Voyager 1 and 2 still alive!!!! 38,000 mph!

Voyager 2 Finds Space Is More Dense Outside the Solar System


interesting. well, if the heliosphere really has this "deflated croissant" shape, that would explain a few things.

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plus, we know "space" isnt "empty. recall Einstein called "like a fabric" with all the objects (stars, planets, us. etc) embedded in it. stands to reason it (space) might "bunch up" when solar winds on opposite directional vectors collide.

diggin' those Voyagers boss... 40 years and still kickin' science a** of there
 
Apparently 85% of space is made of dark matter and nobody knows what it is. I think we are just scratching the surface.
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-dark.html
I got to see a presentation on Voyager I in 1977 at the Council Eagle Scout dinner. JPL presented pictures of Jupiter and Saturn and gave a projection of where the mission would be.

I don’t think that they had any idea that the mission would still be going today.
 
Apparently 85% of space is made of dark matter and nobody knows what it is. I think we are just scratching the surface.
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-dark.html

another spin on that ... estimated 96% of the Universe is "dark" stuff -- dark energy and dark matter -- all around us, walking through it, its "walking" through us, etc.

imagine that .. rest of that math estimate is everything we can see is only 4% of what's out there. And that 4% has TRILLIONS of galaxies in it, with BILLIONS of stars in each one, that we can see.

gives me a headache and tremendous sense of "awe and insignificance" at the same time.

we are really, despite all the advancements in science and technology, kinda "ignorant". To me, that's why Voyagers are so cool. :)
 
More amazing news. 11 months on it's own with no commands from earth.
Earth will receive data but cannot send any to Voyager 2.

News | NASA's Deep Space Antenna Upgrades to Affect Voyager Communications


NASA's Deep Space Antenna Upgrades to Affect Voyager Communications
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DSS43 is a 70-meter-wide (230-feet-wide) radio antenna at the Deep Space Network's Canberra facility in Australia. It is the only antenna that can send commands to the Voyager 2 spacecraft.Credit: NASA/Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex
The antenna enhancements will improve future spacecraft communications, but during the upgrades, Voyager 2 will not be able to receive new commands from Earth.

Starting in early March, NASA's Voyager 2 will quietly coast through interstellar space without receiving commands from Earth. That's because the Voyager's primary means of communication, the Deep Space Network's 70-meter-wide (230-feet-wide) radio antenna in Canberra, Australia, will be undergoing critical upgrades for about 11 months. During this time, the Voyager team will still be able to receive science data from Voyager 2 on its mission to explore the outermost edge of the Sun's domain and beyond.

About the size of a 20-story office building, the dish has been in service for 48 years. Some parts of the 70-meter antenna, including the transmitters that send commands to various spacecraft, are 40 years old and increasingly unreliable. The Deep Space Network (DSN) upgrades are planned to start now that Voyager 2 has returned to normal operations, after accidentally overdrawing its power supply and automatically turning off its science instruments in January.

The network operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and is spread over three sites around the world, in California, Spain and Australia. This allows navigators to communicate with spacecraft at the Moon and beyond at all times during Earth's rotation. Voyager 2, which launched in 1977, is currently more than 11 billion miles (17 billion kilometers) from Earth. It is flying in a downward direction relative to Earth's orbital plane, where it can be seen only from the southern hemisphere and thus can communicate only with the Australian site.

Moreover, a special S-band transmitter is required to send commands to Voyager 2 - one both powerful enough to reach interstellar space and on a frequency that can communicate with Voyager's dated technology. The Canberra 70-meter antenna (called "DSS43") is the only such antenna in the southern hemisphere. As the equipment in the antenna ages, the risk of unplanned outages will increase, which adds more risk to the Voyager mission. The planned upgrades will not only reduce that risk, but will also add state-of-the art technology upgrades that will benefit future missions.

"Obviously, the 11 months of repairs puts more constraints on the other DSN sites," said Jeff Berner, Deep Space Network's chief engineer. "But the advantage is that when we come back, the Canberra antenna will be much more reliable."

The repairs will benefit far more than Voyager 2, including future missions like the Mars 2020 rover and Moon to Mars exploration efforts. The network will play a critical role in ensuring communication and navigation support for both the precursor Moon and Mars missions and the crewed Artemis missions. "The maintenance is needed to support the missions that NASA is developing and launching in the future, as well as supporting the missions that are operating right now," said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager and JPL Director for the Interplanetary Network.

The three Canberra 34-meter (111-foot) antennas can be configured to listen to Voyager 2's signal; they just won't be able to transmit commands. In the meantime, said Dodd, the Voyager team will put the spacecraft into a quiescent state, which will still allow it to send back science data during the 11-month downtime.

"We put the spacecraft back into a state where it will be just fine, assuming that everything goes normally with it during the time that the antenna is down," said Dodd. "If things don't go normally - which is always a possibility, especially with an aging spacecraft - then the onboard fault protection that's there can handle the situation."

Berner says the work on the 70-meter antenna is like bringing an old car into the shop: There's never a good time to do it, but it will make the car much more dependable if you do.

The work on the Canberra DSN station is expected to be completed by January 2021. The DSN is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the agency's Human Exploration and Operations' Space Communication and Navigation program.


News Media Contact

Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-1821
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

2020-044
 
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One possible explanation for the increase in density encountered could be the presence of a hydrogen wall, also observed by New Horizons. The Voyagers lack the capability to detect dark matter. (In fact, there is still no way to detect it.) The notion of dark matter gained traction only toward the end of the 1970s, when the Voyagers were already on their way.
 
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Well as if we don't have enough to worry about. It's like the Sun caught a virus too. Not a doomsday scenario by any means but very interesting.



But there is good news if you believe this.

Yes, a Solar Minimum Is Coming. No, It's Not Going to Mess Up The World

I had gotten back into CB radio but not the "Breaker Breaker Good Buddy" type but SSB single side band skip for long distance. Skip from what I understand is linked to sun spot activity especially in the 11 meter band area. I have from the state of MA have contacted all over the country and have talked from as far away as FLA ,Jamaica, Texas , Canada etc. Old timers remember the days of contacting all over Europe and western Europe and beyond. But these days since I got back into it has been very spotty and mostly dead. Usually there is a 11 year cycle and the info above maybe the reason why this is so.
 
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Feeling lighter on your feet? (kidding ... you wont feel a thing because of this).

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Earth is closer to supermassive black hole at center of our galaxy than we thought - CNN

Excerpt:

(CNN)A new map of the Milky Way by Japanese space experts has put Earth 2,000 light years closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

This map has suggested that the center of the Milky Way, and the black hole which sits there, is located 25,800 light-years from Earth. This is closer than the official value of 27,700 light-years adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1985, the National Observatory of Japan said.

What's more, according to the map, our solar system is traveling at 227 kilometers per second as it orbits around the galactic center -- this is faster than the official value of 220 kilometers per second, the release added.

These updated values are a result of more than 15 years of observations by the Japanese radio astronomy project VERA, according to an announcement released Thursday from the National Observatory of Japan. VERA is short for VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry and refers to the mission's array of telescopes, which use Very Long Baseline Interferometry to explore the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way.
How'd they figure in out? Radio telescopy. Three Americans pioneered that work and got Nobel's in Physics for it this year. Remarkable stuff.

A universe in motion -- moving really friggin' fast too -- Earth spins on axis, as it moves around the Sun like all the other planets around the Sun, and that whole shebang (solar system) moving around the galaxy (with this black hole at its center), and our whole galaxy (Milky Way) headed somewhere in the Universe (until in crashes into Andromeda in a few million years), with a few billion other galaxies going the same "direction"

Any of this solving the world's problems? Naw. "Discovery" -- just because we can use these big-a** brains we are blessed with for something good too ... is still a worthwhile thing for humans strive for IMHO :)
 
Really interesting. Thanks for posting.
 
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Man's ability to explore the universe is mainly hampered by the laws of physics specifically the law that says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Given the size of the universe and given our current technology that means thousands of years to send a probe to even to the nearest star. Things may be change but not at a rate where I will live to see any breakthroughs. On a theoretical level however people are starting to think about the problem. Assuming we don't blow ourselves up there is reason for optimism that future generations will break the speed of light barrier.
 
Well that took the top of my head off...

Turbomni, yeah man that lady gets it. I understood 30% of what she was saying. The math is straight forward in a way .. the conceptions are just too abstract for those of us not trained sufficiently.

Example: I remember learning "math" as a wee lad. Teachers made it make sense using props...you have one thing, "add" another thing, and you get two things. You now have "more" things. As a three year old I could understand that.

Now, what about fractions -- essentially its "division" with numerator and denominator. take one thing, divide it into two things, and what results is two "smaller" things. The bigger the denominator, with numerator relatively unchanged, the smailer the result.

The science lady said it. the Greek alphabet symbols already have had math applied to it already. take "pi" = C/d. C is circumference of a circle, d is diameter. its an infinite number that results 3.14 blah, blah blah, forever. Then you use pi in other forumulas (area of a circle, etc.) for convenience sake.

Einstein's forumula was simple math -- add, subtract, mulitply, divide. What was missing for most of us? the OTHER math with complex abstractions (like infinity) baked into a single Greek letter amalgamation. That sh*t is hard to understand without a lotta conceptual study of the principles embedded in the math.

Man's ability to explore the universe is mainly hampered by the laws of physics specifically the law that says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Given the size of the universe and given our current technology that means thousands of years to send a probe to even to the nearest star. Things may be change but not at a rate where I will live to see any breakthroughs. On a theoretical level however people are starting to think about the problem. Assuming we don't blow ourselves up there is reason for optimism that future generations will break the speed of light barrier.


I was diggin' the science lady .. clearly a brilliant mind able to simplify really hard stuff down to at least to an AP Math level at high school. I still have that level of math ability ..which is where my training stopped and as well as my ability to "get it'. She clearly has gone in her training where few have gone before.

I do get why you cant travel faster than light IN space .. the formula shows you reach infinite mass (what da heck is infinite mass?) and need infinite energy to do it (what da heck does that mean?). Look at the equations and it jumps out just like 1+1=2 did when I was three years old.

But... she also said two remarkable things. First what if Einsteins math does NOT represent how the Universe really works. Maybe it only explains part of what we see. For example, we still cannot reconcile classical Newtonian mechanics (big things moving around) to quantum mechanics (little things moving around). And, if an equation gives "infinity" as an answer, that simply means we still dont know what's going on with things around us.

Second thing she said, it you gotta assume such a thing as the existence of a mathematic abstraction called " negative energy". Havent proven it yet but that doesnt mean it doesnt exist. It does mean to make the math "work" you gotta believe (sounds like "faith' doesnt it?) it exists.

Boil all that down -- space itself appears (inflationary model of the Universe for one) to be able to "move" faster than light. atoms "entangled" appear to communicate "faster than light". So "warp drive" in theory, for passengers inside the "bubble" (with the "bubble" made out of "something" we know nothing about), allows space around the passengers (and the passengers) to move itself from one place to another faster than light.

Fratzog you said it .. galactic travel, even at light speed aint likely to be realized in the years left in our lifetimes, and maybe not even our kids, kids, kids lifetimes. Black hole 25,000 LY away means at 670+ million MPH, it would take 25,000 Earth years to get there.

Space-time folding and/or tunneling technologies, man made (warp drive) or natural (wormholes), for example, are needed and we aint really that close to figuring it out.

I am happy people like the science lady are noodling on it. :)
 
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I am happy people like the science lady are noodling on it. :)
Like yourself I don't have the technical training to get into the weeds of the physics and math. I came across Sabine a few years ago and have come to use her as my BS meter wrt to scientific topics on the internet. In that time she has been a vocal critic of the Alcubierre drive with the caveat that further work was required to establish if the concept had merit. Now that that research seems to be happening and she is hopeful, so am I.

I don't know if you have been following some of the recent "Tic Tac" releases by the US Navy but it wouldn't surprise me if folks were already developing top secret practical applications of the concepts.
 
Like yourself I don't have the technical training to get into the weeds of the physics and math. I came across Sabine a few years ago and have come to use her as my BS meter wrt to scientific topics on the internet. In that time she has been a vocal critic of the Alcubierre drive with the caveat that further work was required to establish if the concept had merit. Now that that research seems to be happening and she is hopeful, so am I.

I don't know if you have been following some of the recent "Tic Tac" releases by the US Navy but it wouldn't surprise me if folks were already developing top secret practical applications of the concepts.


I saw the Tic Tac stories. I never once thought "that's bullsh*t". I never underestimate smart people with money & motivation.

BTW, i aint a conspiracy theorist .. not even remotely. so i am really not going there.

but ...

I do know, with unimpeachable authority and personal experience, that fantastic things have been developed that we don't know about yet. Today's "science fiction" is tomorrow's "airplane".

Think about onlookers at Kitty Hawk saying" "you kooka are gonna do what?" Or, Robert Fulton's critics until one of his creations "steamed by" and they had to pick their chins up off ground in order to remove their feet from the mouths.

There's stuff people just can't know about, for whatever good/crappy reasons, until the right time. Such is usually the case with technologies developed by miltaristic tendencies of governments vs. entrepreneurs like Fulton, Edison, the Wrights, and ton of others looking to profit for themselves and for society too.

Manhattan Project .. horrifying but necessary probably, able to end all life on this planet now in the hands of people. Glad cooler heads have largely prevailed with that technology since discovery .. and that is as political as I will ever get here. :)

Maybe one day the veil of secrecy wont be needed. ... ala Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe. Like Lennon said in song: "Imagine there's no ......

Alas again, not in my lifetime .. but i still have hope.
 
Source: 2020 conjunction: Rare 'Christmas star' with Jupiter, Saturn to align
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December 21, at least in Northern Hemisphere I guess, something unseen like this in 800 years. I will be out looking to get a crude cell-phone pic weather permitting.

Planets line up routinely but looking from Earth Jupiter and Saturn will appear so close as almost to be indistinguishable in the sky. They are still many hundreds of millions of miles apart in their orbits of course. From our viewpoint, they are in the same line of sight.

A so-called Christmas star - article excerpt below (picture is just an illustration):

This year's winter solstice will bring a rare sight to our night skies — just in time for the holidays.

For Earth viewers, Jupiter and Saturn will appear closer to one another on Dec. 21 than they have been since the Middle Ages. If you can gaze into the southwestern horizon at the right time, the two gas giants will look like neighboring points of light.

Almost a "double planet," said Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan.

“Alignments between these two planets are rather rare, occurring once every 20 years or so, but this conjunction is exceptionally rare because of how close the planets will appear to one another,” Hartigan explained.

“You’d have to go all the way back to just before dawn on March 4, 1226, to see a closer alignment between these objects visible in the night sky.”

Astronomers call what we'll witness on Dec. 21 a "conjunction." From asteroids or moons to planets and stars, a conjunction is when two objects in space appear to be close to one another, as observed from Earth. In the reality of space, they're still hundreds of millions of miles apart.

Every 20 years, our solar system's largest planets align during their orbits around the sun. Jupiter and Saturn's last conjunction was in 2000. But this year is particularly special because the two will appear to separated by just 1/5th the diameter of a full moon — or 0.1 degrees — an occurrence the world hasn't seen since the Middle Ages.

1226 is actually the most recent time that such a close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was visible to humans.

"That's just shy of 800 years ago" said Amy Oliver, spokeswoman for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
 
Different take on the phenomena of things we see in the night sky using the "Big Dipper". First constellation I ever learned --- before I even started elementary school.

We know how it looks from Earth, but look at the distances from the Earth the seven stars really are. We can never get far enough away from Earth to get a different angle on the stars we see.

"ET" on his hypothetical planet, if far enough away from Earth, in this galaxy at say right angles to us, looking at the same stars would not see same thing we see.

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