Voyager approaching edge of our Solar System. Wow.

Can some maths nerd :) crunch the numbers and tell us what % of light speed Voyager 1 is doing? I kind of did it and ended up with 0.34% ? Umm...I suck at math :(

Im guessing I got that horrendously wrong!
 
KatanaDV20 said:
Can some maths nerd :) crunch the numbers and tell us what % of light speed Voyager 1 is doing? I kind of did it and ended up with 0.34% ? Umm...I suck at math :(

Im guessing I got that horrendously wrong!
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I won't even try the maths, but here's a quick google

Voyager 1, has covered 1/600th of a light-year in 30 years and is currently moving at 1/18,000th the speed of light. At this rate, a journey to Proxima Centauri would take 72,000 years
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simulatorman said:
The International Space Station manages 7.7 km/sec in orbit.
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A nice way of getting this into perspective is this: if you're 6 feet tall, the distance to the horizon (assuming no major changes in elevation between it and your position, of course) is just over 3 miles. Imagine something covering that distance in less than a second...
 
Tetsujin said:
A nice way of getting this into perspective is this: if you're 6 feet tall, the distance to the horizon (assuming no major changes in elevation between it and your position, of course) is just over 3 miles. Imagine something covering that distance in less than a second...
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I should have put this in here to give some sense of the speed.
 
Must be very rewarding for anyone involved in its construction. Imagine being one of the engineers who bolted that thing together knowing its distance from Earth and humanity.
 
I love stuff like this, astronomy fascinates me. I wish more projects like this would happen, space exploration seems to have dwindled so much. Man I wish I could have seen the golden era when this sort of stuff was just beginning, all the apollo missions and the like... must have been an incredibly exciting time.
 
Ranger07 said:
It took me a while to work out exactly what you were talking about, after about five minutes of the cogs turning I am amazed. Are you serious though? it sounds almost unbelievable.
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What I typed is consistent with current understanding of the scales found in nature. It is very difficult if not impossible for our minds to grasp the scales. Studying cosmology during my physics degree (inc general interest) has helped and I think it is good to make comparisons of similar order changes, especially if it includes something on our own scale.

It is worth bearing in mind that the visible universe is not everything that is out there. The geometry of the universe is still unknown, if it is spherical (i.e. three dimensions wrapped around a 4d sphere) then it is limited in size. If the geometry is flat or hyperbolic then the universe is spatially infinite (although I think fancy topologies can give a non infinite hyperbolic universe), in which case any attempt to grasp the true scale is impossible.

dan1903 said:
I love stuff like this, astronomy fascinates me. I wish more projects like this would happen, space exploration seems to have dwindled so much. Man I wish I could have seen the golden era when this sort of stuff was just beginning, all the apollo missions and the like... must have been an incredibly exciting time.
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The current state of manned space exploration is quite sad. We might enter another golden era in future though, china and india could one day have a space race as rival super powers. There are technologies within our means to open up the skies far more effectively than chemical rockets will ever be able to. It is well worth having a read about the Orion Project. If politicians were brave enough to allow nuclear bombs to be used for peaceful means then we could launch roughly a thousand times more mass into space per cost than we do today. We could launch thousands of voyager style probes in one go, put telescopes in space that dwarf the ones on the ground today, have manned missions to mars and the rocky moons around the gas giants and all within decades if development of Orion was restarted tomorrow. If we were to notice a large asteroid on collision course for Earth at the 11th hour an Orion style vehicle might be the only thing powerful enough to push it off course. It would also make sunshades feasible. If Hawking is correct about our future then developing Orion may be a necessity in the long run. All other methods of putting large amounts of mass into space are not feasible, such as space elevators, or would kill a person, e.g. railguns.

I know I've off on one here a bit but I'll just leave you with the last paragraph from an article written in Science by Freeman Dyson:

"The story of Orion is significant, because this is the first time in modern history that a major expansion of human technology has been suppressed for political reasons. Many will feel that the precedent is a good one to have established. It is perhaps wise that radical advances in technology, which may be used both for good and for evil purposes, be delayed until the human species is better organized to cope with them. But those who have worked on Project Orion cannot share this view. They must continue to hope that they may see their work bear fruit in their own lifetimes. They cannot lose sight of the dream which fired their imaginations in 1958 and sustained them through the years of struggle afterward-the dream that the bombs which killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki may one day open the skies to mankind."

(Death of a Project, 9 July 1965, Volume 149 No 3680, I can't post the whole thing due to copyright)
 
You know I still find it super-awesome that Voyager 1 will be sailing serenely through the Universe long after our base elements have been returned to the Earth..its really cool.

Whatever happens to this planet - if humanity does have a "moment" and presses the "button" then we can rest assured that even if we are all wiped out there is a fleet of silent sentinels out there who will travel pretty much forever. The Voyagers, the Pioneers and the new probes like New Horizons (on its way right now to a Pluto flyby)

New Horizons
Encounter_01_m.jpg


trajectoryImage.jpg


nhov20101201_0422.jpg


All images from New Horizons site: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/index.php
 
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