NASA's Voyager 2 Flew By Saturn 35 Years Ago Today (space.com) 61
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Thirty-five years ago today, a NASA spacecraft got an up-close look at beautiful, enigmatic Saturn. On Aug. 25, 1981, the Voyager 2 probe zoomed within 26,000 miles (41,000 kilometers) of the ringed planet's cloud tops. The discoveries made by Voyager 2 -- and by its twin, Voyager 1, which had flown past Saturn nine months earlier -- reshaped scientists' understanding of the Saturn system and planted the seed for NASA's Cassini mission, which began orbiting the ringed planet in 2004, NASA officials said. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched a few weeks apart in 1977, tasked with performing a "grand tour" of the solar system's big planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The two spacecraft accomplished that goal, eyeing all four gaseous worlds up close, and also studying 48 of their moons. (Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and Saturn, while Voyager 2 had close encounters with all four planets.) The Voyagers weren't the first spacecraft to fly by Saturn; that distinction belongs to NASA's Pioneer 11 probe, which did so in 1979. But the Voyagers broke a lot of new ground; they discovered four new Saturn moons, for example, and revealed an incredible diversity of landscapes on satellites such as Dione, Tethys and Iapetus, NASA officials said. August 25th appears to be a good day for nerds. You can view some out-of-this-world photos from NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 probes here.
Still going, too (Score:1)
Not as newsworthy as Voyager 1's interstellar data, but Voyager 2 is also heading out of the solar system on it's "Interstellar Mission", it is expected to be able to provide measurements of interstellar plasma density & temperature once it's out there.
Re: Still going, too (Score:1)
So Thats where the backup CD went!
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and a ton more anniversaries! Just look at how many times we can celebrate it having left the solar system!
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Explain how one can perceive "obvious subtle" overtones.
Please explain this thoroughly and be *** specific ***.
Too many people on the internet post anonymous stuff like this then just leave, and don't explain their position.
Please be *** specific ***.
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"Value Signalling" requires no defense, for the SJW crowd, all you have to do is indicate you have the "correct" opinions. Having a logical justification or rationale for holding the opinion is superfluous. Ut's enough just to show you have the opinion to get your credibility
Relativeness (Score:5, Informative)
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But I saw it come back as VGER!
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Take me to the Creator!
Re:Relativeness (Score:4, Informative)
For those who don't want to do the math, there's a 8760 light hours in a light year. So the furthest craft from earth is only 0.2% of the way to the closest star.
Why haven't we done Voyager 3 and 4? (Score:2)
These were amazing missions that provided a TON of data and knowledge for the price.
With modern tech, do the same missions, same planets, new info!
Re:Why haven't we done Voyager 3 and 4? (Score:5, Informative)
With modern tech, do the same missions, same planets, new info!
Voyager took advantage of an alignment of the planets that only occurs once every 175 years or so. A similar mission won't happen for a long time. Meanwhile, New Horizons [wikipedia.org] just buzzed Pluto, and is now heading into the Kuiper Belt.
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What is more, New Horizons did a flyby of Jupiter [wikipedia.org] on its way to the outer solar system - quite similar to Voyager. However, this was not in the prime science mission, so they didn't gather all the data they could, it was really more a system test to make sure that they could take useful data.
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Original paper describing the travel benefits of the alignment [gravityassist.com].
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NASA stuff has been morphed by Congress into a source of pork. The folks in Congress hem and haw about which states get to build components. It's like a horse and donkey trading show, "OK, so my state will build the engines, your state will build the avionics, and your state will sell the television rights".
Just give NASA the money, and let them decide who is best to deliver.
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Just give NASA the money, and let them decide who is best to deliver.
As much as I like and respect the folks at NASA, I wouldn't hand ANY government agency a blank check or leave them to do whatever they want with the money. Money corrupts and the good folks at NASA aren't immune. I trust NASA more than most but not that much. That said you do have a valid point that Congress is getting in the way too much. How to solve this I'm not sure. I do think increasing NASA funding and keeping them focused on science, exploration and advanced technology research would be hugely
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That said you do have a valid point that Congress is getting in the way too much. How to solve this I'm not sure.
Limit them to a single term in a specific office. But, we can start by removing party affiliation from the ballot. That alone will probably lead to more churn than any other single change other than hard term limits. It would certainly change the face of politics in the US.
Term limits (Score:2)
Limit them to a single term in a specific office.
A nice idea but then you end up with a bunch of people in office that don't even know where the restroom is much less how to get anything done. If someone is doing a good job I'm fine with them serving more than one term. However I don't think they need to serve more than 4 terms in the House, 2 terms as president or two terms as Senator. Churn just for the sake of churn is pointless. But I don't think we need people serving in congress for multiple decades either.
But, we can start by removing party affiliation from the ballot.
Will never ever happen. Waste of time
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Check out the history of the early years (e.g., https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/sql01). For example, why would you build a space center in Texas? Because the VP and a high-ranking member of Congress's budget committee were from Texas, of course.
"On September 19, 1961, Administrator James E. Webb of NASA formally announced that the new Manned Spacecraft Center would be built in southeastern Harris County, Texas, about
Why Houston? (Score:2)
Actually, Houston was chosen because land was cheap, and because of the proximity of the site to the canal passage to the Gulf of Mexico, to allow shipping large rocket boosters to the cape by barge.
Of course, they ended up not manufacturing large rocket boosters at Johnson, so that turned out to be unnecessary and irrelevant. You might suggest that this requirement, that the site have barge accessibility to the Atlantic, was put in place for no reason other than to make the Texas site competitive. But,
Re:Why haven't we done Voyager 3 and 4? (Score:4, Informative)
A flyby is acceptable for a first mission. The science data from Voyager answered some questions, but also raised lots of new questions. To answer these, we went for orbiting missions that would spend far longer at the planet, using better instruments, and new instruments inspired by the Voyager science return.
Flybys have big drawbacks: you only get a few hours of observation time, so you can't study patterns that occur over long periods (seasonal changes, for example). You can't even see the entire surface of the planet (unless you get lucky and the planet rotates really quickly).
For Jupiter and Saturn, we've had several orbiters now (e.g. Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini, Juno) and we've amassed far more knowledge than flybys could ever give us.
Uranus and Neptune haven't had dedicated missions yet, but that might change soon.
Voyager 3 and 4 were planned initially, by the way (identical to Voyager 1 and 2, with mission plans that included Pluto). They fell to budget cuts (early '70s, NASA was elbow-deep in expensive Apollo missions).
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Budget cuts.
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Budget cuts.
We seem to have the money for more tanks and aircraft carriers...
Voyager was cheap! Build one less Aircraft Carrier and double NASA's budget!
I know slashdot is usually behind (Score:2, Funny)
but 35 years!?
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but 35 years!?
It has something to do with Einstein's relativity. Slashdot is moving faster than the speed of light. Or maybe the rest of the world is moving faster than the speed of light. At any rate 35 years comes out of the equation.
I think.
Maybe.
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Thank you editors (Score:2)
As usual, "today" means "yesterday" on Slashdot. And without "today" meaning "today" this story is pretty much worthless (we all knew about the fly-by).
Better yet would have been to give us a "tomorrow" or "day after next" story, so we could have planned our fly-by parties.
Oh I wish I were a Slashdot editor. I could still live the life of a slacker, but get paid for it.
Is 35 some magic number? (Score:2)
I can understand celebrations at 25 years and 50 etc
or 32 for binary freaks
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celebrations at 25 years
This is just Slashdot being 10 years late.
Voyager eh? (Score:2)
V'ger is pleased with the Creator and would like them to run more missions to the larger planets.
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V'ger is pleased with the Creator and would like them to run more missions to the larger planets.
A carbon unit infestation in interfering with the Creator. Send a probe to the Creator's home planet to render aid.
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AFAIK a Falcon 9 Heavy rocket can do a manned orbital lunar mission in a single launch. The Russians could do it with the Proton rocket (Zond program), with technology available in the 1960s, and the Falcon 9 Heavy has more launch capacity than the Proton. The first Falcon 9 Heavy rocket should launch this year or next.
Developing the lander is easy. SpaceX already designed the SuperDracos for the Dragon V2 capsule. First launch for the capsule supposed to happen next year. The transfer vehicle doesn't sound
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PS: a manned lunar landing mission could be done with a simultaneous launch of two rockets (can't remember if you need two Falcon 9 Heavies or you can do it with a Falcon 9 Heavy and a regular Falcon 9). This should be possible once SpaceX has their Texas launch site operating in addition to their existing Cape Canaveral launch site. The cost of the rockets for the launch could be quite small if SpaceX reused the lower stages from prior launches.
ULA could also pull it off in theory if they wanted to. The or
How can it? It has flown for only 34.8 years! (Score:3)
[*] I am using the formula dleta_t=(sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2) + poetic_license(liberal_dose)).