Wow Mr Pickard That was a very rude reply to a comment that everyone else, who is capable of at least three seconds of coherent thought, saw as a humorous reply to what was very well a humorous question. The only fantasy, Mister Pickard, is the one you live in.
New Horizons passed Pluto not long ago. Juno is circling Jupiter right now. Cassini - a joint NASA/ESA venture cicled Saturn for years and landed the Huygens lander on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Dawn is circling Ceres, the largest asteroid right now. Two rovers are exploring Mars. Lots and lots of stuff going on. Look at NASA's and ESA's websites. Or just search TH-cam. :)
On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 turned its camera back this way and sent us a Valentine -- a picture of the Earth from the edge of the Solar System. Earth was a single blue pixel; NASA had to circle it so people would know where to look.
And now, in 2019, it probably won't even see a whole pixel. I just wonder whether we will let them go on forever, or collect them for the Lunar "Space Technology Museum" that we'll build in a hundred years from now. BTW, if not, and if anyone else finds them, we will have become a K2 Civilization and won't be afraid of them.
I sincerely hope future humans, who develop the technology to go inrerstellar, will allow the Voyagers to continue on their journey....even long after we are able to pass them...
I hope we never see them again, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. I hope all interstellar probes, from the Pioneers to New Horizons and beyond to be allowed to wander the stars unimpeded for the rest of time rather than languishing in a museum somewhere. If we are able to catch up to them in the future then I hope their trajectories are protected from interference. There is a romantic notion behind their fate that I love.
I'm in love with the Voyagers. I feel this deep, joy and sadness about them, that grows as the drift out into the unknown darkness, slowly fade away, and become a monument that will likely outlive us. I'm fascinated by the gold records. The thought that must have went into how best to communicate with others that may be radically different from us. Within that is the idea that there is some universality that unites us... and fills me with a sense of hope for humanity.
+John Di Fransisco Well, that's not entirely correct. The golden records comes with both instructions and a needle to play the records. :-) Read more here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record#Playback
Im in love with the Voyagers too. The simple fact that there the 20 billion kilometers away from Earth the furthest man mad object ever and we have the technology to pick up its signals as it flies through Interstellar space for another 70,000 years until it reaches alpha centari proxima centari our closest neighbors which is 4 1/2 light years away. when we want to read a signal from the Voyager probe it takes scientists 13 almost 14 hours to send a signal to Voyager then Voyager makes the calculations sends a signal back which takes another 13 hours so it takes over a day to reach to complete its functions all this traveling at the speed of light so can you imagine how far away this thing is? space is so vast and so huge we can't even imagine or wrap our minds around how big it is if we try to think about how big space is our brains will simply run out of fuel it's huge that's why everything is measured in light years and not miles or kilometers and measuring things in light years still doesn't do it justice because the farthest object in space is 93 billion light years away and we don't know what's at the edge of the observable universe crazy shit huh?
Now days you'd be lucky if it's mentioned at all. No one cares about interesting and important stuff like this now days, all people care about are dumb celebrities.
Fraser Cain so did a tin foil spacecraft, mounted with a computer that possessed less capapbilities than that of a modern day pocket calculator, to effortlessy get men safely into space, to our moon and back home again. 👌
Dee F You don't need today's computers to fly to the moon. All it takes is just use shit-ton of fuel for the rocket to leave into space, oxygen tank in the space craft, steering controls and primitive radios with high reception so that you can communicate with earth
karolak kolo yes primitive radio's communicating with earth which would need radio tower's in space to work, like we need on earth radio towers and cables to communicate with each other.
It is simply amazing to think that Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will be out there. The hope that friendly intelligent life from another galaxy will find either one or both and make contact with us still goes on.
It is also amazing if they are discovered too late and that even if our entire solar system is gone, there will be little two golden disks carrying our voice beyond ❤️ What a precious cargo for a pale blue dot 🌍 There lived humans.
More than likely, the alien disposition will be similar to what Sigourney Weaver encountered in the series ALIEN. Ravenously hungry meat eating fast breeding chest exploding acid blooded human dominating combination of a Praying Mantis, a Tiger and Black Widow.
And you think all those thousands of people who worked on these projects could have kept quiet for all these years? The President of the US had to resign because he couldn't keep a third rate B&E quiet. Nobody is going to reveal anything of the sort, even though there are lots of religious fanatics who wish someone would.
Hey Luna You're not alone. I found out a month ago, and since then I'm glued ON to it. NASA has a link where you can track it on daily basis. Here it is if you want to see where exactly it is now. voyager.jpl.nasa.gov .
chachi luna Don't worry, I came to know about all this amazing world of physics - Astronomy, quantum mechanics, and all this stuff, in last five months. Yup, I was living under a rock, deprived of internet.
See www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/earth/pale-blue-dot.html for a great piece of writing by Sagan. I can read it again and again, look at that image and consistently recharge my spiritual and scientific batteries.
I've dear memories of being a kid in the 80's (early 90's?) looking at the amazing full colored voyager pictures in a big set of encyclopedia volumes my dad had bought. I look back and realize what an important role information like this plays in driving a person's mind away from "animalistic" concerns and into wondering WTF is really going on in the universe.
I was working in the engineering department at a small Seattle Avionics company when our department lead told us that today we would "play hooky", go to his home on Queen Anne hill, and watch (on analog TV!) the video coming in from the Voyager mission as it passed Mars. This was a life-changing event. The Voyager missions were a high point in US space exploration...in terms of "cost versus knowledge-gained" they are unsurpassed. The information derived from the Voyage programs shifted our human paradigm and bolstered support for further planetary exploration. Lets pray that we can continue to dream, wonder, and look outward, asking more questions, rather than burn our furniture to keep warm.
When I was a kid, the US was struggling to get the first Earth satellite into orbit, via efforts of the military. There was as yet, no NASA. There was NACA. By the time we got to the Pioneers & Voyagers, space missions had become commonplace, but still really exciting.
I too remember when the Voyagers launched. These were a very big deal and I was about 6 years old when it happened. I remember getting updates sometime later with images from Jupiter, Saturn, etc.. I will miss them indeed. I with that the power supply had been built to last some orders of magnitude longer, but perhaps we shall leave to a future space probe. Since I have been a teenager, I have been fascinated by magnetometers. I was surprised to find out that the Voyager spacecrafts used fluxgate mags for both high and low field analysis. This is advantageous in that fluxgate permits the discernment of field direction, but in 1977 (and arguably still to this present day) you get much better performance in terms of sensitivity, low noise floor, etc., using optically pumped alkali vapor magnetometers such as cesium, rubidium, or potassium. Generally higher-field mags with inherently higher noise floors like fluxgates are idea for orienting the spacecraft when it's close to a celestial body of known position like a planet, a moon, or an asteroid. The low-field mags are usually concerned with detecting subtle field changes from objects of great distance such as the sun's magnetic influence billions of miles from the probe, or from closer objects that are much smaller, and these are usually at the heart of the scientific measurements that the conceivers of a space probe are concerned with.. MagSat and Orsted were two satellites that used cesium mags. They limited the use of fluxgates on those two missions strictly for orienting the satellite.. In the case of Voyager, they used molybdenum ring cores for the fluxgate magnetometers which apparently lowered the noise floor, thus permitted greater sensitivity at lower fields in order to permit the detection of more subtle changes. No doubt they still would have gotten even greater sensitivity using an alkali vapor oscillator mag, but I guess that for what they were doing, they really believed they needed the ability to detect vector direction as well. Actually without that vector detection component, we wouldn't know the geometry of Neptune's magnetosphere the way we do today.
My grandfather got the slide shows from a scientific magazine after each flyby and I still remember watching the amazing pictures of distant worlds with him in the evenings. You know, we had no Internet at that time... ;-)
Really interesting video. You missed out a detail though. When NASA decided Voyager 1 should flyby Titan they had to abort a flyby of Pluto. They were disappointed with the return of Titan data due to the clouds. In hindsight they wished they'd gone for the Pluto flyby.
My dad worked on both voyagers and the viking probes that went to mars, back in the early 70's. I was in high school. He passed away two yrs ago. This video brought back a flood of memories. Thank you it was well done.
I love following our, and Russian, ESA space programs. I was 12 when Armstrong set foot on the Moon. I got an autographed 8x10 from Ed White a few months before he was killed in the catastrophic Apollo fire. Now, with 5 grandchildren few people seem to show much interest in the various World's space programs. Few people can name which 5 Astronauts are on the Space Station. I worked on the fueling system for Skylab (remember Skylab in the 70's?). My 37 years with the DoD has helped me keep up with the various Space Programs and admittedly I know little about the varied World's Space Programs. If the Government wants to finance the various missions it is going to be hard to spend tons of money from a deficit budget. I would bet there are only about 5% of the World's population that know, or care about the Space Missions, especially unmanned (even though "unmanned" is WAY more practical to use our scant resources). We alive in the 60's were blessed to be so involved). Vote the dollars for the programs or just watch Science Fiction created by the Dreamers...
masao shiose When i was a small fry I threatened to run away from home. My dad told me not to go too far lest I fall off the edge of the earth. So I camped out in our backyard instead. Flying for a living now and you can make out the curvature of the earth, nothing flat. As much as I can remember of celestial navigation from my navy days, a lot of the educated people and mariners in the Middle Ages believed the earth was round. Hard to fathom that in this day and age people still believe the earth is flat.
Imagine it lands at a tribe civilization that will just be like "what even is this?" And just throw it in their sea..... Just imagine how sad that would be.
I was a lad of seven years when the Voyager probes were launched. The encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and their moons framed my teenage years. That they have survived to enter interstellar space still working is a testament to the vision of the people who campaigned for the mission, the engineers who built the craft and the scientists who tended and looked after them with such extraordinary care. Thank you for sharing this.
At Neptune one of the local PBS stations did a thing they called "Neptune all night". They just went to JPL with cameras and some other equipment and broadcast what was happening in real time and some interviews etc. I lost an nights sleep. I really wish I had it as a video. I think I would watch it again in segments. It felt more real than most other science programs because you got to see the scientists say "I don't know" when asked a question and then someone else would get the same question. They would discuss it a bit and suggest that they could rule something out. You really saw science happening.
Hi Fraser, I have a few question about the trajectory of the voyagers. 1) If I understand correctly the voyagers gained an escape velocity to escape the sun's gravity. But did it attain enough velocity to escape the milky way galaxy? (probably not.) 2) If it does not have enough velocity to escape the solar system, does it mean that it is in an orbital trajectory around the center of the milky way (Sagittarius A*)? so its possible that one day in astronomical years from now it will meet up with our solar system again? 3) Relative to the milky way galaxy in which direction is it moving? Is it currently moving outward of the milky way or inward? Thanks for your inspiring episodes!
Regarding 2, I don't know their exact trajectories, but I would expect that if they've achieved solar escape velocity, the odds they'll ever get significantly closer again are incredibly small; after enough time has passed for them to gain or lose a lap on us, they'll have been influenced by the gravity of so many different stars and stuff that they might as well have been launched in a completely different escape trajectory. After so much time, any deviations in trajectory, however small, add up to huge changes. I don't think we know the position and speed of enough objects in the Milky Way with enough accuracy to be able to predict where the probes will be at the time they would be expected to get significantly closer if their current orbits were maintained.
All numbers from uncle google 1) no: our solar system Orbits with a speed of 230 km/s around the center of the Galaxy. The voyager moves with a speed of 17 km/s. Escapy velocity for milky way would be around 537km/s. 2) its basically impossible. It will be influence by such many objects gravitational, that it is impossible to know the path of the probe in the far future.
And 3) Since it does not have enough velocity to escape the Milky Way, and its future course will be determined by whatever bodies it might encounter along its path, the direction (towards the center or edge of the galaxy) is irrelevant. Assuming it doesn't crash into anything, it will witness the Milky Way merging with Andromeda. At that point, "direction" becomes meaningless.
Escape velocity for the galaxy is something like 20 to 30 times escaping from the Sun. Very hard for us Humans with current technology, but still we can imagine it's in reach in the near future. Once they're out past about one light year or so, Voyagers (and Pioneers, and New Horizons) will probably have irregular zig-zag trajectories influences by whatever are the several nearest stars at any time. This will play out very slowly, thousands of years between newsworthy changes. One of the Pioneers is heading in the direction of Aquila, a constellation near Sagittarius, so that one's going closer to the galactic center. The IEEE (an organization for Electrical Engineers!) has details (i hope YT permits links like this) spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/robotic-exploration/plotting-the-destinations-of-4-interstellar-probes
I was born in 1973 I remember some great moments and some unfortunate tragedies hoping for a bright future of space exploration btw I can't believe some people still thinks in 2022 that the Earth is flat absolutely blows my mind unreal it's definitely round 🌎
I was 6 years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. My mum set me in front of our little black and white TV in the living room and told me to watch this! This was history! I could not understand what I was looking at. It was a grainy, staticy, black and white picture of something moving. I had never seen an astronaut, I didn't even know what they were. However, I do remember watching it because I could sense it was something very important, because of how my mother was acting. It was only months and years later, seeing replays of the landing, that I came to fully understand what I had witness.
The Pioneer missions (10 and 11) only received a brief mention, which is a pity. These were the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter and Saturn and the first to leave the Solar System. The Pioneer craft truly are the pioneers of human exploration of the galaxy.
I'll do a whole episode on the Pioneers as well at some point, but we're at the 40th anniversary of the Voyagers, so I thought it was a good time to mention it.
I have just googled the speed of Voyager and @ 35,000 mph it will not emerge from the oort cloud for 30,000 more years ! and it will still be 2 light years from the closest star , wow
My father worked on both the Mariner and Voyager programs. He worked at Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, Ca. He was an engineer who worked out the vectors for the probes. He brought all kinds of cool photos home. I was just a kid then. I'm 62 now. My memory is that one Saturday, I was already up watching Saturday morning cartoons, when he started getting ready to go to work, but, he didn't work on Saturdays. He told me to get ready too. I did, because I never questioned my father. He took me to breakfast, and then we drove to JPL in his 1951 Chevy pickup, around to a back parking lot. We pulled up to a gate, and there was a guard shack. The guard greeted my dad, asked him who I was, and told me to enjoy the tour. It was awesome. I got to dress up in a clean suit, that was way to big for me, so I could go into the clean room with my dad, where they did final assembly for components of the satellites. I saw the wind tunnels, and the water tank test areas, compression tanks, and the coolest thing was, all the critical labs were deep underground. Just like Cheyenne Mountain. My dad had a cool office too. It had his awards and degrees and stuff, and pictures with him and Einstein, from when they both worked at Los Alamos. Pretty cool. The best part for me, was getting to grow up in Los Angeles.
He couldn't talk about a lot of what he did. He had Top Secret security clearances, and you don't get them, and keep them, by talking. He learned that working on the Manhatten Project in New Mexico. He rarely spoke of his experiences in WW2. He was in the action, getting two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. He destroyed a two man Japanese Suicide sub, and was credited for saving lives, because the intelligence he secured indicated it was ready to be deployed against the 7th Fleet. He was also in the final fighting on Okinawa, and I know the fighting there was brutal, and he must have witnessed horrors. He had a charmed life, his five brothers all served in WW2, in the Army, all except for my dad went to Europe, and all saw action, and all returned home. He did tell me about the troop shipo ride home to Seattle, when the were destroying ordinance from the deck, and scuttling heavy equipment and helos off the ship. He told me some other stuff, about Einstein, that only somebody who worked with him would know. Most of the fathers on my block growing up worked either in defense, or aerospace. My mom, like most moms in my neighborhood, stayed home to raise the kids. I only remember one mom working, and she was some big banker. That's about it, sorry.
i am very young, so the only thing i remember is my father when i was 7 or 8 telling me about a spacecraft that had gone outside the solar system and that had travelled for 40 years, and my naive mind thinking it was a space shuttle crew and wondering how could the food last so long
Great commentary on Voyagers. I was amazed on finding out that they got so low power that they have to turn heater off, run other stuff then transmit it, then turn on heaters. They apparently found out that running tape machine there kept things slightly warmer meanwhile! Amazing hacks to keep it running a little longer, especially with Voyager 2 and its broken parts, because temperate changes freqrance commands can be sent at.
And the two Mars rovers that landed in 2003/2004. Those went *way* beyond nominal lifetimes of three months. And Cassini went past its main mission, , into extended mission (XM) and even into XXM. I want my next car to be built by JPL!
From the way it sounds, I am only one year-ish older than you, so I remember the launches and the landmark reports. It's amazing how long they've lasted.
I recently bought a Hasegawa 1:42 scale model of the Voyager probe (yet to assemble) because what I love the most about it, is that it's the first spacecraft that humanity has ever sent into interstellar space. I like to think that one day we can send more to follow in it's footsteps. To the outer planets and beyond!
why couldnt they keep voyager 2 orbiting neptune? was it going too fast for that? what saddens me the most is that they are all we have left... a forward thinking civilization would be sending a few voyager-type probes every 2 years or so with new goals and better-more instruments, its unfathomable the kind of discoveries we could've made by doing that since the 70's
The problem is that the Voyager probes were using the alignment of planets as a means of using gravity assists to get the velocity possible to leave the solar system. I guess these trajectories aren't often availiable
I'm 46, and I remember the National Geographic issues covering each planetary encounter made by these two.......I was going to say probes, or machines, but they were SO much more than that! They are humanity's attempt to LEARN, to learn abstract information, information that has little impact on most of our day-to-day lives, but has a staggering effect on our understanding of our universe! These brave explorers are our attempt to be more than we are, and as such, should be known by every single student on Earth!!!
Fraser Cain They're never going to be lost, not really! They are a message to other intelligent life forms that screams "WE ARE HERE, AND WE WISH TO LEARN!!" Any aliens will understand this message, and know of our existence - could any conceivable machine ever serve a more noble purpose? Lol, I wax pilosophical when I think about the distance they've traveled 😂
It would be cool if one day, when Voyager 1 runs out of energy, we could be advanced enough to send out another one with more energy and brink back Voyager 1.
very fast if you think about it I mean 1 is outside the solar system 1's almost outside and we are still able to get information from it in just less than a day but doesn't that mean that the radio waves travel faster than light.....
well if it takes 8mn for light to get from the sun to the earth then shouldn't it take radio signals from something way farther from us than the sun to take atleast............wait a sec nvm I'm retarded
The BBC documentary 'The Planets' has a truly brilliant episode dedicated solely to these missions and it is by far one of my favourite things I've ever watched and I go back to it every few years or so.
Are there any plans on a new "voyager" program? The advancement in technology has made an enormous leap forward, since these 2 were launched back in the 70's ... I am sure the next would be able to last quite a bit longer.. and sent even more detailed pictures..
Awesome video! Been amazed at the Voyager missions since the early 1980's. First mission ever to try to journey out of our solar system. Space is so huge! It is mind boggling.
I never knew about the records! That is such a heart fluttering moment, the thought that somehow, somewhere, some time, they could be discovered and played. It's this final touch that makes us humans truly amazing. We have hope and belief!
They should invent voyager 3 with the highest technology possible, with 16k video/picture camera and really good videos and the highest and clearest microphone possible ( to record earth sounds, animals, humans, cities, etc. ) and also with the highest tech microphone possible to record space sounds and 16k photos and videos of our space. They should also make Voyager 3 last as long as possible with electricity.
Totally achievable but instead we waste money with useless things. I miss the space race between soviets and USA. It made us focus on the right things.
In 1977 I was 16 . My brother in law at the time was working at JPL when the Voyagers were sent . They feel like old friends that have been with me for most of my life so I have a sort of sentimental attachment to them
@@lindaeasley4336 That's probably the first mission that I really remember well. I remember seeing the TV coverage of the Vikings and being amazed there were landers on Mars.
I'm over 50 and fondly remember the Voyagers. They were a crowning source and accomplishment at the time for something we take for granted today. To this day I am still astonished that at any time, we can plot a projected course of objects across our solar system decades in advance and be able to launch a spacecraft from the other side of a massive star to intercept planets we can only guess are going to be where they should and with pinpoint precision. Think of what those scientists may have said to each other back then. "But if we wait a few more months, we can slingshot it around the Sun, hit this window on Jupiter, then the window on Saturn,.." and so on. Its awe- inspiring when you take it all in.
I remember! The day after the first Voyager was launched from Florida, I left home for my first paying job in what was my career field. I am retired now, but I was lucky to see the images made by the Voyager spacecraft, that was built with Apollo era technology. Still rugged, and believe that someday, another culture will find them and check out the recording. God Speed Voyagers!
My Voyager memories are always bound up with the first time I watched Cosmos with my father when I was 10 years old. Born Sept 1969. I remember Voyager much better then even the later Apollo shots.
Thank you for all your work on this channel! I have been subscribed to your email newsletters as well & just wanted yinz to know how much I appreciate everything! 💛
I was born in 1977, the same year Voyager launched. I have often thought of them, as I journey through life, and they through the universe. I would go so far as to say those two little spacecraft are the most profound thing humanity has ever done. 5 billion years from now when the earth has been burnt to a crisp by our then red giant sun, at least something of those two little spacecraft will still be there. A testament to humanity, reminding eternity, we were here.
Sorry you weren't around for the moon landings. I remember my parents letting me stay up to see the take off of their rocket and I listened to all the experts talk about the process. Off course we know now that the astronauts were incredibly vulnerable and lucky not to have been killed by solar flares. We also know now that they were not certain that the surface of the moon would hold the landing craft. You are probably too young to remember the first Viking pictures of the surface of Mars. I got up to watch the first photos come through. The Voyager projects have always fascinated me and given us so much. Nice video, keep them coming.
Thank you, Fraser, for this beautiful retrospective. I think that one my favorite Voyager accomplishments is the Pale Blue Dot photograph; I am not sure if it provided any scientific knowledge to us, but it certainly gave us a perspective on our home that we never experienced before. Carl Sagan's reflection on that photograph in his 1994 speech nearly drives me to tears.
if voyager has not yet reached the ort cloud how why is it considered outside the solar system? isn't the ort cloud still under the gravitational pull of the sun?
The Oort cloud is gravitationally bound to the Sun, but since it's outside of the heliosphere, it's technically in interstellar space. Think of the Solar system as a car, and the Oort cloud as a trailer hitched up to the back. Everything in the car is "in the car", but the trailer isn't "in the car". Voyager would be crawling along the rear trunk towards the trailer. Also not "in the car".
Incredible! Thanks for this brilliant video. Absolute Noob here. I was under the impression that the Voyagers have officially left the solar system, I didnt know about the Oort cloud until now. I had a question about how the crafts are still intact without succumbing to collisions. Thanks to the comments from your wonderful and really informative audience, that question has been answered as well. Subscribed! Cheers from India!
I had totally forgotten that Voyager One reached Jupiter the day before my birthday in my senior year of high school, I do recall the heavy conversations about it, and reading much in Sky & Telescope magazine .... it was nearly as memorable as huddling around a little black-and-white TV one late evening with my parents in 1969 to watch the Apollo 11 landing... It felt like a much more innocent time.
We had one at Saturn and at Jupiter. Some day we need to go back to Uranus and Neptune. And there are plans in the works to send a spacecraft to Pluto to orbit it.
@@ThePioneerChannel The Galileo spacecraft was in orbit around Jupiter and the Cassini spacecraft was in orbit around Saturn. In order for these probes to be useful they have to be controllable from the ground. This means keeping them stable and pointed in the right direction so as to take images and make measurements and to communicate with earth. To do that they require fuel for their thrusters, which are little rocket motors that fire occasionally to control the spacecraft's orientation. Once the thruster fuel runs out the probes become uncontrollable and useless space junk. Once that happens there is a risk that the spacecraft could impact one of the planet's moons and infect it with germs from earth. That would mean any life found there in the future might be from earth and not the moon itself. So as to avoid this contamination both probes were deliberately crashed into the planets to destroy them when they were low on fuel but while they were still controllable. So the probes are kind of still there but only in the form of the basic materials that they were made of.
@@MusiCaninesTheMusicalDogsAt first, they really use a really big sattelite dish. And they also use signals based on pseudo random sequences. These signals allows receiver to collect energy from some period of time and then compress it. As a result the signal level increases in the number of times in wich its duration was compressed, but the level of noise stays the same. GPS satellites use the same thing, but their signals are shorter what means they have less energy. I'm russian, so sorry for my English, I hope you'll be able to understand my message.
The window of opportunity was well used. Voyager 1 and 2 taught us so much and are seriously the greatest technical achievements of mankind that really brought us further as a species. Something that the majority of people today won't even remotely comprehend or appreciate. Voyager 1 & 2 and it's golden records are a kiss for eternity.
Wouldn't it be cool to come up with a new form of space propulsion, where we could catch up with Voyager I in a couple hours, no sweat? I should have become a rocket propulsion engineer :.(
AvyScottandFlower I mean, a couple hours? Nah! The Voyagers are over 13 light-hours away, and you have to accelerate too; so even the best space propulsion possible will take a few days! But yea, faster space propulsion is gonna be necessary! NASA does have a powerful Ion Thrusther called VASIMR, which can head to mars in 39 days, and catching up to voyager? Brb, gonna go calculate it. Results: 9.65 years to catch up to Voyager! To get to the supposed Planet 9's perihelion? 32.8 years! Saturn? 11 months! With even better ion tech in the future.. even faster! Also, nuclear energy! Nuclear Fission or Fusion could get us to multiple percentages of light speed, same with Antimatter and Artifical Black Holes, aswell as Photon Sails. Those 5 are the kind of things youd use to go interstellar! Infact, there is currently a project called "Breakthrough Starshot" being made, which, in maybe just a few decades time, will launch thousands of tiny little probes pushed by lasers to Proxima Centuari, traveling at a monsterous 20% of light speed.
AvyScottandFlower Actually, a couple days would mean a ship that could almost get to light speed! Interstellar travel will never be short, even the closest star takes 4.24 years to get to at light speed, the fastest speed in the universe. Breakthrough Starshot should take just over 20. That's perfectly okay for probes! Obviously, probes can survive a while! In the far future, we'll be sending probes on maybe e even multi-milennia mission to distant stars! Manned missions? You'd transplant humanity! For example, let's say you sent a manned ship to the nearest star at 10% light speed, therefore a 42 year journey? You'd make a ship the size of your average suburban city, and have hundreds of thousands with everything they need to live! Mhm! Manned Interstellar Voyages would be better called "Colonial Interstellar Voyages". You could also just freeze them for the voyage, then you might just need an aircraft carrier sized ship. Or put everyone into a virtual reality/simulated city.
@dsv Im not sure how to calculate how much force something hits with at certain speeds. As far as the Alcubierre Drive? We just dont have enough evidence for me to justify that it's possible! Youd need tons of exotic matter, a substance which probobly dosent exist, and even if it can be created, making that much is absurd. Most people tend to think we'll achieve FTL one day, but ima keep rolling my eyes at those proposals until we find definitive proof.
Went on a field trip to JPL around 1977. They gave us pictures of Jupiter. Wish I'd have been more appreciative of the opportunity to visit such a place.
In my opinion the " Pale Blue Dot" picture is 1 of the greatest and most meaningful pictures ever taken. To say its the greatest might cause an argument so i'll just say its 1 of the top 3. To me that 1 picture makes the program worth it. The volumes of other things we got are just a bonus.
@@frasercain Great...only a needle!? Wait till they get the part about plugging the player into a wall socket, Alien: "Damn, we have to build a city, just to play this thing".
Im not ashame to shred a tear for this heroic technologies. I love you voyagers, cassini, oppy and many more of them that keeps giving us informations about the unknown world ❤
The planetary alignment that allowed the Voyager 2 spacecraft to visit 4 planets in a single flight was very rare. The opportunity only comes around once every 176 years! The last time it happened, Thomas Jefferson was president, and he blew it.
So we can build things that can still get signal 20,000,000 miles away, but I can't connect to my wifi from my kitchen.
If you're willing to carry around an 80 meter radio dish, you should be able to improve your wifi signal.
Wow Mr Pickard That was a very rude reply to a comment that everyone else, who is capable of at least three seconds of coherent thought, saw as a humorous reply to what was very well a humorous question.
The only fantasy, Mister Pickard, is the one you live in.
Um 20,000,000,000 actually 😁
Is you're microwave leaking?
My first thought was to reply as Mr. Cain, but, you did not see the humor in his answer, so:
Uh, have you tried moving your kitchen closer?
Good job 1960's scientists. Now let's send one now with today's technology and equip it with cameras capable of returning 4k images.
There are plenty of newer spacecraft going out. Did you see the pictures of Pluto from New Horizons, or what Curiosity is sending back?
Also the lining up of the gas giants wont happen again for a while.
New Horizons passed Pluto not long ago.
Juno is circling Jupiter right now.
Cassini - a joint NASA/ESA venture cicled Saturn for years and landed the Huygens lander on Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
Dawn is circling Ceres, the largest asteroid right now.
Two rovers are exploring Mars.
Lots and lots of stuff going on. Look at NASA's and ESA's websites. Or just search TH-cam. :)
We have 8k cameras and video 2018 just waiting for some to say 16k
I know right
On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 turned its camera back this way and sent us a Valentine -- a picture of the Earth from the edge of the Solar System. Earth was a single blue pixel; NASA had to circle it so people would know where to look.
Such an amazing moment in space history. Gives me chills.
Just think that picture was a picture of everyone in the world up to that point. Dead or alive.
And now, in 2019, it probably won't even see a whole pixel. I just wonder whether we will let them go on forever, or collect them for the Lunar "Space Technology Museum" that we'll build in a hundred years from now. BTW, if not, and if anyone else finds them, we will have become a K2 Civilization and won't be afraid of them.
Greatest selfie ever done.
isn't it just amazing that for the technology we had in 1977 we are still communicating after 42 years with a space craft that is over 13B miles away
Absolutely incredible. They were built to last.
Incredibly robust engineering!
I sincerely hope future humans, who develop the technology to go inrerstellar, will allow the Voyagers to continue on their journey....even long after we are able to pass them...
That would be cool to catch up with them and put them in a museum.
Some point in the future, an earth starship may discover Voyager 1or 2 and the crew may take it back to earth 🌏 .
You are so optimistic about the fate of humans. I think we will be extinct long before we could travel in interstellar space.
I hope we never see them again, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
I hope all interstellar probes, from the Pioneers to New Horizons and beyond to be allowed to wander the stars unimpeded for the rest of time rather than languishing in a museum somewhere. If we are able to catch up to them in the future then I hope their trajectories are protected from interference. There is a romantic notion behind their fate that I love.
thats not possible..... no its necessary anyone? no ok
I'm in love with the Voyagers. I feel this deep, joy and sadness about them, that grows as the drift out into the unknown darkness, slowly fade away, and become a monument that will likely outlive us. I'm fascinated by the gold records. The thought that must have went into how best to communicate with others that may be radically different from us. Within that is the idea that there is some universality that unites us... and fills me with a sense of hope for humanity.
Very poignant, beautiful, and DEEP, but I hope that the "universality that unites us" is Frisbee because we didn't send a record player!
+John Di Fransisco
Well, that's not entirely correct. The golden records comes with both instructions and a needle to play the records. :-) Read more here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record#Playback
that was impressive
The universality that unites us is the LP record player.
Im in love with the Voyagers too. The simple fact that there the 20 billion kilometers away from Earth the furthest man mad object ever and we have the technology to pick up its signals as it flies through
Interstellar space for another 70,000 years until
it reaches alpha centari proxima centari our closest
neighbors which is
4 1/2 light years away. when we want to read a signal from the Voyager probe it takes scientists 13 almost 14 hours to send a signal to Voyager then Voyager makes the calculations sends a signal back which takes another 13 hours so it takes over a day to reach to complete its functions all this traveling at the speed of light so can you imagine how far away this thing is? space is so vast and so huge we can't even imagine or wrap our minds around how big it is if we try to think about how big space is our brains will simply run out of fuel it's huge that's why everything is measured in light years and not miles or kilometers and measuring things in light years still doesn't do it justice because the farthest object in space is 93 billion light years away and we don't know what's at the edge of the observable universe crazy shit huh?
I still remember in elementary school when Voyager 2 flew by Neptune. It was on all the magazine covers and everything.
LordBitememan I was born after they passed neptune
Yeah, I have those same memories. I was just graduating high school at the time.
Now days you'd be lucky if it's mentioned at all. No one cares about interesting and important stuff like this now days, all people care about are dumb celebrities.
Fraser Cain op
Jero Briggs agreed
Carl Sagan's request for one last photo of Earth. "The Pale Blue Dot"
His speech regarding that photo still gives me chills.
delivering science from 20 billion kilometers away.....yet my cell struggles to get reception in a parking garage.
You might want to try using a 70-meter radio dish attached to your cell phone. Seems to work for NASA.
Fraser Cain so did a tin foil spacecraft, mounted with a computer that possessed less capapbilities than that of a modern day pocket calculator, to effortlessy get men safely into space, to our moon and back home again. 👌
Dee F You don't need today's computers to fly to the moon. All it takes is just use shit-ton of fuel for the rocket to leave into space, oxygen tank in the space craft, steering controls and primitive radios with high reception so that you can communicate with earth
karolak kolo yes primitive radio's communicating with earth which would need radio tower's in space to work, like we need on earth radio towers and cables to communicate with each other.
and a firework from a car boot sale to launch it back from the moon at a 1/6th less gravity.
It is simply amazing to think that Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will be out there. The hope that friendly intelligent life from another galaxy will find either one or both and make contact with us still goes on.
Or that our future human explorers will be able to take a space bus and visit the Voyagers as they fly on.
It is also amazing if they are discovered too late and that even if our entire solar system is gone, there will be little two golden disks carrying our voice beyond ❤️ What a precious cargo for a pale blue dot 🌍 There lived humans.
More than likely, the alien disposition will be similar to what Sigourney Weaver encountered in the series ALIEN. Ravenously hungry meat eating fast breeding chest exploding acid blooded human dominating combination of a Praying Mantis, a Tiger and Black Widow.
The Voyagers were what got me into astronomy.
now just imagine if Voyagers were revealed to be a hoax.
I.... I don't really know why that would matter? So a hoax got me interested in one of the most interesting things possible - the universe?
Rob Ducharme no, that was lsd, not what you're talking about.
What a stupid comment. They are not a hoax.
And you think all those thousands of people who worked on these projects could have kept quiet for all these years? The President of the US had to resign because he couldn't keep a third rate B&E quiet. Nobody is going to reveal anything of the sort, even though there are lots of religious fanatics who wish someone would.
perhaps one day people might visit the voyagers as if they were roadside attractions
That's pretty nice
Imagine aliens trying to figure out where it came from and why it was built by using the map on the disk and the sounds
I'm fed up with Uranus being the butt of jokes.
I see what you did there...
Uranus is gassy
Yep, i feel the same
That joke is a bummer
danceswithcritters we should rename it Urectum...
I am just now finding out about both voyager one and two! What have I done with my life?!
You lived life to the fullest, have no regrets, and now you get to catch up on this amazing mission.
haaaa
Hey Luna You're not alone. I found out a month ago, and since then I'm glued ON to it. NASA has a link where you can track it on daily basis. Here it is if you want to see where exactly it is now. voyager.jpl.nasa.gov .
chachi luna Don't worry, I came to know about all this amazing world of physics - Astronomy, quantum mechanics, and all this stuff, in last five months. Yup, I was living under a rock, deprived of internet.
Read up on the Horizons probe(s), not sure if it was 1 or 2 of them too. after Voy 1 n 2.
Next voyager, send it with a Nokia battery, we will conquer all universe before the battery needs a new recharge ;)
I'm sure Nokia has helped provide technology to various aerospace projects.
You mean before it hits 99%
It will still. by 99.9999999991%
My Nokia actually takes a week before 10-40
Claudio Rodriguez Palma thts funny lolz
Don't forget voyager look back at earth, before it got to far out of solar system- check out ( Pale Blue Dot Video).
The Pale Blue Dot is one of the most important photographs ever taken. And Carl Sagan's words that go along with it are pure poetry.
See www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/earth/pale-blue-dot.html for a great piece of writing by Sagan. I can read it again and again, look at that image and consistently recharge my spiritual and scientific batteries.
I've dear memories of being a kid in the 80's (early 90's?) looking at the amazing full colored voyager pictures in a big set of encyclopedia volumes my dad had bought. I look back and realize what an important role information like this plays in driving a person's mind away from "animalistic" concerns and into wondering WTF is really going on in the universe.
its just sad how the voygers are going to die in a few years and then stay suspended in the vast darkness of space. :(
It is sad, but it's also amazing how long they've been working for. Decades beyond their original missions.
Until future humans discover them.
They may outlast humanity and carry our existence with them for eons.
I was working in the engineering department at a small Seattle Avionics company when our department lead told us that today we would "play hooky", go to his home on Queen Anne hill, and watch (on analog TV!) the video coming in from the Voyager mission as it passed Mars. This was a life-changing event. The Voyager missions were a high point in US space exploration...in terms of "cost versus knowledge-gained" they are unsurpassed. The information derived from the Voyage programs shifted our human paradigm and bolstered support for further planetary exploration. Lets pray that we can continue to dream, wonder, and look outward, asking more questions, rather than burn our furniture to keep warm.
That's awesome, I definitely remember the Voyagers. But I was just a kid when they passed Jupiter and Saturn.
When I was a kid, the US was struggling to get the first Earth satellite into orbit, via efforts of the military. There was as yet, no NASA. There was NACA.
By the time we got to the Pioneers & Voyagers, space missions had become commonplace, but still really exciting.
I too remember when the Voyagers launched. These were a very big deal and I was about 6 years old when it happened. I remember getting updates sometime later with images from Jupiter, Saturn, etc.. I will miss them indeed. I with that the power supply had been built to last some orders of magnitude longer, but perhaps we shall leave to a future space probe. Since I have been a teenager, I have been fascinated by magnetometers. I was surprised to find out that the Voyager spacecrafts used fluxgate mags for both high and low field analysis. This is advantageous in that fluxgate permits the discernment of field direction, but in 1977 (and arguably still to this present day) you get much better performance in terms of sensitivity, low noise floor, etc., using optically pumped alkali vapor magnetometers such as cesium, rubidium, or potassium. Generally higher-field mags with inherently higher noise floors like fluxgates are idea for orienting the spacecraft when it's close to a celestial body of known position like a planet, a moon, or an asteroid. The low-field mags are usually concerned with detecting subtle field changes from objects of great distance such as the sun's magnetic influence billions of miles from the probe, or from closer objects that are much smaller, and these are usually at the heart of the scientific measurements that the conceivers of a space probe are concerned with.. MagSat and Orsted were two satellites that used cesium mags. They limited the use of fluxgates on those two missions strictly for orienting the satellite.. In the case of Voyager, they used molybdenum ring cores for the fluxgate magnetometers which apparently lowered the noise floor, thus permitted greater sensitivity at lower fields in order to permit the detection of more subtle changes. No doubt they still would have gotten even greater sensitivity using an alkali vapor oscillator mag, but I guess that for what they were doing, they really believed they needed the ability to detect vector direction as well. Actually without that vector detection component, we wouldn't know the geometry of Neptune's magnetosphere the way we do today.
It's amazing that we're still getting data from them, so many years after they launched.
My grandfather got the slide shows from a scientific magazine after each flyby and I still remember watching the amazing pictures of distant worlds with him in the evenings. You know, we had no Internet at that time... ;-)
I remember those slide shows. That's awesome!
Should have included a picture of Chuck Norris. That way aliens will think twice before invading Earth.
That would do the trick.
@@frasercain Aliens will never visit us while we have Chuck Norris.
Really interesting video. You missed out a detail though. When NASA decided Voyager 1 should flyby Titan they had to abort a flyby of Pluto. They were disappointed with the return of Titan data due to the clouds. In hindsight they wished they'd gone for the Pluto flyby.
That's amazing, I didn't even know that!
But then perhaps we wouldn't have the photo of Pluto's heart ❤️
My dad worked on both voyagers and the viking probes that went to mars, back in the early 70's. I was in high school. He passed away two yrs ago. This video brought back a flood of memories. Thank you it was well done.
Not made in china then
Nope, but the Chinese have made some pretty impressive spacecraft too.
Japan Material 4 life lol
@@truegrit1860 If you are talking about Tiangong-1 chinese space station, it was designed to keep ticking for just two years
U sure ???? Because , Made in Hong Kong ???? LOL
'made in China ' jokes apart.
Recently Chinese built largest telescope in the world.😊
I love following our, and Russian, ESA space programs. I was 12 when Armstrong set foot on the Moon. I got an autographed 8x10 from Ed White a few months before he was killed in the catastrophic Apollo fire. Now, with 5 grandchildren few people seem to show much interest in the various World's space programs. Few people can name which 5 Astronauts are on the Space Station. I worked on the fueling system for Skylab (remember Skylab in the 70's?). My 37 years with the DoD has helped me keep up with the various Space Programs and admittedly I know little about the varied World's Space Programs. If the Government wants to finance the various missions it is going to be hard to spend tons of money from a deficit budget. I would bet there are only about 5% of the World's population that know, or care about the Space Missions, especially unmanned (even though "unmanned" is WAY more practical to use our scant resources). We alive in the 60's were blessed to be so involved). Vote the dollars for the programs or just watch Science Fiction created by the Dreamers...
That must have been an amazing experience, thanks for helping with human space exploration. :-)
the us is broke cause it blows too much money on DOD and military - nearly a trillion per year
The Earth is not Flat
We live on a Pale Blue Dot. 🔵
One of the most important photographs ever taken.
Fraser Cain So is that what the image is at 8:10 - 8:22? Is that a picture of the Earth from Voyager?!?!?
I think we live on an electron
masao shiose When i was a small fry I threatened to run away from home. My dad told me not to go too far lest I fall off the edge of the earth. So I camped out in our backyard instead. Flying for a living now and you can make out the curvature of the earth, nothing flat. As much as I can remember of celestial navigation from my navy days, a lot of the educated people and mariners in the Middle Ages believed the earth was round. Hard to fathom that in this day and age people still believe the earth is flat.
masao shiose Santa is real too you know. They were tracking him on my local news just last December.
Imagine it lands at a tribe civilization that will just be like "what even is this?" And just throw it in their sea..... Just imagine how sad that would be.
Hah, the irony. :-)
I was a lad of seven years when the Voyager probes were launched. The encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and their moons framed my teenage years. That they have survived to enter interstellar space still working is a testament to the vision of the people who campaigned for the mission, the engineers who built the craft and the scientists who tended and looked after them with such extraordinary care. Thank you for sharing this.
It sounds like we're about the same age. :-) I've got the same anchoring memories through my teens of the various planetary encounters.
my grandfather was one of the scientists who worked on the voyager 1
That's awesome, I hope he had some great stories for you.
What is he called?
Kris Kärner
What an honor...they had such a privilege to take part in the human races biggest feat.
My uncle had a plymouth voyager
At Neptune one of the local PBS stations did a thing they called "Neptune all night". They just went to JPL with cameras and some other equipment and broadcast what was happening in real time and some interviews etc. I lost an nights sleep. I really wish I had it as a video. I think I would watch it again in segments. It felt more real than most other science programs because you got to see the scientists say "I don't know" when asked a question and then someone else would get the same question. They would discuss it a bit and suggest that they could rule something out. You really saw science happening.
Hi Fraser, I have a few question about the trajectory of the voyagers.
1) If I understand correctly the voyagers gained an escape velocity to escape the sun's gravity. But did it attain enough velocity to escape the milky way galaxy? (probably not.)
2) If it does not have enough velocity to escape the solar system, does it mean that it is in an orbital trajectory around the center of the milky way (Sagittarius A*)? so its possible that one day in astronomical years from now it will meet up with our solar system again?
3) Relative to the milky way galaxy in which direction is it moving? Is it currently moving outward of the milky way or inward?
Thanks for your inspiring episodes!
Regarding 2, I don't know their exact trajectories, but I would expect that if they've achieved solar escape velocity, the odds they'll ever get significantly closer again are incredibly small; after enough time has passed for them to gain or lose a lap on us, they'll have been influenced by the gravity of so many different stars and stuff that they might as well have been launched in a completely different escape trajectory. After so much time, any deviations in trajectory, however small, add up to huge changes. I don't think we know the position and speed of enough objects in the Milky Way with enough accuracy to be able to predict where the probes will be at the time they would be expected to get significantly closer if their current orbits were maintained.
All numbers from uncle google
1) no: our solar system Orbits with a speed of 230 km/s around the center of the Galaxy. The voyager moves with a speed of 17 km/s. Escapy velocity for milky way would be around 537km/s.
2) its basically impossible. It will be influence by such many objects gravitational, that it is impossible to know the path of the probe in the far future.
And 3) Since it does not have enough velocity to escape the Milky Way, and its future course will be determined by whatever bodies it might encounter along its path, the direction (towards the center or edge of the galaxy) is irrelevant. Assuming it doesn't crash into anything, it will witness the Milky Way merging with Andromeda. At that point, "direction" becomes meaningless.
Escape velocity for the galaxy is something like 20 to 30 times escaping from the Sun. Very hard for us Humans with current technology, but still we can imagine it's in reach in the near future.
Once they're out past about one light year or so, Voyagers (and Pioneers, and New Horizons) will probably have irregular zig-zag trajectories influences by whatever are the several nearest stars at any time. This will play out very slowly, thousands of years between newsworthy changes.
One of the Pioneers is heading in the direction of Aquila, a constellation near Sagittarius, so that one's going closer to the galactic center. The IEEE (an organization for Electrical Engineers!) has details (i hope YT permits links like this)
spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/robotic-exploration/plotting-the-destinations-of-4-interstellar-probes
mcarp555 yeah but which direction is it heading? Towards the center of the Milky Way or?
Im 15 and I think one of the highlights I will remember is when I first saw the New Horizons picture of Pluto on the news
That's a pretty epic mission to remember. 😀
I was born in 1973 I remember some great moments and some unfortunate tragedies hoping for a bright future of space exploration btw I can't believe some people still thinks in 2022 that the Earth is flat absolutely blows
my mind unreal it's definitely round 🌎
your so old
I was 6 years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. My mum set me in front of our little black and white TV in the living room and told me to watch this! This was history! I could not understand what I was looking at. It was a grainy, staticy, black and white picture of something moving. I had never seen an astronaut, I didn't even know what they were. However, I do remember watching it because I could sense it was something very important, because of how my mother was acting. It was only months and years later, seeing replays of the landing, that I came to fully understand what I had witness.
That must have been amazing. My version of that was when the space shuttle launched in 1981.
The Pioneer missions (10 and 11) only received a brief mention, which is a pity. These were the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter and Saturn and the first to leave the Solar System. The Pioneer craft truly are the pioneers of human exploration of the galaxy.
I'll do a whole episode on the Pioneers as well at some point, but we're at the 40th anniversary of the Voyagers, so I thought it was a good time to mention it.
Excellent.
I have just googled the speed of Voyager and @ 35,000 mph it will not emerge from the oort cloud for 30,000 more years ! and it will still be 2 light years from the closest star , wow
Yup, the actual influence of the Solar System is HUGE.
i wish there was a live camera on voyager but it would be mmad delayed ;-;
Alien: Hmmm a gold record. I know, let's bring it to the Hipsterians of Rigel. They're all into retro and probably have a player for it.
My father worked on both the Mariner and Voyager programs. He worked at Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, Ca. He was an engineer who worked out the vectors for the probes. He brought all kinds of cool photos home. I was just a kid then. I'm 62 now.
My memory is that one Saturday, I was already up watching Saturday morning cartoons, when he started getting ready to go to work, but, he didn't work on Saturdays. He told me to get ready too. I did, because I never questioned my father. He took me to breakfast, and then we drove to JPL in his 1951 Chevy pickup, around to a back parking lot. We pulled up to a gate, and there was a guard shack. The guard greeted my dad, asked him who I was, and told me to enjoy the tour. It was awesome. I got to dress up in a clean suit, that was way to big for me, so I could go into the clean room with my dad, where they did final assembly for components of the satellites. I saw the wind tunnels, and the water tank test areas, compression tanks, and the coolest thing was, all the critical labs were deep underground. Just like Cheyenne Mountain. My dad had a cool office too. It had his awards and degrees and stuff, and pictures with him and Einstein, from when they both worked at Los Alamos. Pretty cool.
The best part for me, was getting to grow up in Los Angeles.
Wow! It must have been amazing to hear all those stories about the missions.
He couldn't talk about a lot of what he did. He had Top Secret security clearances, and you don't get them, and keep them, by talking. He learned that working on the Manhatten Project in New Mexico. He rarely spoke of his experiences in WW2. He was in the action, getting two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. He destroyed a two man Japanese Suicide sub, and was credited for saving lives, because the intelligence he secured indicated it was ready to be deployed against the 7th Fleet. He was also in the final fighting on Okinawa, and I know the fighting there was brutal, and he must have witnessed horrors. He had a charmed life, his five brothers all served in WW2, in the Army, all except for my dad went to Europe, and all saw action, and all returned home. He did tell me about the troop shipo ride home to Seattle, when the were destroying ordinance from the deck, and scuttling heavy equipment and helos off the ship. He told me some other stuff, about Einstein, that only somebody who worked with him would know. Most of the fathers on my block growing up worked either in defense, or aerospace. My mom, like most moms in my neighborhood, stayed home to raise the kids. I only remember one mom working, and she was some big banker. That's about it, sorry.
i am very young, so the only thing i remember is my father when i was 7 or 8 telling me about a spacecraft that had gone outside the solar system and that had travelled for 40 years, and my naive mind thinking it was a space shuttle crew and wondering how could the food last so long
“ not only does Uranus have a magnetosphere but it is twisted into a corkscrew shape” 😂😭
how is it running for 40 years non stop?Where does the energy comes from?
Solar?
It has a radioactive thermal generator on board, a chunk of plutonium that releases heat that the spacecraft can use for power.
Secoundly space is vacuum and thus no air resistance,so any object moving for a certain speed continues to move in a certain direction.
abde sakib solar wouldn’t be enough to run on
Once an object has an acceleration in space there is nothing there to stop it, providing it doesn’t collide with anything
HarvardLaw22' I meant how it is still sending information. That definitely requires some energy. Anyway got the answer I was looking for.
Great commentary on Voyagers. I was amazed on finding out that they got so low power that they have to turn heater off, run other stuff then transmit it, then turn on heaters. They apparently found out that running tape machine there kept things slightly warmer meanwhile! Amazing hacks to keep it running a little longer, especially with Voyager 2 and its broken parts, because temperate changes freqrance commands can be sent at.
Yeah, nobody ever expected the Voyagers to last this long.
And the two Mars rovers that landed in 2003/2004. Those went *way* beyond nominal lifetimes of three months. And Cassini went past its main mission, , into extended mission (XM) and even into XXM.
I want my next car to be built by JPL!
Indeed! Love it when we really get the value of science out of those!
From the way it sounds, I am only one year-ish older than you, so I remember the launches and the landmark reports. It's amazing how long they've lasted.
Yup, we keep getting reports and I'm amazed they're still cranking away.
I recently bought a Hasegawa 1:42 scale model of the Voyager probe (yet to assemble) because what I love the most about it, is that it's the first spacecraft that humanity has ever sent into interstellar space. I like to think that one day we can send more to follow in it's footsteps. To the outer planets and beyond!
why couldnt they keep voyager 2 orbiting neptune? was it going too fast for that?
what saddens me the most is that they are all we have left... a forward thinking civilization would be sending a few voyager-type probes every 2 years or so with new goals and better-more instruments, its unfathomable the kind of discoveries we could've made by doing that since the 70's
Voyager 2 was traveling too fast to enter orbit, it would need tons of fuel to slow down.
The problem is that the Voyager probes were using the alignment of planets as a means of using gravity assists to get the velocity possible to leave the solar system.
I guess these trajectories aren't often availiable
wtf lol Afghanistan and Iraq both cost trillions. Then there was Vietnam. Today we have Trump.
To remain in orbit takes rather a lot of rocket fuel also
Trump would topple over into a pile of fat and tears if hit by a three-year-old girl. Your emperor has no clothes.
Not a good idea to tell unknown aliens where we are! :(
Zfast4y0u we Indians will take our land back
Eddie LM shut up the possibility are low
Great Sniff lol, your chiefs already sold you guys out to Canadians for an environmental trophy from the UN.
Zfast4y0u You're very strange.
Maybe it will find planet Namek
probaly the voyagers will outlive mankind
They'll actually be chunks of metal flying in space for probably a billion years before they wear away.
Oké wouter
I'm 46, and I remember the National Geographic issues covering each planetary encounter made by these two.......I was going to say probes, or machines, but they were SO much more than that! They are humanity's attempt to LEARN, to learn abstract information, information that has little impact on most of our day-to-day lives, but has a staggering effect on our understanding of our universe!
These brave explorers are our attempt to be more than we are, and as such, should be known by every single student on Earth!!!
I'm really grateful for these missions, and it'll be sad to lose them.
Fraser Cain
They're never going to be lost, not really!
They are a message to other intelligent life forms that screams "WE ARE HERE, AND WE WISH TO LEARN!!"
Any aliens will understand this message, and know of our existence - could any conceivable machine ever serve a more noble purpose?
Lol, I wax pilosophical when I think about the distance they've traveled 😂
Thanks NASA for pursuing such ambitious and inspiring the whole humanity together.
It would be cool if one day, when Voyager 1 runs out of energy, we could be advanced enough to send out another one with more energy and brink back Voyager 1.
I'm 50 yr old and have a tattoo of the voyager plaque on my forearm
Andy Zwright nice
how long does it take for a signal from the voyagers to reach earth?
very fast if you think about it I mean 1 is outside the solar system 1's almost outside and we are still able to get information from it in just less than a day but doesn't that mean that the radio waves travel faster than light.....
well if it takes 8mn for light to get from the sun to the earth then shouldn't it take radio signals from something way farther from us than the sun to take atleast............wait a sec nvm I'm retarded
I think you made that up! %)
Lyka not long at all, since they don't exist it's pretty much instant.
Aulia Lubis Ok its 5 billion km away. Light speed is 3 millon meters a second. Do the math.
The BBC documentary 'The Planets' has a truly brilliant episode dedicated solely to these missions and it is by far one of my favourite things I've ever watched and I go back to it every few years or so.
That's a great series, thanks for making of me think about it.
Are there any plans on a new "voyager" program? The advancement in technology has made an enormous leap forward, since these 2 were launched back in the 70's ... I am sure the next would be able to last quite a bit longer.. and sent even more detailed pictures..
Last year when they said there was another planet past Pluto, wouldn't the voyager probes found something?
No, they're not equipped to be able to find them.
These drones may still be roaming the universe when humanity is long dead and gone.
Yup, they should last for a billion years or more.
MCP/ChronicBuzz our time capsules to the cosmos.
I just learned about voyager 1 & voyager 2 but i already miss them 😭❤️
Yeah, it was amazing to be there for them and see when the pictures first came back. Incredible time.
Awesome video! Been amazed at the Voyager missions since the early 1980's. First mission ever to try to journey out of our solar system. Space is so huge! It is mind boggling.
I never knew about the records! That is such a heart fluttering moment, the thought that somehow, somewhere, some time, they could be discovered and played. It's this final touch that makes us humans truly amazing. We have hope and belief!
As long as they find them in the next billion years or so.
Fraser Cain - Sold point 🤣. I hope they do 👍🏼
I love all the Voyager missions I'll miss you Captain Kathryn Janeway as well as tuvok, as for Seven of Nine she was an amazing actress. 😂
Apparently the last episode of ST:V is the most watched Star Trek episode on Netflix.
Lol
U.S.S. Voyager NCC-74656
I still miss that ship and her crew. Looks like that'll be the only Voyager to make it home any time soon.
david james yes thank you
NASA was basically like "YEET" and threw two spaceships out of the fucking solar system?
Exactly!
They should invent voyager 3 with the highest technology possible, with 16k video/picture camera and really good videos and the highest and clearest microphone possible ( to record earth sounds, animals, humans, cities, etc. ) and also with the highest tech microphone possible to record space sounds and 16k photos and videos of our space. They should also make Voyager 3 last as long as possible with electricity.
Sounds good, that would be amazing. :-)
The way the planets were aligned in 77 is what allowed all the optimal gravity assists.
Totally achievable but instead we waste money with useless things. I miss the space race between soviets and USA. It made us focus on the right things.
A microphone? A radio receiver should suffice.
In 1977 I was 16 . My brother in law at the time was working at JPL when the Voyagers were sent .
They feel like old friends that have been with me for most of my life so I have a sort of sentimental attachment to them
That's amazing to hear. I've had a few people tell me they were involved or had family members working on the missions. So amazing.
@@frasercain He showed the family pictures from the Viking mission to Mars in 1976 . It was very fascinating. 👍
@@lindaeasley4336 That's probably the first mission that I really remember well. I remember seeing the TV coverage of the Vikings and being amazed there were landers on Mars.
I'm over 50 and fondly remember the Voyagers.
They were a crowning source and accomplishment at the time for something we take for granted today.
To this day I am still astonished that at any time, we can plot a projected course of objects across our solar system decades in advance and be able to launch a spacecraft from the other side of a massive star to intercept planets we can only guess are going to be where they should and with pinpoint precision.
Think of what those scientists may have said to each other back then.
"But if we wait a few more months, we can slingshot it around the Sun, hit this window on Jupiter, then the window on Saturn,.." and so on.
Its awe- inspiring when you take it all in.
I pass Voyager-1 every time I take two lung murdering bong rips back to back...hey..there it goes by now.....
What if UFOs are just probes from extinct alien civilizations?
That would be cool.
Voyager 1 was launched on the day I was born 👶🛰
I remember! The day after the first Voyager was launched from Florida, I left home for my first paying job in what was my career field. I am retired now, but I was lucky to see the images made by the Voyager spacecraft, that was built with Apollo era technology. Still rugged, and believe that someday, another culture will find them and check out the recording. God Speed Voyagers!
My Voyager memories are always bound up with the first time I watched Cosmos with my father when I was 10 years old.
Born Sept 1969. I remember Voyager much better then even the later Apollo shots.
It's crazy we can still get signals from the voyagers. I can't even get my wifi to work properly most times.
Have you tried installing a 70-meter radio dish? NASA found that really helped to boost the signal.
They weren't expected to survive the encounter with Jupiter or Saturn because of their insane electromagnetic emissions. But they did.
They helped us map out these regions in the first place. Amazing how much they taught us.
Science is bad ass ...
Super bad ass. :-)
Thank you for all your work on this channel! I have been subscribed to your email newsletters as well & just wanted yinz to know how much I appreciate everything! 💛
I was born in 1977, the same year Voyager launched. I have often thought of them, as I journey through life, and they through the universe. I would go so far as to say those two little spacecraft are the most profound thing humanity has ever done. 5 billion years from now when the earth has been burnt to a crisp by our then red giant sun, at least something of those two little spacecraft will still be there. A testament to humanity, reminding eternity, we were here.
They shud make it so when voyager 1 cant talk with earth it puts out a repeat of music from the 70s like a radio station....forever...
Except when it runs out of power it won't be able to transmit anything anymore.
Aw that would be so cool
hard to think of mission that had more bang-for-the-buck than the voyagers, when the RTGs deplete, fare thee well v'ger
How far will the voyagers get in those billon years you think?
Gerardo Ruiz mid in andromeda i think?😁
Well voyager has only 3 years left of fuel
Gerardo Ruiz i think milkomeda😂
Sorry you weren't around for the moon landings. I remember my parents letting me stay up to see the take off of their rocket and I listened to all the experts talk about the process. Off course we know now that the astronauts were incredibly vulnerable and lucky not to have been killed by solar flares. We also know now that they were not certain that the surface of the moon would hold the landing craft. You are probably too young to remember the first Viking pictures of the surface of Mars. I got up to watch the first photos come through. The Voyager projects have always fascinated me and given us so much. Nice video, keep them coming.
I definitely remember the Vikings, that was in my time. :-)
Thank you, Fraser, for this beautiful retrospective. I think that one my favorite Voyager accomplishments is the Pale Blue Dot photograph; I am not sure if it provided any scientific knowledge to us, but it certainly gave us a perspective on our home that we never experienced before. Carl Sagan's reflection on that photograph in his 1994 speech nearly drives me to tears.
V'GER
star trek reference?
🖖🖖Live long and prosper🖖🖖
Harry Evett Yup. V'ger is Voyager with some AI encrusted on it.
elocoetam Lol! I was going to leave that comment until I read yours!
Just waiting for one of them to return with that bald headed chick
I remember watching that particular episode of Star Trek when I was but a wee lad. :-)
if voyager has not yet reached the ort cloud how why is it considered outside the solar system? isn't the ort cloud still under the gravitational pull of the sun?
brian phillips They mean the main solar system! The oort cloud is gravitationally bound, but it isn't the main area.
then they haven't left the solar system
True! When they say solar system, they probably ment the main system, though specifying would've been a good idea.
The Oort cloud is gravitationally bound to the Sun, but since it's outside of the heliosphere, it's technically in interstellar space. Think of the Solar system as a car, and the Oort cloud as a trailer hitched up to the back. Everything in the car is "in the car", but the trailer isn't "in the car".
Voyager would be crawling along the rear trunk towards the trailer. Also not "in the car".
The Oort cloud does orbit the sun, but the voyagers are going a lot faster and are headed out.
In my headcanon of human future, we will catch up with the Voyagers, retrofit them with new tech and send them on a new mission: Explore Andromeda
Incredible! Thanks for this brilliant video. Absolute Noob here.
I was under the impression that the Voyagers have officially left the solar system, I didnt know about the Oort cloud until now. I had a question about how the crafts are still intact without succumbing to collisions. Thanks to the comments from your wonderful and really informative audience, that question has been answered as well. Subscribed! Cheers from India!
I had totally forgotten that Voyager One reached Jupiter the day before my birthday in my senior year of high school, I do recall the heavy conversations about it, and reading much in Sky & Telescope magazine .... it was nearly as memorable as huddling around a little black-and-white TV one late evening with my parents in 1969 to watch the Apollo 11 landing... It felt like a much more innocent time.
It would be cool if they had a satellite stationed around each planet instead of just doing a fly by .
We had one at Saturn and at Jupiter. Some day we need to go back to Uranus and Neptune. And there are plans in the works to send a spacecraft to Pluto to orbit it.
are they still there? if not what happened to them?
@@ThePioneerChannel The Galileo spacecraft was in orbit around Jupiter and the Cassini spacecraft was in orbit around Saturn. In order for these probes to be useful they have to be controllable from the ground. This means keeping them stable and pointed in the right direction so as to take images and make measurements and to communicate with earth. To do that they require fuel for their thrusters, which are little rocket motors that fire occasionally to control the spacecraft's orientation. Once the thruster fuel runs out the probes become uncontrollable and useless space junk. Once that happens there is a risk that the spacecraft could impact one of the planet's moons and infect it with germs from earth. That would mean any life found there in the future might be from earth and not the moon itself. So as to avoid this contamination both probes were deliberately crashed into the planets to destroy them when they were low on fuel but while they were still controllable. So the probes are kind of still there but only in the form of the basic materials that they were made of.
fucking google it,.ffs!!!!
Hey Dude I was 9 when Apollo launched, it was epic!
Nice, I'm jealous.
How do we manage to detect Voyager 2's signal since it's so damn weak? 😮
This is mind boggling! 😲
With a really big satellite dish.
Carlos Perez What do you mean? Is someone supposed to pay me something and I don't know? If this is the case, I want my money.
@@MusiCaninesTheMusicalDogsAt first, they really use a really big sattelite dish. And they also use signals based on pseudo random sequences. These signals allows receiver to collect energy from some period of time and then compress it. As a result the signal level increases in the number of times in wich its duration was compressed, but the level of noise stays the same.
GPS satellites use the same thing, but their signals are shorter what means they have less energy.
I'm russian, so sorry for my English, I hope you'll be able to understand my message.
The window of opportunity was well used. Voyager 1 and 2 taught us so much and are seriously the greatest technical achievements of mankind that really brought us further as a species. Something that the majority of people today won't even remotely comprehend or appreciate. Voyager 1 & 2 and it's golden records are a kiss for eternity.
I was 11 years old when the Voyagers lifted off. Pretty amazing what they've discovered.
I remembered when nasa had the last launch of space shuttle.
Aww, me too. I was actually at Florida for the 2nd to last launch but they had a big delay so I missed it. :-( I never saw one launch.
Meanwhile, I just walked a few meters to my fridge to grab a sandwich :)
Nice work!
Wouldn't it be cool to come up with a new form of space propulsion, where we could catch up with Voyager I in a couple hours, no sweat?
I should have become a rocket propulsion engineer :.(
I'm in my early 40s now, and on a different path.. Would have been an interesting choice perhaps
Thanks for the encouragement, though! ;)
AvyScottandFlower I mean, a couple hours? Nah! The Voyagers are over 13 light-hours away, and you have to accelerate too; so even the best space propulsion possible will take a few days! But yea, faster space propulsion is gonna be necessary! NASA does have a powerful Ion Thrusther called VASIMR, which can head to mars in 39 days, and catching up to voyager? Brb, gonna go calculate it. Results: 9.65 years to catch up to Voyager! To get to the supposed Planet 9's perihelion? 32.8 years! Saturn? 11 months! With even better ion tech in the future.. even faster! Also, nuclear energy! Nuclear Fission or Fusion could get us to multiple percentages of light speed, same with Antimatter and Artifical Black Holes, aswell as Photon Sails. Those 5 are the kind of things youd use to go interstellar! Infact, there is currently a project called "Breakthrough Starshot" being made, which, in maybe just a few decades time, will launch thousands of tiny little probes pushed by lasers to Proxima Centuari, traveling at a monsterous 20% of light speed.
Nice reply!
Well, I wouldn't mind a couple of days, haha
Though even that would be too slow for interstellar travel!
AvyScottandFlower Actually, a couple days would mean a ship that could almost get to light speed! Interstellar travel will never be short, even the closest star takes 4.24 years to get to at light speed, the fastest speed in the universe. Breakthrough Starshot should take just over 20. That's perfectly okay for probes! Obviously, probes can survive a while! In the far future, we'll be sending probes on maybe e even multi-milennia mission to distant stars! Manned missions? You'd transplant humanity! For example, let's say you sent a manned ship to the nearest star at 10% light speed, therefore a 42 year journey? You'd make a ship the size of your average suburban city, and have hundreds of thousands with everything they need to live! Mhm! Manned Interstellar Voyages would be better called "Colonial Interstellar Voyages". You could also just freeze them for the voyage, then you might just need an aircraft carrier sized ship. Or put everyone into a virtual reality/simulated city.
@dsv Im not sure how to calculate how much force something hits with at certain speeds. As far as the Alcubierre Drive? We just dont have enough evidence for me to justify that it's possible! Youd need tons of exotic matter, a substance which probobly dosent exist, and even if it can be created, making that much is absurd. Most people tend to think we'll achieve FTL one day, but ima keep rolling my eyes at those proposals until we find definitive proof.
Went on a field trip to JPL around 1977. They gave us pictures of Jupiter. Wish I'd have been more appreciative of the opportunity to visit such a place.
In my opinion the " Pale Blue Dot" picture is 1 of the greatest and most meaningful pictures ever taken. To say its the greatest might cause an argument so i'll just say its 1 of the top 3. To me that 1 picture makes the program worth it. The volumes of other things we got are just a bonus.
I totally agree with you. Definitely one of the most amazing and meaningful pictures ever taken.
I remember Voyager reaching Neptune.
I just watched the documentary on Netflix about the Voyagers called "The Farthest". So great.
Hopefully the aliens know how to play a record.
The spacecraft includes a record needle and instructions on how to use it.
@@frasercain Great...only a needle!? Wait till they get the part about plugging the player into a wall socket, Alien: "Damn, we have to build a city, just to play this thing".
Fantastic video mate, a credit to you...
Thanks a lot!
Im not ashame to shred a tear for this heroic technologies. I love you voyagers, cassini, oppy and many more of them that keeps giving us informations about the unknown world ❤
The planetary alignment that allowed the Voyager 2 spacecraft to visit 4 planets in a single flight was very rare. The opportunity only comes around once every 176 years!
The last time it happened, Thomas Jefferson was president, and he blew it.
Mind boggling mathematical accuracy of the creators of the mission, and our luck to be alive in that time