NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced a computer glitch that’s causing a bit of a communication breakdown between the 46-year-old probe and its mission team on Earth.
Yeah I got very sad when I saw the headline and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Voyager 1’s death will be far sadder than most public figures. Maybe any.
Same, for a moment I was really concerned. Voyager is like a lifetime achievement for humanity at this point. When it stops communicating its going to be a big loss for the scientific community, and population as a whole. I’m not looking forward to hearing about its loss of functionality in the next decade or so.
I really can’t say, I’m not privy to any of the outer solar system projects that might be in the works. Voyager was originally intended to do flyby of the outer planets, and then it headed out of the solar system. I think the trajectory was always designed with the idea that it could exit the solar system. As far as I’m aware, we’ve done a few missions to asteroids, but nothing that is going out to do flyby of the outer planets. But, I could be wrong, don’t take my word for it. All of the stuff I have worked on has been near earth, or pointing away from the earth but still within the vicinity of L1 and L2 Lagrange points.
You’d be surprised how many missions nasa has in the works at any one time.
I think when we have space based fuel and fabrication infrastructure we’ll be able to make some interesting projects, some huge thing that just burns its rockets at full power through the solar system.
Or a very robust probe fired from a giant nuclear cannon on the dark side of the moon. If you start the journey at top speed that cuts out all the acceleration time, we could have stuff popping off in every direction.
