Voyager I and II

[garyclaytonpalmer]

What has happened to the early space probes that were first sent out from earth back in the 60's or 70's that have gone out past Pluto. I cannot think of their names. One was mentioned in a Star Trek movie. Oh, yes Voyager! There was a Voyager I and II right? Where are these now and do they still send back information to NASA?

[rstevenson]

Let me Google up the answer for you. ... ...

Okay, have a look at Wikipedia, searching for Voyager, scrolling down to the Current Status section and you will find what you seek.

Rob

[bystander]

Click to view full size image

Voyager Mission Site
Voyager Mission Pages
Pioneer Mission Pages

[garyclaytonpalmer]

Message in a Bottle
Each Voyager has mounted to one of the sides of the bus a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk. The disk has recorded on it sounds and images of Earth designed to portray the diversity of life and culture on the planet. Each disk is encased in a protective aluminum jacket along with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions explaining from where the spacecraft originated and how to play the disk are engraved onto the jacket. Electroplated onto a 2 cm area on the cover is also an ultra-pure source of uranium-238 (with a radioactivity of about 0.26 nanocuries and a half-life of 4.51 billion years), allowing the determination of the elapsed time since launch by measuring the amount of daughter elements to remaining U238. The 115 images on the disk were encoded in analog form. The sound selections (including greetings in 55 languages, 35 sounds, natural and man-made, and portions of 27 musical pieces) are designed for playback at 1000 rpm. The Voyagers were not the first spacecraft designed with such messages to the future. Pioneers 10 and 11, LAGEOS, and the Apollo landers also included plaques with a similar intent, though not quite so ambitious.

It states above that there are instructions of how to play the disk. If we encountered a message from a distant civilisation how would we ever desypher what it said ? How will a intelligent being do the same from out unknown language?

[neufer]

Walt Whitman _Leaves of Grass_ 1900.
___ The Untold Want

THE untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.

----------------------------------------------
____ Now, Voyager (1942)

Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis):
Oh Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars.
----------------------------------------------

[makc]

btw

[JuanAustin]

Did anyone think to include instructions on how to build a cd/dvd player using metal, plastics, glass, and etc infrastructure using power generated from water, nuclear, wind or other power infrastructure and regulating agencies there of??

[garyclaytonpalmer]

Thats what I am talking about. Its like we find a spaceship floating towards our solar system. On it is a message that plainly says in 400 alien languages from Planet X, "aksmu anshyan mdjusty ammaunnhs annsaa s asnnahs ahsb absba a sbhhfif " now who is decyphering it and figuring out what it says? Look how long its taken to decypher Egyptian and other ancient Earth cultures and learn what they were saying. Now think about it with a culture from another solar system thousands to millions of light years away.
Ever see the Outer Limits or Twilight Zone show about the alien who lands on Earth and shares a book about his planet, Millions of people believe he is of good intention and go to his planet, soon after nearly all of Earths residents have gone a scientist says "We have decyphered the book, its called "To Serve Man" but its a cookbook!" lol....
Or the Star Trek movie where the thing comes to Earth and hovers in space sending a message, only its talking to Whales not humans. And we barely know anything about whale songs...

[rstevenson]

You seem to be insisting that these hypothetical intelligent beings wouldn't act intelligently by offering us some clues -- as we did on the Voyager plaques.

Rob

[garyclaytonpalmer]

I just dont think no matter how intelligent they are in their own culture that our writting would be anymore decypherable than theirs would be to us.

[The Code]

When they find Voyager 1 and 2,,, They will know us better than we know ourselves. Radio

[garyclaytonpalmer]

Ever hear the story about how man defined God?
On day after all the knowledge of man was written down, man said is the a God. They looked and looked thru out all the books and said, not enough information. Then centuries passed and man again asked the question is there a God, Still after all that was written down was looked at, not enough information was discovered.
So man as he traveled around the world and recorded every known thing, he came to the same question again, is there a God. Still not enough information!
Finally man moved into space exploration and began studing the universe. Soon all the information was put into the supercomputers, the question was asked is there a God. The computer replied, "I Am"

[neufer]

I just dont think no matter how intelligent they are in their own culture that
our writting [sic] would be anymore decypherable than theirs would be to us.

The irony would be if their message to us was on a gold plated 8-track cartridge.

[rstevenson]

Ever hear the story about how man defined God? ...

You're thinking of "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke. He told it better.

Rob

[Qev]

Sounds more like Asimov's "The Last Question" to me.

[makc]

a time machine would solve it while travelling back in time, the outside world would, just like a movie on fast-backward, go from chaos to order by the same laws that it normally goes from order to chaos... so, just go back in time, maybe kill your-other-self, and harvest an energy again.

or maybe not, maybe by travelling backwards in time we would propagate changes into outside world too, and those would change the past before we can get there... ah well, this is going off-topic.

[rstevenson]

Sounds more like Asimov's "The Last Question" to me.

You're right. I must plead sagging memory (among other things) since I read the story about 50 years ago, around the same time I read Clarke's.

Rob

[emc]

Voyager in the news...



"a pale blue dot"

Voyager 1 is now nearly 17 billion kilometers away from the Sun...

[jacklap]

Voyager 1 was launched 9/5/1977 and has just passed it's twentieth anniversary as an extra-solar traveler. According to wiki it's exiting our neighborhood at about 17km/sec. It's an easy matter to calculate the age of Voyager I in seconds, minutes, days, months, etc knowing the moment of launch (birth if you have it) until this anniversary last Februray 12. But would a hypothetical "time and date keeper" aboard Voyager who had a clock that was synchronized with it's terrestrial counterpart at launch be celebrating at the same moment we did? Of course, I'm thinking of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (?) and thinking that the timekeeper aboard Voyager would check calendar and clock and wonder why the fuss back on Earth. They're too early! Any idea of how different the two clocks might now be?

[Chris Peterson]

Voyager 1 was launched 9/5/1977 and has just passed it's twentieth anniversary as an extra-solar traveler. According to wiki it's exiting our neighborhood at about 17km/sec. It's an easy matter to calculate the age of Voyager I in seconds, minutes, days, months, etc knowing the moment of launch (birth if you have it) until this anniversary last Februray 12. But would a hypothetical "time and date keeper" aboard Voyager who had a clock that was synchronized with it's terrestrial counterpart at launch be celebrating at the same moment we did? Of course, I'm thinking of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (?) and thinking that the timekeeper aboard Voyager would check calendar and clock and wonder why the fuss back on Earth. They're too early! Any idea of how different the two clocks might now be?

By my calculation, assuming that Voyager 1 was traveling at 17 km/s the entire 32 years (which it wasn't, but close enough for our purposes, I think), its clock is now behind ours by about 1.6 seconds.

[jacklap]

Thanks Chris. Somehow, I thought it might be a bit more, maybe as much as 10 minutes, going on gut feelings. Probably stemming from the little I know about having to tweak the clocks on the GP satellites almost daily(?). Might I extend my original question by further asking about the effect on Voyager 1's clock that it's tour of the gas giants had on it. These planets have many times the mass of Earth, thus their warping of space-time would be greater. Since the Voyagers had close encounters with them not only for exploration, but their gravitational boost to the next objective, would the effect have been to slow the Voyager clock a little more, or speed it up or neither relative to the clock on Earth. Thanks.

[Chris Peterson]

Might I extend my original question by further asking about the effect on Voyager 1's clock that it's tour of the gas giants had on it. These planets have many times the mass of Earth, thus their warping of space-time would be greater.

No calculations here- they are more complex, and I don't have enough information about the trajectories. However, I feel pretty confident in saying that the effect of any planetary masses on the clock is orders of magnitude less than the effect from velocity alone. While the gas giants are more massive, their effect on the curvature of space-time is still tiny. Relativistic effects from gravitational fields are not significant until you have very strong fields- near the surface of neutron stars or black holes, for instance.

[Orca]

1.6 s over several decades sounds like a good guess; even though Voyager 2 is moving pretty fast by our standards it is only traveling at a very small fraction of the speed of light.

[Chris Peterson]

1.6 s over several decades sounds like a good guess

It wasn't a guess <g>.

[Orca]

Oh. Sorry.

I meant to say, "If I were to make a guess, it would be a few seconds tops, so your calculation sounds good to me."