, you kept
Those picture postcards coming. Signals crept

To Pasadena, where they were enhanced
Until those planets clear as daylight danced.
The stripes and swirls of Jupiter’s slow boil,
Its crazy moons, one cracked, one fried in oil,
One glazed with ice, and one too raw to eat,
Still cooking in the juice of inner heat,
Arrived on our astonished monitors.
Then, next, after a station break of years,
Fat Saturn rode your feeble beam, and lo! —
Not corny as we feared, but art deco —
The hard-edge, Technicolor rings, as thin
As cardboard, broader than Lake Michigan,
And casting flashlit shadows. Planet three
Was Uranus (accented solemnly
By anchormen on the first syllable,
Lest viewers think the “your” too personal):
A glassy globe of gas upon its side,
Its nine dark, close-knit rings at last descried,
Its corkscrew-shaped magnetic passions bared,
Its pocked attendants digitized and aired.
Last loomed, against the Oort cloud, blue Neptune,
Its counterrevolutionary moon,
Its wispy arcs of rings and whitish streaks

Of unpredicted tempests — thermal freaks,
As if an unused backyard swimming pool,
Remote from stirring sunlight, dark and cool
(Sub-sub-sub-freezing), by itself would splash.
Displays of splendid waste, of rounded trash!
Your looping miles of guided drift brought home
How barren cosmic space would be to roam.
One awful ball succeeds another, none
Fit for a shred or breath of life. Our one
Delightful, verdant orb was primed to cede
The H2O and O and N we need.
Your survey, in its scrupulous depiction,
Purged from the solar system science fiction —
No more Uranians or Io-ites,
Just Earthlings dreaming through their dewy nights.

You saw where we could not, and dared to go
Where we could scarcely dream; you showed
A kind of metal courage, and faithfulness.
Your cryptic, ciphered, graven messages
Are for ourselves, designed to boomerang
Back like a prayer from where the angels sang,
That shining ancient blank encirclement.

Your voyage now outsoars mundane intent
And joins matter’s blind motion. Au revoir,
You rickety free-falling man-made star!
Machines, like songs, belong to all. A man
Aloft is Russian or American,
But you aloft were simply sent by Man
At large.

Sincerely yours,

A fan.
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  #5  
Unread 03-02-2015, 01:34 PM
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Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
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130 AUs is 65,000 light-seconds (quite close enough), or almost exactly three quarters of one day away at the speed of light (mmm, mmm). That's a long reach for radio! It won't come back because it's not in a solar orbit. Never was. Moving "slow", but much faster than Halley at that reach.

Last edited by Allen Tice; 03-02-2015 at 02:23 PM.
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Unread 03-02-2015, 02:45 PM
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Mario Pita Mario Pita is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Allen Tice View Post
130 AUs is...almost exactly three quarters of one day away at the speed of light
While supposedly the speed of light is the cosmic speed limit, if we got in a car and traveled at the local speed limit of 55 miles per hour, it would take us almost 220 million years to travel those 130 AUs, so Voyager must be traveling very fast to have crossed that in a few decades, though at only a fraction of the speed of light.
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Unread 03-02-2015, 04:21 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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That's why no one obeys the speed limit, Mario.
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Unread 03-02-2015, 05:08 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
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Voyager 1 is moving at 38,610 mph.

Here’s something tangentially related to the Voyagers, but I found it interesting.

Excerpt:

Quote:
The Space Shuttles weren’t starships. At a maximum speed of about 17,600 mph (about 28,300 kph), it would have taken a Space Shuttle about 165,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.

How about the Voyager spacecraft? These two unmanned space probes – Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 – were launched in 1977. They’re now heading out of our solar system. The Voyagers aren’t aimed toward Alpha Centauri, but if they were, they’d take tens of thousands of years to get there.

On the other hand, eventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will drift within 1.6 light-years (9.3 trillion miles) of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis. In some 296,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass 4.3 light-years from Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Hmm, 4.3 light-years. That’s the distance between us and Alpha Centauri.

The problem with conventional rockets is that, if you’re carrying fuel, you need more fuel in order to carry your fuel to accomplish star-to-star travel.

http://earthsky.org/space/alpha-centauri-travel-time

Last edited by Martin Elster; 03-02-2015 at 05:19 PM.
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  #9  
Unread 03-02-2015, 10:40 PM
Chris O'Carroll Chris O'Carroll is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Stephen Hampton View Post
Thank you, Martin. Another question; As halley's comet cannot escape the gravity of our Sun, and must return, how can either of our sister Voyagers?
The rocket scientists who launched Halley's Comet from Earth were using very primitive propellants. By the time the first Voyager was launched, technology had undergone great advances.
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Unread 03-02-2015, 11:04 PM
Michael Cantor Michael Cantor is offline
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Halley himself was aware of this, and discussed it frequently in his memoirs. The Object (which is how he referred to it) is on its way and behaving well, he wrote to Francis, but I hope that it does not eventually lead to a generation of geeks.
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