Speaker 1: Welcome to text Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
Speaker 1: I love all things tech, and today we're going to
Speaker 1: listen to a classic episode titled tech Stuff Goes on
Speaker 1: a Voyage. It's about the Voyager program and this episode
Speaker 1: originally published on April two thousand thirteen. The Voyager program
Speaker 1: is one of those really fascinating space programs that I
Speaker 1: absolutely loved learning about, so I hope you guys enjoy
Speaker 1: this classic episode. The first thing we wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about was kind of what was the purpose of the
Speaker 1: Voyager missions, which, by the way, are still going. But
Speaker 1: we want to talk about kind of the timeline of
Speaker 1: the missions, and then we'll get into more details about
Speaker 1: the space craft itself and then follow that up with
Speaker 1: a discussion about the science that has been discovered by
Speaker 1: these amazing spacecraft. So going back to May nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: that's when NASA begins to fund a mission that will
Speaker 1: involve designing, building, and launching spacecraft that are meant to
Speaker 1: explore the outer planets of our Solar System. And even
Speaker 1: before this back in the engineer named Gary Flandreau noticed
Speaker 1: that sometime in the nineteen seventies, the outer planets would
Speaker 1: be aligned planetary alignment in such a way as to
Speaker 1: make this very possible. And this was you know, the
Speaker 1: space program was going and booming, and it was kind
Speaker 1: of an incredible alignment of the stars that allowed us
Speaker 1: to write when we had money to do this stuff. Right, So, so,
Speaker 1: I mean that planetary alignment is really what makes the
Speaker 1: voyager missions possible because you know, if the if the
Speaker 1: plants were in such an alignment, so that let's say
Speaker 1: that alignment, well there's still aligned properly, they're just not
Speaker 1: viable for us to explore. But let's say let's say
Speaker 1: like jupiters on one side of the Sun and Saturn's
Speaker 1: on the other side of the Sun, then it would
Speaker 1: be really tricky to design a spacecraft sector could explore both. Right, So,
Speaker 1: and this particular alignment isn't going to occur again for
Speaker 1: another hundred and seventy six years, so you had to
Speaker 1: jump on the opportunity. And so in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: even though it was still years away from when this
Speaker 1: alignment would occur, NASA gets on the ball and starts
Speaker 1: to design this, and in nineteen seventy seven they are
Speaker 1: finished with the design and the spacecraft they had been
Speaker 1: designing was under the working name the Mariner Jupiter slash
Speaker 1: Saturn nineteen seventy seven, but they decided to rename it
Speaker 1: a little bit of a mouthfall, yeaheah. They called it Voyager,
Speaker 1: and on August twenty, nineteen seventy seven, a Titan Centaur
Speaker 1: rocket carried one of the two Voyager spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida,
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere and ultimately into space. Which one was
Speaker 1: it that will launched first? It was Voyager two that
Speaker 1: launched first. Which one launched second? Voyager one? Okay, So
Speaker 1: so this this was basically for pr purposes because the
Speaker 1: way that they were designed, Voyager one was going to
Speaker 1: due to its trajectory, it was going to reach Jupiter
Speaker 1: first and so start sending back images of Jupiter, you know,
Speaker 1: fingers crossed if all goes well first, and NASA thought
Speaker 1: that the public would be incredibly confused if if the
Speaker 1: Voyager one launched first but got to the planets second,
Speaker 1: whereas some for some reason launching second and getting to
Speaker 1: the planet first is less confusing. No one was paying
Speaker 1: attention to the launch. Yeah, goodness knows, no one pays
Speaker 1: attention to something. Yeah, the one thing you're actually able
Speaker 1: to watch while you're still on Earth. It still makes
Speaker 1: me tear up every single time anything gets launched into space.
Speaker 1: I'm like, just humanity is so beautiful. That's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: I mean when you think about what it takes to
Speaker 1: get something into space, and is phenomenal the amount of
Speaker 1: engineering and ingenuity that went into that. But yes, absolutely so.
Speaker 1: The Voyager to launches first. The Voyager one launches about
Speaker 1: sixteen days later, in fact, not about sixteen days later,
Speaker 1: at launches nicely on September and it's using the same
Speaker 1: sort of rocket, the Titans Centaur rocket, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: I love it anyway. The initial purpose was for these
Speaker 1: to explore the giant planets in the Outer Solar System.
Speaker 1: Those giant planets are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Pluto,
Speaker 1: of course not a giant planet. It does not get
Speaker 1: the treatment, not for these missions. Forget you Pluto. And
Speaker 1: there were two separate trajectories that were being used. Voyager one,
Speaker 1: of course, was designed so that the trajectory was chosen
Speaker 1: so that it would reach Jupiter first, then move on
Speaker 1: to Saturn, and then get flung off to head toward
Speaker 1: interstellar space. Uh. Voyager too would do a visit to
Speaker 1: all four of the giant planets. So that's why you
Speaker 1: have the different timelines, because even though Voyager two launched first,
Speaker 1: for it to be able to hit this trajectory where
Speaker 1: it was going to to pass by each of the
Speaker 1: four giants, it had to do that at a different Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's the you know. And if you were to
Speaker 1: just look at a model of the Solar System and
Speaker 1: just spin the planets around at the different rates, you
Speaker 1: would see like, oh, yeah, now I understand you would
Speaker 1: have to be really particular about when you would launch
Speaker 1: and how you would launch for it to be able
Speaker 1: to hit all of these points properly. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: an amazing amount of engineering that's required and and just
Speaker 1: math that's required to make sure that you've got the
Speaker 1: right the right timing. Yeah, and it was it was
Speaker 1: kind of shady, you know, basically until it happened, no
Speaker 1: one was sure that it was going to happen, right
Speaker 1: and Uh, And it's interesting because the Voyager spacecraft actually
Speaker 1: used the planets themselves to help make sure they got
Speaker 1: to where they needed to go. But we'll get into that.
Speaker 1: It's pretty awesome though. So moving down the timeline, they
Speaker 1: they've launched in nineteen seventy seven. Almost two years later,
Speaker 1: on March five, nineteen seventy nine, Voyager one has its
Speaker 1: closest approach to Jupiter and it captures a lot of
Speaker 1: images of Jupiter and Jupiter's moons. Uh. And then July nine,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, so same year, that's when Voyager two
Speaker 1: passes closest to Jupiter. Uh. Then we go to the
Speaker 1: next year. On November twelve, eighty Voyager one has its
Speaker 1: closest approach to Saturn, and then it begins its trip
Speaker 1: out of the Solar System, saying so long, suckers, and
Speaker 1: starts heading off into the well. It would be the sunset,
Speaker 1: except it can't be in the opposite of the sunset, right,
Speaker 1: It's not the sun rise either. That's that would normally
Speaker 1: be the opposite of a sunset, the sun diminishing into
Speaker 1: a tin year ball. I guess not nearly as poetic.
Speaker 1: But August one, that's when Voyager two gets its closest
Speaker 1: approach to Saturday. But of course Voyager two is not
Speaker 1: flung off into in our interstellar space right away. Instead,
Speaker 1: it is then heading toward Uranus, which it passes closest
Speaker 1: to on January fourth, nineteen eight six. So it took
Speaker 1: five years for Voyager two to go from Saturn to Uranus. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it would take um it would take a few
Speaker 1: more years before it would like five well three more years,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, three more years before I would get close
Speaker 1: to Neptune. But before we get to that point, seven,
Speaker 1: Voyager two observes the supernova nineteen seven eight Voyager returns
Speaker 1: the first color images of Neptune. So that Voyager two
Speaker 1: that is, so it's getting closer to Neptune. It's still
Speaker 1: not the closest it will be, but that's when we
Speaker 1: first started getting color images of Neptune back from Voyager,
Speaker 1: and on August nine, Voyager two as its closest approach
Speaker 1: to Neptune. And that concludes the primary mission of the
Speaker 1: of both Voyager spacecraft, that primary mission being the exploration
Speaker 1: of those outer planets. So the cost of the missions
Speaker 1: from nineteen seventy two to the time when they finished
Speaker 1: their mission their primary mission was eight hundred sixty five
Speaker 1: million dollars. Now, NASA points out that if you break
Speaker 1: this down by the population of the United States and
Speaker 1: year over year, that's about eight cents per person per year.
Speaker 1: So it's it's essentially saying like, look, really in the
Speaker 1: grand scheme, and it sounds like a lot of money,
Speaker 1: but in the grand scheme of things, this is just
Speaker 1: a tiny investment. So look at these pictures of center. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: keep keep calm and keep exploring, is what they said.
Speaker 1: I hate that name anyway. So the that that million
Speaker 1: dollars included everything include the expense of the launch vehicles,
Speaker 1: the radioactive power source, which we'll get to talk about
Speaker 1: in a little bit, uh, and and just the maintaining
Speaker 1: of the missions. By nine, Voyager one was heading toward
Speaker 1: interstellar space and on vale In Tine's Day in nineteen nine,
Speaker 1: we get the final images from Voyager, which is a
Speaker 1: portrait of the Solar System. Happy Valentine's Day, I gave
Speaker 1: you the Solar System. Sweet Three days later, February I'm
Speaker 1: sorry three days in eight years later on fantasy, I
Speaker 1: should read the year before I read the day February
Speaker 1: sevent have all my notes in front of me, it's just,
Speaker 1: you know, my typing and viewing skills are Apparently there's
Speaker 1: something to be desired. February seventeenth, the Voyager one passes
Speaker 1: the Pioneer ten, which had obviously been launched previously, and
Speaker 1: so that makes the Voyager one the most distant human
Speaker 1: made object in space. It is still to this day
Speaker 1: the most distant human made object in space. It's actually
Speaker 1: most distant stir and it was because it keeps going.
Speaker 1: That was good. Well, I figured it might as well
Speaker 1: measure up to my reading and comprehension skills. Uh. Decenumber
Speaker 1: fifteen two thousand four. Edge or one crosses the termination
Speaker 1: shock comination shock. This is this is pretty cool, guys,
Speaker 1: and do the heally you sheath. Yeah. So here's here's
Speaker 1: some things that you need to know about our wacky
Speaker 1: little solar system. Here you might ask, what's the edge
Speaker 1: of the Solar System? Is it Pluto? No? No, it's
Speaker 1: not Pluto. Well, I mean again, it all depends on
Speaker 1: how you're defining the edge of the Solar System. But
Speaker 1: the way NASA defines it, Nope, not Pluto, especially since
Speaker 1: it's not it's still on a planet right now, that's
Speaker 1: not it's a dwarf planet. There's that never mind, there's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's Pluto is right there with happy, sneezy,
Speaker 1: sleepy Adobe doc bashful. Uh So, termination shock, that's that's
Speaker 1: the point where the solar wind particles start to slow down.
Speaker 1: They were traveling essentially at kind of the speed of
Speaker 1: sound would be, but anyway, they're traveling really fast. They
Speaker 1: start slowing down because you can think of the solar
Speaker 1: wind as this uh, this force that pushes out from
Speaker 1: the Sun. All right, Now, think of the interstellar space
Speaker 1: kind of having its own pressure. It's sort of like
Speaker 1: air pressure. It's pushing in on the solar made of
Speaker 1: magnetic fields instead of air pressure. So there exactly, they're
Speaker 1: not air particles. It's all we're talking. There are particles
Speaker 1: on space, but that's that's a different thing anyway. So
Speaker 1: the solar wind is pressing against these these other pressures.
Speaker 1: So once you get to the point where the solar
Speaker 1: wind is slowing down, that's the termination shock. Right, there's
Speaker 1: kind of a boundary with a with a shock wave
Speaker 1: fare and also still not the edge of the Solar system. Also,
Speaker 1: you also have the heliosphere. Now this is where we
Speaker 1: still have we still have evidence of the solar wind
Speaker 1: within the heliosphere. Then you have the helio pause, which
Speaker 1: is the very boundary of where the solar wind is,
Speaker 1: and that still is not the edge of the Solar System,
Speaker 1: not according to NASA. According to NASA, really we need
Speaker 1: to think of the edge of the Solar System as
Speaker 1: being an area where the Sun's gravitational poll has no
Speaker 1: greater effect on you than any other particular celestial body
Speaker 1: out there. So, in other words, you aren't being pulled
Speaker 1: towards the Solar System at that point anymore than you're
Speaker 1: being pulled towards some other point, right, Yeah, so that
Speaker 1: that area is ill defined by the very nature of gravity.
Speaker 1: But um, that would take us a very long time
Speaker 1: to get there, and we'll talk about that when we
Speaker 1: get into the science section. So anyway, termination shock has
Speaker 1: all these fluctuating magnetic fields due to the change and
Speaker 1: the speed of the Solar wind, and that's kind of
Speaker 1: why it's called what it's called. And Voyager one, like
Speaker 1: I said, crossed it on December two thousand four and
Speaker 1: begins to encounter the interstellar medium. That doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: it's in interstellar space yet, but starting to encounter the
Speaker 1: particles that would be an interstellar space September five, two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, three years later, that's when Voyager two catches
Speaker 1: up and crosses the termination shock at a totally different point.
Speaker 1: By the way, these two spacecraft are in two totally
Speaker 1: different sections of no nowhere near each other anymore, not
Speaker 1: at all. And then in July and two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: Voyager one enters a new region of space which is
Speaker 1: still inside the Solar System. It's another region of the
Speaker 1: helio heliosphere helio she called a magnetic highway YEP. And
Speaker 1: the directions of the particles that it's encountering are beginning
Speaker 1: to change, which suggests that the spacecraft is at the
Speaker 1: very edge of the heliosphere. And UM engineers didn't expect
Speaker 1: that the data that they got back. They thought that
Speaker 1: it would have passed beyond this point earlier, which just
Speaker 1: tells us that our Solar system is actually larger, thought
Speaker 1: that the Sun is more powerful than we previously expected.
Speaker 1: Never underestimate the power of the Sun. It can turn
Speaker 1: me read in a matter of minutes, very susceptible to
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. So, yeah, that's we've already talked
Speaker 1: about how they have, they left at different times in
Speaker 1: their pathways, meant that they are traveling in different directions
Speaker 1: and different at different speeds. Uh, and they visited different
Speaker 1: you know, like voice You're two visited two more planets
Speaker 1: than Voyage or one did. But we talked about how
Speaker 1: the planets helped move the spacecraft and direct the spacecraft.
Speaker 1: So if you guys have seen science fiction films like
Speaker 1: Star Trek four, the Voyage Home where they sling shot
Speaker 1: around the Sun, they're actually using the Sun's gravity to
Speaker 1: kind of accelerate a ship to the point where it
Speaker 1: can travel back in time. I don't understand that. By
Speaker 1: the way, if you've got warp speed, you technically anyway,
Speaker 1: that's another episode. We already did. That episode we did.
Speaker 1: But anyway, they use it to sling shot around the Sun,
Speaker 1: which magically lets them travel back in time. There's some
Speaker 1: truth to that in the sense that we have used
Speaker 1: that same kind of principle with designing the voyage or spacecraft. Right.
Speaker 1: What we what we kind of realized is that if
Speaker 1: you okay, you're you're you're moving towards the planet, you're
Speaker 1: a probe okay, okay, and uh, as you move towards
Speaker 1: the planet. You're going to start accelerating as the planet's
Speaker 1: gravitational pull starts pulling you in. Right, if you only
Speaker 1: kind of graze by it, then hypothetically you'll deseller right
Speaker 1: on the way out because you're losing energy to that
Speaker 1: gravitational pull. Right. And by the way, because of the
Speaker 1: conservation of energy, technically, the planet's orbit actually slows sure infanticimally, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh say, I've got wait, wait, wait, I have
Speaker 1: it written down. I know I've got it written down.
Speaker 1: It's something like, uh, one foot in a trillion years. Well,
Speaker 1: but hey, that is an impact you are. You are
Speaker 1: making a difference. But Jupiter is going to be a
Speaker 1: little late to its to its appointment in one trillion years. Right. However,
Speaker 1: because planets are moving in their orbits, if you are
Speaker 1: going on the same trajectory as a planet's orbit, you
Speaker 1: can pick up that orbital speed as you slingshot around
Speaker 1: the planet. Ye, And so that that has allowed the
Speaker 1: Voyager spacecraft to get propulsion from one plant to the
Speaker 1: next without having to have massive thrusters on board. In fact,
Speaker 1: when we get to the actual description of the spacecraft,
Speaker 1: you'll find out that their thrusters are not incredibly powerful
Speaker 1: at all, but they were able to use the power
Speaker 1: of gravity to direct and propel themselves something as large
Speaker 1: as as Jupiter. You know, it's moving through space at
Speaker 1: something like thirty thousand miles per hour forty tho kilometers
Speaker 1: and uh yeah, so so and and that's yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a completely free energy boost of about that much speed.
Speaker 1: According to NASA, because of the use of planetary gravity,
Speaker 1: Voyager too ended up having a fuel economy of about
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand kilometers per leader or thirty thousand miles per gallon.
Speaker 1: That's efficient. That beats That beats my car. That's highway miles,
Speaker 1: city miles. They did not give me, so I don't
Speaker 1: I don't know how it would do in the city. Uh. There,
Speaker 1: the Voyager two's flight path got a look, like we said,
Speaker 1: at all four of the giant plants um and uh
Speaker 1: and it's a couple of billion miles further inside the
Speaker 1: Solar System than the Voyager one. So the Voyager one
Speaker 1: got a kind of a head start into interstellar space
Speaker 1: um and is more than eleven billion or seventeen point
Speaker 1: seven eleven billion miles or seventeen point seven billion kilometers
Speaker 1: away from the Sun at this point more more more
Speaker 1: than eighteen as of as of today, there's there's a
Speaker 1: there's a tracker on on NASA nice where you can
Speaker 1: check all this out. So uh and and uh. At
Speaker 1: that distance, it takes hours for a for data to
Speaker 1: go from the spacecraft to be picked up here on Earth.
Speaker 1: About seventeen hours. Wow. Yeah, so that's a long time.
Speaker 1: So the way that let me let me find my
Speaker 1: note on it that it's really interesting the way that
Speaker 1: they receive those radio signals because they're they're pretty far away,
Speaker 1: they're getting increasingly difficult to check all the times. They
Speaker 1: have a whole series of two and thirty ft radio
Speaker 1: dishes right basically to pull Voyager data. These are the
Speaker 1: deep space antenna that they have to pick up this information,
Speaker 1: um and uh. And they actually upgraded those over the
Speaker 1: course of the life of the Voyager program. When they
Speaker 1: first started, they were significantly smaller, and they didn't have
Speaker 1: to be as big because the Voyager spacecraft were relatively
Speaker 1: closer to the Earth. Uh. And now now we've got
Speaker 1: to a point where we keep upgrading the antenna so
Speaker 1: that we can continue to pick up these increasingly weak signals,
Speaker 1: so it's pretty amazing. According to NASA, the emissions from
Speaker 1: Earth to Neptune required the equivalent of eleven thousand work
Speaker 1: years of human work. Eleven thousand work years, which they said,
Speaker 1: there's only a third of what it took to build
Speaker 1: the Great Pyramid. So well, hey, so you know we're slack,
Speaker 1: and yes, you know, really they're just saying, look how
Speaker 1: much more efficient we are. They were piling up rocks,
Speaker 1: we were sending spacecraft into space. Um and uh, and
Speaker 1: again we've learned that the Solar System is actually larger
Speaker 1: than what we have previously anticipated and um. So by
Speaker 1: the time the Voyager two flew by Neptune, the two
Speaker 1: spacecraft together had transmitted about five trillion bits of scientific
Speaker 1: data back at Earth and it was someone's job to
Speaker 1: look at all that. But yeah, the deep space tracking
Speaker 1: antennas are the ones we were talking about earlier that
Speaker 1: have been upgrades several times, and that that kind of
Speaker 1: that's the brief overview of the mission, and next we're
Speaker 1: going to take a look at the spacecraft itself and
Speaker 1: also some kind of cool records that are above the
Speaker 1: two spacecraft. But before we do that, let's take a
Speaker 1: quick pause to thank our sponsored. Okay, let's talk about
Speaker 1: the actual spacecraft for a minute. We know what they
Speaker 1: were supposed to do and what they have done. Um
Speaker 1: so uh And one thing I did not mention, I
Speaker 1: guess is that the whole inner interstellar travel stuff that's
Speaker 1: totally planned as well, in fact, has been added on
Speaker 1: as a secondary mission. The primary mission was the outer planets.
Speaker 1: Secondary is what's up with this interstellar stuff we don't
Speaker 1: know anything about. Well, they realize that their power sources
Speaker 1: would work until about and so figured well, hey, let's
Speaker 1: just kind of roll with it. Yeah. Yeah, so that's five.
Speaker 1: That's about when we expect the power resources to be
Speaker 1: to the point where they can no longer power the
Speaker 1: transmitter to send us back data. And we'll talk about that.
Speaker 1: That's one of the things that that's interesting about this spacecraft.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of interesting things. So both of them, uh,
Speaker 1: because because they're identical, Yes, they are identical. So each
Speaker 1: one of them weighs just under a ton. And now
Speaker 1: when they were on top of the the launch vehicle,
Speaker 1: they weighed a lot more than that, but the spacecraft
Speaker 1: themselves are just under a ton each unearthed obviously, because
Speaker 1: weight is all relative to where you are. Yes, uh,
Speaker 1: And they are each made up of about sixty five
Speaker 1: fouls and individual parts. But these parts are often made
Speaker 1: up of tinier components. So they have a term they
Speaker 1: use which is equivalent parts. And equivalent parts means like
Speaker 1: if you were to look at, for example, if I
Speaker 1: were to say my computer is part uh, is one
Speaker 1: part of the equipment that I use, someone else could
Speaker 1: point out, well, that computer has multiple chips in it,
Speaker 1: and those chips have transistors, and so really that one
Speaker 1: part is a representation of lots and lots and lots
Speaker 1: of parts. So NASA was like, well, if you want
Speaker 1: to know how many equivalent parts there are, there about
Speaker 1: five million of them. Compare that to your old standard
Speaker 1: definition color television. There will be about two thousand, five
Speaker 1: D equivalent parts. So lots more than a color TV,
Speaker 1: which is kind of what you want when you're when
Speaker 1: you're expo space. Yeah, you need a little bit more
Speaker 1: than it than your average standard definition color television. I agree,
Speaker 1: I would hope. So yeah, also larger than your standard yes, well,
Speaker 1: unless you're a crazy rich person. The main body is
Speaker 1: a is a ten sided box that's about six ft
Speaker 1: or one point eight meters across, and that's where the
Speaker 1: fuel tank, the and and some of the electronic instruments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about those instruments. They are all lot
Speaker 1: of them. Yeah, they're they were. They both have areas
Speaker 1: that are hardened against radiation and shielded. And the reason
Speaker 1: for that is obviously that when you go into space,
Speaker 1: you are going to encounter things that you would not
Speaker 1: encounter here on the surface of the planet. And the
Speaker 1: reason for that is that the Earth atmosphere and magnetos
Speaker 1: sphere mag magnetosphere sphere still makes me think that we're
Speaker 1: watching x men. I would say, I would say magnetosphere.
Speaker 1: I know you would, but shere it is the sphere
Speaker 1: in which magneto travels, and it's also a magnetic field
Speaker 1: that surrounds the Earth, penetrates and binds us together like
Speaker 1: the force. Now, what it does is actually repels certain
Speaker 1: types of waves and particles, which allows us to remain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we do. We're not being bombarded by cosmic radiation or
Speaker 1: gamma raise or things like that, because that would be
Speaker 1: a much were sunburned than that other sa burned than
Speaker 1: we were talking. The combination of the of our atmosphere
Speaker 1: and the magnetosphere or magnetosphere protectas, and so the thing
Speaker 1: is that when you're out in space, you don't have
Speaker 1: the benefit of that protection. So that's why both of
Speaker 1: them have these these shielding areas and casings that are
Speaker 1: hardened against radiation to protect them if they were to
Speaker 1: encounter any of these waves or particles. Clearly very important,
Speaker 1: interesting little side fact. So Earth has a magneto sphere,
Speaker 1: Mars doesn't, So if we were to make a colony
Speaker 1: on Mars we would not have that protection that we
Speaker 1: would we need to compensate for it in some wame, right,
Speaker 1: So you wouldn't want to go on any long strolls
Speaker 1: on the Martian soil without some serious protection. So that's
Speaker 1: all of those All of those fashionable space bikinis that
Speaker 1: were that were really popular back in the nineties would
Speaker 1: not probably be good. The interesting thing I heard was
Speaker 1: I was I was listening and I'll go ahead. It
Speaker 1: was a skeptic skuide to the universe. A great podcast
Speaker 1: has no affiliation with us, but they are fantastic, very fun,
Speaker 1: interesting educational podcast. They had a recent episode where um
Speaker 1: they had an astronomer on talking about things like Mars
Speaker 1: and they were even talking about, all right, let's let's
Speaker 1: look into a science fiction future where we can terraform Mars,
Speaker 1: so we're able to transform Mars so that the actual
Speaker 1: surfaces habitable. And even then, because of the lack of
Speaker 1: the magnetosphere, you would still be prone to things like
Speaker 1: cosmic radiation, gamma radiation. You would you would still be
Speaker 1: vulnerable with that, so you would not be able to
Speaker 1: terraform it for any extended length of time. Eventually that
Speaker 1: stuff would kill the life on that planet. Right, because
Speaker 1: things like gamma radiation, for example, aren't as cool is
Speaker 1: for example, teenage meeting nincha turtles make it sound or
Speaker 1: almost mostly you just die. Yeah, yeah, it's not. It's
Speaker 1: not attractive. In fact, uh NASA said that because of
Speaker 1: the distance from the the the Voyager spacecraft passed close
Speaker 1: enough to Jupiter that it received more than a thousand
Speaker 1: times the radiation that would be a lethal bull of
Speaker 1: radiation for human Yeah, for a human person, yes, um, So,
Speaker 1: moving on to more things that are on board this
Speaker 1: these spacecraft. It has a it has a twelve foot
Speaker 1: or a three point seven meter high gain antenna which
Speaker 1: looks like a satellite dish. Yeah, this is what allows
Speaker 1: it to transmit and receive data to and from Earth,
Speaker 1: and no matter where it goes, the the antenna is
Speaker 1: programmed to always point towards Earth. Yes, that's it's actually
Speaker 1: got a gyroscopic UH system so that no matter how
Speaker 1: it's oriented, it can it can readjust its attitude so
Speaker 1: that the UH the antenna is pointing towards US, so
Speaker 1: we can have the best chants possible to pick up
Speaker 1: those radio transmissions. UM. It has a lot of different
Speaker 1: instruments aboard, including besides the high gain antenna, it's got
Speaker 1: a low energy charged particle instrument and ultra violet spectrometer
Speaker 1: which currently only the voyager one is using to collect data.
Speaker 1: Has both narrow and wide angle imaging instruments also known
Speaker 1: as cameras. It's got a fancy, fancy eight hundred by
Speaker 1: eight hundred cameras because this was launched in the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies seemed pretty cool at the time. UH as a
Speaker 1: cosmic ray instruments so it can detect and measure cosmic rays,
Speaker 1: a photopolarimeter, which I have no idea what it does.
Speaker 1: I was. I ran into it and I thought that's
Speaker 1: really cool, and I never actually looked more into it
Speaker 1: because I was lucky that I could say it. There's
Speaker 1: an infrared interferometer spectrometer UH, an optical calibration targeting system,
Speaker 1: a planetary radio astronomy and plasma wave antenna. Each spacecraft
Speaker 1: have two of those UM and also known as the
Speaker 1: Planetary radio Astronomy Instrument or p r A has the
Speaker 1: plasma instrument. Voyager ones plasma instrument is non functional, but
Speaker 1: all other instruments are in working order, and Voyager two
Speaker 1: is still collecting data through its plasma instruments. It's got UH.
Speaker 1: It also gets its power from three D O isotope
Speaker 1: thermoelectric generators and currently it gets about three D and
Speaker 1: fifteen watts of power. And now the spacecraft are designed
Speaker 1: so that all of their systems can operate at about
Speaker 1: four hundreds of power, so it's able to UH. It's
Speaker 1: still getting power, but it's not enough power to operate everything.
Speaker 1: And in fact, they designed the Voyager spacecraft with this
Speaker 1: in mind, the idea being that as the power as
Speaker 1: the power supply begins to decrease, it begins to shut
Speaker 1: down unnecessary instruments. So originally there were eleven different UM
Speaker 1: projects that were involved in gathering data from the Voyager
Speaker 1: systems and processing that data here on Earth. There were
Speaker 1: eleven of them. Currently only five of them are still
Speaker 1: in operation because the other systems have been progressively shut
Speaker 1: down to make sure that the Voyager spacecraft can still
Speaker 1: send us information. And like you said, by five or so,
Speaker 1: that's when we aspect the power to have run down
Speaker 1: enough where we're not going to be able to get
Speaker 1: any more information from them, because it's just not gonna
Speaker 1: have the power necessary to broadcast right right Well, because
Speaker 1: the way that this this engine of sorts works is
Speaker 1: that pellets of plutonium dioxide release heat through their own
Speaker 1: natural decay process, and so once they have finished decaying,
Speaker 1: that's it. Yeah, that's true. And then I forgot. There
Speaker 1: also some magnet magnetometer boom, which is designed toss to
Speaker 1: measure magnetic fields. So that was one of those things
Speaker 1: we didn't really know a lot about the magnetic fields
Speaker 1: of the Elder planets before we sent these these spacecraft up.
Speaker 1: That's one of the really huge sources of information that
Speaker 1: it is it has sent us. Yeah, and uh so
Speaker 1: then it has a flight data subsystem which handles all
Speaker 1: the information, and it has an eight track digital tape recorder.
Speaker 1: So you've got an eight track up there. It's uh.
Speaker 1: So the FDS configures controls, collects data from the various instruments,
Speaker 1: and the tape recorder handles the data from the plasma
Speaker 1: wave subsystem because that's the one that gets the highest
Speaker 1: density of data and the shortest amount of time. So
Speaker 1: the data tape recorder was the cutting edge technology to
Speaker 1: handle that that information. And according to NASA, the tape
Speaker 1: in the digital recorder won't wear out until the tape
Speaker 1: has moved back and forth through a distance that is
Speaker 1: equivalent to the width of the United States. Uh. That
Speaker 1: is not terribly precise, because the United States is not
Speaker 1: a perfect rectangle, but in general, I would say that's
Speaker 1: probably about three thousand miles, which is around four thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred kilometers. I assume what they mean is that
Speaker 1: it's it's doing fine. Yeah, So what they're saying is
Speaker 1: that that tape is capable of traveling that collective amount
Speaker 1: of distance without breaking. So you've got to remember the
Speaker 1: tape itself is not that long. It's just saying that
Speaker 1: they would you know, by the time you would go
Speaker 1: through all this tape and is worn out you could
Speaker 1: have gone all the way across the United States using
Speaker 1: that same distance of tape being played through. Just kind
Speaker 1: of that's kind of impressive. There has a command computer
Speaker 1: subsystem which p it's sequencing and control functions, which includes
Speaker 1: fault detection, corrective routines, antenna pointing data, and spacecraft sequencing data.
Speaker 1: The fault detection involves seven top level fault protection routines
Speaker 1: and each one is able to detect and correct for
Speaker 1: several possible failures. Basically, it just means that there's the
Speaker 1: computer has multiple modules and they compare data back and
Speaker 1: forth between each other and and it will decide if
Speaker 1: if one module is differing from the others, that that
Speaker 1: one's faulty and to cut it out of the system. Yes,
Speaker 1: And it also means that both of the spacecraft are
Speaker 1: capable of shutting down systems if it needs to automatically autonomously.
Speaker 1: Because which is so important, because we can't broadcast to
Speaker 1: these things. They broadcast to us, but they don't have receivers.
Speaker 1: Their antenna could receive information. Yeah, but it means that
Speaker 1: it would take seventeen hours for the information to get
Speaker 1: to us. In seventeen hours for the information to get
Speaker 1: back and by then whatever the problem was is probably
Speaker 1: not the biggest issue at that point, right, So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that it was important to have something to connect autonomously
Speaker 1: if if you know, if the communication is a barrier.
Speaker 1: The same sort of thing with the Curiosity Rover when
Speaker 1: it was landing on the surface of Mars. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of that landing. In fact, all of the
Speaker 1: landing was autonomous because there was no time for us
Speaker 1: to send any adjustments to the system. It's like you're
Speaker 1: on your own. By the time we would be able
Speaker 1: to send an adjustment, it would have already either crash
Speaker 1: or landed safely. So you had to design a spacecraft
Speaker 1: that could do this or else it just wouldn't work.
Speaker 1: Pretty impressive in the nineteen seventies for for the amount
Speaker 1: of computing power that was going. Oh yeah, definitely. And
Speaker 1: it also had an attitude in art or still has.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I'm using the past tense. It's
Speaker 1: still out there. The Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem, which
Speaker 1: is also known the A A c S. It's in
Speaker 1: charge of maintaining the spacecraft orientation and positions the scan platform.
Speaker 1: So this is what we're talking about. The system that's
Speaker 1: that's in charge of making sure that dad antenna has
Speaker 1: pointed back at Earth. And also that the scan platform,
Speaker 1: which is really you know, the instrumentation panel this point
Speaker 1: in the right direction to get the data that the needs.
Speaker 1: And uh it's yeah, it's got a three access stabilization
Speaker 1: system and use the celestial or gyro referenced attitude control
Speaker 1: to make the high gain antenna point back to Earth. Now,
Speaker 1: we talked about the fact that there is an interesting
Speaker 1: gold plated copper disc on board each of the two
Speaker 1: Voyager spacecraft, right the golden records there refer So this is, uh,
Speaker 1: this was a really cool idea. You know who, of
Speaker 1: course was the chairman for this, Carl Sagan. Yes, he
Speaker 1: he had billions and billions of suggestions, but not all
Speaker 1: of them can make it onto the disc obviously, right.
Speaker 1: And these are these are these these gold plated copper
Speaker 1: discs engraved like vinyl records. Yeah yeah, and kids ask
Speaker 1: your parents, no, no, dear, no no, no. Kids are
Speaker 1: hipsters these days. They know they know things about vinyl.
Speaker 1: It's cool. Kids tell your older siblings because they missed
Speaker 1: down the whole hipster generation. Um, all right, so so yeah,
Speaker 1: you're talking about a disk that has physical grooves that
Speaker 1: are in it that can be read using a stylist
Speaker 1: and cartridge, which which were included. They included the cartridge
Speaker 1: and stylists. They did not include a turntable, so aliens
Speaker 1: they have to build it. But they did leave instructions
Speaker 1: written in a symbolic language to say here's how you
Speaker 1: would construct something that would be able to play these things.
Speaker 1: They were their twelve inches in diameter, and they are
Speaker 1: designed to be played back at sixteen and two thirds
Speaker 1: revolutions per minute, so actually fairly slowly. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: we think about the the forty five or thirty three
Speaker 1: revolutions per minute for for your average albums, and this
Speaker 1: is a sixteen and two thirds. So on these Golden
Speaker 1: records are lots and lots of stuff. Actually, um, it's
Speaker 1: including things like greetings from in fifty five different languages,
Speaker 1: including some that aren't being used anymore. They are not
Speaker 1: being used in a very long time, like which is
Speaker 1: a Sumerian language which was last used around four thousand BC. UH,
Speaker 1: a selection of nature sounds yep, yep, So if you
Speaker 1: ever wanted to hear what frogs burping sounded like and
Speaker 1: you were from from some distant planet. Here's an opportunity
Speaker 1: to a lot of So you're for Ford Prefect and
Speaker 1: you're on your way to Earth. This is a good
Speaker 1: way to do some homework before you get there. All right,
Speaker 1: a lot of traditional music, some some Native American chance
Speaker 1: and Scottish bagpipes. I've got to talk about some of
Speaker 1: the music that's on here for African ritual music. There's
Speaker 1: a bunch of classical music, all right. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: wrote down some of my favorites. This is this is Obviously,
Speaker 1: there are lots and lots of musical tracks that are
Speaker 1: on the records. These are just the ones that I
Speaker 1: personally wrote down because I I they resonate with me.
Speaker 1: It's not to say that the other ones are not
Speaker 1: as good, right, I may not be familiar with some
Speaker 1: of them. But there's the brandon Burg Concerto number two
Speaker 1: in F. Actually it's just the first movement. That's by
Speaker 1: a guy named Batch. Johann Batch wrote that, Um, if
Speaker 1: you've heard he's just some dude. Really yeah, yeah, obviously
Speaker 1: box Edinburg can chair to a number two. N f uh.
Speaker 1: Then there's a Melancholy Blues which was performed by Louis Armstrong.
Speaker 1: Stravinsky's The Right of Spring was included back actually was
Speaker 1: pretty well represented on this record. He also had the
Speaker 1: well tempered Clavia on there. There was the first movement
Speaker 1: of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, you know, the dah There was
Speaker 1: a navajo tribes chant, and then of course the most
Speaker 1: important i think musical work that was included out of
Speaker 1: all the pieces that were on there. As as we
Speaker 1: all know from the documentary Back to the Future, It's
Speaker 1: saved Marty McFly, It'll save the human race. We're talking
Speaker 1: about Chuck Berry's Johnny be Good. Yeah. Um, there's actually
Speaker 1: a book all about the process that they used to
Speaker 1: select which sounds went on the Golden Record, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: It finally came out with a CD companion at some point.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's on digital. The book itself is out
Speaker 1: of print, but you can sometimes find copies. It is
Speaker 1: called Murmurs from Earth, So if you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about how they came about choosing which sounds go
Speaker 1: in there. Um, that's it's it's a really well done piece.
Speaker 1: It's it's something that I've I've heard nothing but good
Speaker 1: things about it. I personally have not had a chance
Speaker 1: to read it. By the time I learned about it
Speaker 1: was running on a print, so it's kind of fine.
Speaker 1: But there's also a bunch of images on the desks,
Speaker 1: including a star map clearly showing the location of Earth.
Speaker 1: Here's what humans taste like, maps of Earth images. I'm
Speaker 1: just I'm just ignoring that entirely. There are people who
Speaker 1: have said what a huge mistake it was to essentially
Speaker 1: include directions directly to us. I think, well, I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty ridiculous because the odds of anyone and the
Speaker 1: odds of anyone finding the voyagers as big as it
Speaker 1: turns out, really big, no, no, no, bigger than that. Not.
Speaker 1: You might think it's a long walk to the chemist
Speaker 1: style on the corner, but that's just nuts compared to space.
Speaker 1: But it's going to be tens of thousands of years
Speaker 1: before either the voyager craft encounter anything near another star. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So really, by the time, I'm betting we will have
Speaker 1: either kill ourselves off or hit the Singularity. And and
Speaker 1: plus on top of that, you know, it would all
Speaker 1: depend on from one direction the other creatures were approaching Earth,
Speaker 1: Because I mean, there's there are a lot of different
Speaker 1: vectors you could take and only a couple of them
Speaker 1: would intersect with the pathway of either voyagers. Way more
Speaker 1: vectors than most science fiction movies are willing to acknowledge.
Speaker 1: There's more than just ship spaceship battles, than just the
Speaker 1: single plane. Yeah. Uh So there was also an hour
Speaker 1: long recording of the brain waves of a woman named
Speaker 1: Anne Druian, who would become Carl Sagan's wife. Yep, she's
Speaker 1: an author. She concentrates mainly on cosmology and science, and
Speaker 1: she she signed up for this. She volunteered to have
Speaker 1: her brain waves reported. Yea. She and Carl Sagan had
Speaker 1: talked about it, and she thought it was a really
Speaker 1: interesting idea, and so she went in for the process
Speaker 1: where her brainless waves and her heartbeat were read and
Speaker 1: then transferred into data analog data, we have to say,
Speaker 1: because it's an analog disc and um. She says that
Speaker 1: what she did was she she thought about big historical
Speaker 1: moments that were very important in the development of human history,
Speaker 1: and then she spent some time thinking about the current
Speaker 1: situation on Earth, how what that's like things and and
Speaker 1: not sugarcoating at things like violence between people and the Yeah.
Speaker 1: So she really spent some time thinking about things that
Speaker 1: she felt needed to be addressed. And then she said
Speaker 1: that she took the liberty towards the end of the
Speaker 1: session to take a little bit of time and think
Speaker 1: about what it's like to fall in love, which I
Speaker 1: think is amazing, just the most wonderful suite. Ye. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so now we those aliens can't tell us they don't
Speaker 1: know how to love because she thought about it for
Speaker 1: for a while, darn it. Um. So, yeah, those radio
Speaker 1: signals do take a long time to get to us. So.
Speaker 1: But and and the record that's on there, if you
Speaker 1: want to hear some of the stuff, Uh, there are
Speaker 1: there are a lot of different sites out there that
Speaker 1: that keep all the things that aren't on there. It
Speaker 1: tells you what's there, and most of that's pretty easy
Speaker 1: to get access to and listen to. I'll try that.
Speaker 1: We'll try to find one and link it up on social. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll see if we can find something. And you know,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll see if I can make it a Spotify
Speaker 1: playlist or something and get a uku lele and play
Speaker 1: Johnny be Good on the ukulele. That's uh, that would
Speaker 1: probably be Johnny please stop. That would be the name
Speaker 1: of that song. All right, So, um, anyway, that's that's
Speaker 1: kind of the the wrap up of the spacecraft and
Speaker 1: the stuff that was aborted. But we still haven't talked
Speaker 1: about the actual science that's returned. So we're going to
Speaker 1: do that in just a moment, but before we do,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick moment to thank our other sponsor. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've talked about what the mission was, we talked
Speaker 1: about the spacecraft. Let's talk about what the spacecraft found.
Speaker 1: So out of the all in investigation teams that were
Speaker 1: originally involved in the Voyager mission, like I said earlier,
Speaker 1: only five of them are still supported. And those five
Speaker 1: are magnetic field investigation, low energy charged particle investigation, cosmic
Speaker 1: ray investigation, plasma investigation, which is only active on the
Speaker 1: Voyager too because the Voyager ones doesn't work anywhere, and
Speaker 1: plasma wave investigation. So plasma investigation plasma wave investigation two
Speaker 1: different things, right, and these are clearly the more important
Speaker 1: ones because there's not all that much too. For example,
Speaker 1: take pictures of Yeah, once you're done taking the photo
Speaker 1: of the Solar system from way the heck out there,
Speaker 1: there's really no purpose to keep going to that. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's been shut down. Um, and uh, the five instruments
Speaker 1: that support these five missions are the Magnetic Field Instrument
Speaker 1: or MG, the low energy Charged Particle Instrument, the l
Speaker 1: e CP Cosmic ray instrument that's the CRS, the plasma
Speaker 1: instrument that's p l S, and the Plasma Wave Instrument
Speaker 1: that's p WS. And really at this point, uh, now
Speaker 1: that we've finished taking photos and measurements of all the planets,
Speaker 1: which that was the main science before was really getting
Speaker 1: good images and getting some good scientific data about the
Speaker 1: actual plants and their moons. It was the origin of
Speaker 1: the program. Yeah, before they kind of realized, oh hey,
Speaker 1: we can do more stuff out there. Yeah, so now
Speaker 1: now we're we've switched it over to interstellar. But some
Speaker 1: of the stuff they found because of these and then
Speaker 1: later on have have expounded upon by sending out other
Speaker 1: orbiters like Cassini for example. But some of the stuff
Speaker 1: they discovered were like they took a closer look at Europa,
Speaker 1: which is one of Jupiter's moons, and saw that it
Speaker 1: had a water ice surface, and originally they thought that
Speaker 1: maybe Europa could have an ocean underneath that ice, but
Speaker 1: some scientists now say they think that it's probably more
Speaker 1: like a slush or maybe even solid solid ice, but
Speaker 1: that was a stability um. They the Voyager spacecraft also
Speaker 1: observed Pale, which is the largest of the volcanoes on Io,
Speaker 1: which is the another moon of U, and they observed
Speaker 1: that Paley was erupting sulfur and sulfur dioxide, and these
Speaker 1: eruptions were going up to heights that are equivalent to
Speaker 1: about thirty times the elevation of Mount Everest, the tallest
Speaker 1: mountain on Earth. Multiply that by well, tallest mountain on
Speaker 1: the surface, like not underwater, because you could look at
Speaker 1: underwater and there's but the above water. It's the tallest
Speaker 1: mountain on Earth. Multiply that by thirty times. That's how
Speaker 1: high up these eruptions were going. Not necessarily a good
Speaker 1: vacation spot. Now. The scientists also point out that Io's
Speaker 1: gravity is about six times weaker than that of Earth's,
Speaker 1: so it's closer to what our moon has. But the
Speaker 1: fallout zone for the the the sulfur dioxide that was
Speaker 1: being thrust into the atmosphere of Io was about the
Speaker 1: size of France. Yeah, so uh that was when I
Speaker 1: read that, I was like, wow, that is a huge,
Speaker 1: huge volcano. Um. Now the see what. We also had
Speaker 1: some information about Saturn's largest moon, which is called Titan. Uh.
Speaker 1: It discovered the oceans of ethane and methane aboard aboard
Speaker 1: on Titan, not a board Titan. It is technically a
Speaker 1: space that's not nothing satellite satellite, but it's a natural satellite,
Speaker 1: not a man made one. And it has also discovered
Speaker 1: that has the Titan, the the largest moon of Saturn,
Speaker 1: has a dense atmosphere and lots of hydrocarbons and maybe
Speaker 1: it could possibly at some point in the past have
Speaker 1: supported life. The methane is a possible indication that living
Speaker 1: things once lived there. Now that does not necessarily the
Speaker 1: hydrocarbons as well, but that does not necessarily mean that
Speaker 1: life ever was on Titan, but it's a possibility. Voyager
Speaker 1: also took images of Uranus's rings, which are very difficult
Speaker 1: to they're very faint right um, And but they did that.
Speaker 1: They also observed Saturn's rings and saw that they were
Speaker 1: made of about ten thousand strands of ice particles and
Speaker 1: car sized icebergs, and that if you look at them proportionally,
Speaker 1: their thickness is much much, much, much much smaller than
Speaker 1: the width of the ring. So if you think of
Speaker 1: it as like a one of those things called they're
Speaker 1: not the Frisbees, but you know the rings, they're they're
Speaker 1: hollow in the middle, right, there's there, so it's just
Speaker 1: a it's a disc that doesn't have a center to it.
Speaker 1: Um the width of the band is much wider than
Speaker 1: the thickness of the band, is what they discovered. So
Speaker 1: that was kind of interesting. Uh, now we're talking more
Speaker 1: about the interstellar work, so they're still inside the heliosphere, right,
Speaker 1: And I did want to mention at some point here
Speaker 1: on March, and we mentioned this in another podcast that
Speaker 1: we were recording. Right around March twenty UM, there were
Speaker 1: there were false reports that that it had left the
Speaker 1: helo sphere and entered interstellar space, and those were those
Speaker 1: were false reports. Yeah, NASA came out and said, no,
Speaker 1: we've not seen the changes in the magnetic radiation that
Speaker 1: we are expecting to see. That. They did say that
Speaker 1: they had seen some changes in particle movement, which at
Speaker 1: first would have indicated that the spacecraft had moved out
Speaker 1: of the heliosphere, but then they found from the magnetic
Speaker 1: movement that's not the case. So it's it's one of
Speaker 1: those things where again we keep finding out the Solar
Speaker 1: System is larger as we learn more about how it's behaving.
Speaker 1: So now the next step in this you could think
Speaker 1: of the interstellar exploration and being in three phases. The
Speaker 1: first was crossing the termination shock, which both of the
Speaker 1: spacecraft have already done. The next is the exploration of
Speaker 1: the Helio sheath, which is happening right now, and then
Speaker 1: the third is interstellar exploration, which is when the spacecraft
Speaker 1: have passed beyond the Helio Pause boundary. Now Helio Pause boundary,
Speaker 1: you can think of this as kind of like a
Speaker 1: bubble around the Sun that completely encompasses the the entire
Speaker 1: Solar System. It's not a perfectly round bubble, so don't
Speaker 1: think like that, but it's it's this whibbli wabbli area. Uh,
Speaker 1: And beyond this boundary there's no solar wind or magnetic
Speaker 1: field from the Sun. However, there's still the gravitational influence
Speaker 1: of the Sun at that point, but particles and waves
Speaker 1: in this area of space are unaffected by our Sun,
Speaker 1: and we don't really know a whole lot about them
Speaker 1: because we haven't been able to observe them directly through
Speaker 1: any kind of spacecraft. Right. Yeah, and and this is
Speaker 1: this is a hypothetical heliopause. Yeah, we have not encountered
Speaker 1: it yet, so but it's still not technically the edge
Speaker 1: of the Solar System if you if you ask NASA,
Speaker 1: the edge of the Solar System would be that area
Speaker 1: where there's no longer that gravitational factor from the Sun,
Speaker 1: which would require us to travel about two light years
Speaker 1: away from the Sun. So that will take us about
Speaker 1: forty thousand years for those spacecraft to get there, which
Speaker 1: is a you know, set your alarms because it's gonna
Speaker 1: take a while. So in other words, it'sman tells you
Speaker 1: that the voyager has passed outside the Solar System, your
Speaker 1: response should be wow, which alien warped it away from there?
Speaker 1: Because there's no way that it's done that, at least
Speaker 1: not by the definition that NASA makes. Now, if they're
Speaker 1: talking about the helio pause, that's a different story. Different
Speaker 1: that's a different story. And I think they are anticipating
Speaker 1: that within our lifetimes. Yeah, they said they said they
Speaker 1: expected it to happen within ten to twenty years of
Speaker 1: passing the termination shock. So now it's just probably probably
Speaker 1: hopefully fingers crossed before before that plutoni and dioxide runs
Speaker 1: out right before around that area. So, uh, Lauren, you
Speaker 1: had an interesting idea. One that an experimental idea that
Speaker 1: we thought we would try, which is that you sent
Speaker 1: out a tweet saying, hey, guys, if you have any
Speaker 1: anything interesting that you want to ask or goofy that
Speaker 1: you want to ask us about our podcast about the
Speaker 1: Voyage spacecraft, now's the time to do it. And people did.
Speaker 1: A couple of people did anyway, So hopefully we'll be
Speaker 1: able to do this in the future and get even
Speaker 1: more discussion. But this was a fun first attempt. So
Speaker 1: here's some of the questions we received. Ian on Twitter
Speaker 1: asked a whole bunch of questions that I'm going to
Speaker 1: tackle one at a time. The first was how fast
Speaker 1: are the Voyager spacecraft traveling? Good question, Ian, So Voyager
Speaker 1: one's traveling at about three point six astronomical units per
Speaker 1: year and Voyager two is poking along at three point
Speaker 1: three astronomical units per year. Now, that might not tell
Speaker 1: you very much unless you know how long an astronomical
Speaker 1: unit is. It's a measurement of distance that's based upon
Speaker 1: the mean distance between Earth and the Sun, and that's
Speaker 1: equivalent to about a hundred and forty nine million, five thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred swenty one kilometers or two million, nine hundred
Speaker 1: fifty five thousand, eight hundred seven miles. And because Jonathan
Speaker 1: loves you, he did the math yep. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about how this sucker breaks down. So remember, Voyager one's
Speaker 1: going at three point six astronomical units per year. That
Speaker 1: means it's traveling about five hundred thirty nine million kilometers
Speaker 1: per year or three hundred thirty five million in miles
Speaker 1: per year, and that breaks down to four kilometers per
Speaker 1: hour or thirty eight thousand, one seventy six miles per hour.
Speaker 1: Either way, it's going wicked fast. Voyager two is three
Speaker 1: point three astronomical units per year. That breaks down to
Speaker 1: four four million kilometers per year or fifty six thousand,
Speaker 1: eighteen kilometers per hour, and in miles, it's three hundred
Speaker 1: seven million miles per year or thirty five thousand miles
Speaker 1: per hour. Slightly less wicked fast, but still wicked fast,
Speaker 1: but still faster than than me. For example, his next question.
Speaker 1: Ian's next question was are they accelerating? No, next question
Speaker 1: was how long will you remain in contact. Well, like
Speaker 1: we said, we're not really sure. It's all going to
Speaker 1: depend upon the power supply. Uh. And also whether or
Speaker 1: not our antenna here on Earth can continue to pick
Speaker 1: up that week signal, but we expect around five will
Speaker 1: be the last we hear of them. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: Ian and also a listener named Jonathan. Also they both
Speaker 1: asked that we somehow reference a film, Star Trek the
Speaker 1: motion Picture. Okay, what does Voyager have to do with
Speaker 1: Star Trek the Motion Picture? Well, in a way, Voyager
Speaker 1: is the bad guy in Star Trek the motion Picture.
Speaker 1: In another way, the whole film is the bad guy
Speaker 1: because the thing is slow as heck. I watched it.
Speaker 1: I watched it not for anticipation of this podcast. I
Speaker 1: watched it justly, and I had not seen it since
Speaker 1: I was a kid. And I don't think I ever
Speaker 1: sat through it all the way through when I was
Speaker 1: a kid. I don't think I sat through it all
Speaker 1: the way there was an adult, I can't. I can't
Speaker 1: say that i've seen it since I was about a
Speaker 1: laundry and now Star Trek two amazing movie. Star Trek
Speaker 1: the motion Picture not so much. But in that story
Speaker 1: and this is gonna sound really familiar to anyone who
Speaker 1: watched Star Trek four because it's a very similar story.
Speaker 1: A probe that has this weird energy field around it
Speaker 1: enters our Solar system. Actually first it's just moving through space,
Speaker 1: but everything it encounters it's starting to deactivate, and everyone's
Speaker 1: kind of upset because because that's as head of right
Speaker 1: to Earth. So what do we do? How do we
Speaker 1: stop this? And of course the only person who can
Speaker 1: stop it as Kirk, who commandeers this starship, Starship Enterprise.
Speaker 1: He is no longer the captain of the Enterprise at
Speaker 1: that point. He's teaching at star Fleet, but the Enterprise
Speaker 1: is is docked in a space station around Earth, and
Speaker 1: so he, after a very long tour of the ship,
Speaker 1: of the outside of the ship that Scotty takes him on,
Speaker 1: eventually gets on board. And this movie moves slowly, is
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. And just they go and investigate this, uh,
Speaker 1: this probe that's called VJER and UH and VJR is
Speaker 1: this artificially intelligent vehicle and actually the vehicle contains a
Speaker 1: smaller probe like vehicle inside of it. Ultimately they discovered
Speaker 1: that what Vijure really is is Voyager six, which doesn't
Speaker 1: exist yet. No, there's only Voyager one and two. But
Speaker 1: in this in the movie, it was Voyager six that
Speaker 1: was supposedly launched towards the end of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: which I don't know if you notice, we're not in
Speaker 1: the any or um, so you know, same thing like
Speaker 1: I think the Eugenics Wars and Star Trek two that
Speaker 1: are that ever mentioned that con was part of that
Speaker 1: was supposed to take place in nine, So we had
Speaker 1: a lot of catching up to do. Uh, Not that
Speaker 1: I want those to happen anytime soon. But the the
Speaker 1: VJRE was called vitre because it could no longer uh
Speaker 1: see the letters that were missing, So all the missing
Speaker 1: letters were gone, so all that was left was the
Speaker 1: v g e R. So it's Vidre uh and uh.
Speaker 1: And in the story, what you find out is that
Speaker 1: aliens had encountered the Voyager six probe and had enhanced
Speaker 1: it so that it could learn everything that is learnable
Speaker 1: and then returned the information to Earth. So it was
Speaker 1: trying to do a uh. Originally it was supposed to
Speaker 1: be a benevolent thing, but because vjer had gained sentience,
Speaker 1: it no longer completely understood the parameters of its mission,
Speaker 1: and so it started to go a little bonkers um
Speaker 1: and then of course the some remembers aboard the Enterprise
Speaker 1: end up essentially reasoning with the artificially intelligent probe. So Veder,
Speaker 1: like I said, it's kind of the bad Guy and
Speaker 1: Star Trek the motion picture. If you feel like I
Speaker 1: spoiled that movie, I didn't. It's really I mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: and I say this as someone who loves Star Trek. Okay, don't,
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong, I just I feel like that
Speaker 1: movie was a lot of the movie is played for grandeur,
Speaker 1: and the problem is that we've all gotten used to
Speaker 1: seeing these amazing sort of visuals that are even more
Speaker 1: amazing than what was available back then. So to kind
Speaker 1: of have this big reveal moment and you look at
Speaker 1: the picture and you're like, yeah, okay, it happens on
Speaker 1: TV every week. Yeah, So that's that's a problem alright.
Speaker 1: So uh then we also had a listener who has
Speaker 1: to handle REDNA maybe that's his name, who asked, what
Speaker 1: about future missions with better equipment? Well, we had the
Speaker 1: Cassini orbiter, but we also NASA had proposed a couple
Speaker 1: of joint mission with the European Union. Um, but they
Speaker 1: haven't really worked out. One of them was the Jupiter
Speaker 1: Europa orbiter, but that was essentially scrapped because of budget problems.
Speaker 1: And the other was the Titan Saturn system mission, which
Speaker 1: was shelved in order for NASA to concentrate on the
Speaker 1: Jupiter Europa or better. Yeah so, but but originally those
Speaker 1: were supposed to launch in twenty Now because of the
Speaker 1: budget cutbacks and everything, and you know the fact that
Speaker 1: there just hasn't been the time to develop it, that
Speaker 1: that launch window is kind of closed at this point.
Speaker 1: So um, as far as I know right now, there
Speaker 1: are no definitive deep space or outer planet missions planned.
Speaker 1: I think right now people are really concentrating on Mars,
Speaker 1: Mars and the Moon and Earth orbit. Those are those
Speaker 1: are I mean the things that are I hesitate to
Speaker 1: stay easier but maybe more achievable. Yeah, I have I
Speaker 1: have heard that that that future Moon landings have been
Speaker 1: scrapped in favor of future Mars land Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's you know, and and this changes from one administration
Speaker 1: to another because because a lot of these considerations are
Speaker 1: not just technological or scientific, they're also political. I mean,
Speaker 1: the whole space race was political, the fact that if
Speaker 1: there had not been that rivalry between the United States,
Speaker 1: but you know, we we can send we can send
Speaker 1: this rocket not only to your face, but all the
Speaker 1: way to the moon. Yeah, So I mean that was
Speaker 1: that was you know, without that kind of pressure than
Speaker 1: it makes it harder for scientists to get the money
Speaker 1: they need to be able to do the science they do.
Speaker 1: That's a sad fact of the world is that, you know,
Speaker 1: money in a way does make the world go round.
Speaker 1: And that wraps up another classic episode of tech stuff.
Speaker 1: Hope you guys enjoyed it. This was a lot of
Speaker 1: fun for us to do. I really had a great
Speaker 1: time with it. I want to do more episodes that
Speaker 1: are space related about specific projects. I've done everything from
Speaker 1: like the Gimin E program or Gimini program to uh,
Speaker 1: you know, like the Apollo O missions, the Space Shuttle missions.
Speaker 1: But I want to look at more of the satellite
Speaker 1: type stuff too. I think that those are really fascinating
Speaker 1: and I've only done a few of them. So if
Speaker 1: there are any specific topics, whether they are space related
Speaker 1: or otherwise, let me know, you know, ones that you
Speaker 1: want to hear anyway, let me know about it. Reach
Speaker 1: out on Twitter or on Facebook. The handle for both
Speaker 1: is text Stuff h SW and I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.