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