Comments by "H. de Jong" (@h.dejong2531) on "The Only Reason the Voyager Probes are Still Working Today" video.

  1. I can look up at night and see satellites in the night sky, proving that space is real, and NASA's projects are real.
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  2. Present your evidence that they are lying.
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  3. That won't help. the Voyager mission will end when it no longer has enough power to run one instrument (which will happen in the next 5 years), not because it's going out of transmission range. That won't happen for another 30 years.
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  4. We have detected the CMB using several different spacecraft, demonstrating that those measurements are not a measurement error.
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  5. What the Voyagers did is produce actual science.
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  6. Time dilation for the Voyagers is less than a second over the whole mission.
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  7. That is nonsense.
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  8. The difference is that there are buildings between your cell phone and the base station, and no obstacles between Earth and Voyager. Progress cannot change the laws of physics: radio waves cannot travel through solid structures.
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  9.  @dyavorchid  Yes, you misunderstood his words. He did not claim that spaceflight is impossible. And as I said, it's simple to prove that spaceflight is real, which collapses your whole argument.
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  10.  @dyavorchid  A vacuum can exist adjacent to a pressurized system. The gases in our atmosphere are subject to gravity, just like all other matter. Gravity exerts a force on every molecule in our atmosphere. That force is enough to keep our atmosphere bound to the planet instead of escaping into space. Again, we can observe spacecraft in orbit. We can measure their altitude and find they are at altitudes of 400 km and more. We can measure their speed: at 28,000 km, if they were in an atmosphere they'd be glowing brightly from atmospheric friction. We se no such glow, so even from the ground we can confirm those satellites are not in our atmosphere.
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  11. They send a different signal every time. The car and fob both generate a number based on a shared cryprographic system. This is done to prevent people from recording the signal and then rebroadcasting it to break into your car.
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  12. He did a good job, along with the others involved in designing the Voyagers.
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  13. His pronunciation is correct. The original Greek has the accent on the first syllable.
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  14. 47 years in a radiation level much lower than it was designed for (it was designed to survive Jupiter), moving fast through empty space. The only stuff hitting the spacecraft has been particles smaller than a dust grain - we know this because the Voyagers can measure those impacts. The Voyagers use *radio*, not wifi. Wifi is specifically designed for short distances. In 1900, Marconi was sending radio messages across the Atlantic. The only thing you need to receive data across those distances is a very large antenna. The Voyager signals are received by 70-meter antennas, with a receiver cooled to 4 K. There's nothing magical about, this, just solid science and engineering.
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  15. Not at the moment. The Voyagers are moving away from the sun at a speed of about 15 km/s. You'd need about 3000 toms of fuel to stop them. That means launching 3000 tons to a distance of 150 AU, at a speed high enough to overtake the Voyagers. The best we can do today is launch 500 kg at a speed twice as high as the Voyagers, so that 500 kg would catch up with them in 25 years. Then that fuel would have to be slowed down to match the speed of the Voyagers, which uses 90% of that 500 kg. You'd need thousands of Starship launches to do this.
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  16. The secret to that is the antennas we have here on Earth. The Voyagers use an ordinary radio transmitter. It's not very powerful either. But when you have an antenna with a diameter of 70 meters, and a received cooled to 4 K (to minimise noise), you can receive very faint signals - even the Voyagers are not near the limits of what we can receive.
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  17. Radiation damages a single atom at a time, or it breaks up a complex molecule (like the DNA in our cells). Magnetic tape uses iron oxide (simple molecules). Each one or zero consists of billions of molecules, so a particle hitting the tape damages a tiny fraction of one bit. This makes magnetic tape very tolerant to radiation damage.
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  18. That won't solve anything. The Voyager mission will end because the power supply will nog longer be able to power even one science instrument. The antennas we have here on Earth could stay in touch with the Voyagers for the next 40 years if the Voyager power supply lasted that long.
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  19. That's not how science works.
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  20. No, it won't be too far away to send a signal back until 2057. The power supply will run out long before that.
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  21. The consumer 8-track system was a mess: the tape cartridge held a single spool, and the tape was pulled from the hub of the spool for playback. That, combined with low-quality parts in the cartridge was responsible for the mess. The Voyager tape recorder is more comparable to the open-reel tape recorders we have. The tape is stored on two spools, so it's never under any strain.
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  22. 1. relay sats are far more expensive (will cost billions per relay) than just building a few more antennas here on Earth ($100M). 2. the range we have with our current antennas on Earth is 200 AU. Voyager 1 is at 150 AU today, so even the farthest mission would not benefit from a relay. 3. relays are inefficient. A relay sent in the direction of Voyager 1 can only be used for Voyager 1. Other spacecraft are closer to Earth than to that relay.
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  23. There are two ways to look at this. 1. the electromagnetic influence of the sun is limited to the heliosphere. The Voyagers have exited the heliosphere, and are now able to examine the electromagnetic/particle content of interstellar space. 2. the gravitational influence of the sun reaches much farther. The Voyagers are still inside the Sun's Hill sphere.
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  24. Yes, we get data from Both Voyagers every day.
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  25. Messages to the Voyagers are sent at the speed of light. New technology does not improve that.
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  26. The Voyager cameras did not use a CCD (the element in digital cameras that records the image as digital data). they used a Vidicon tube (as was used in TV cameras back then), and ran its analog output through an AD converter to get the digital data.
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  27. New Horizons won't overtake the Voyagers. As you travel outwards in the solar system, you speed drops as you get farther from the sun. New Horizons' speed when it flew by Pluto is lower than the Voyagers' speed when they passed Plutos' orbit.
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  28. The Voyagers don't have solar panels.
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  29. ​ @truckloadoftruth4772  The Voyagers contain digital clocks. They work just like the ones on Earth. The time we measure does not depend on sunrise: we measure the number of oscillations in a cesium atom, and have defined time from that.
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  30.  @truckloadoftruth4772  A sundial measures solar time. It does so very inaccurately, as it is limited by the physical objects you use. We have stopped using sundials for anything accurate centuries ago.
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  31. Yes. Voyager 1 would be the first one to arrive at Jupiter.
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  32. I feel bad for you for misunderstanding Nye's words to such an extent. He did not say we can't launch satellites. He wasn't talking about satellites or space exploration at all. He was answering a question: "can we send our trash into space?". This is the whole answer: "Why we don’t throw trash into space? Because it’s too expensive. Lifting a ton of material into space takes an extraordinary amount of rocket fuel. And, by the way, when people want to send this much plutonium-238 which is not even the weapon’s plutonium, a baseball size, a grapefruit size, people freak out because the rockets sometimes blow up.” “Now, one thing I really want your generation to embrace is that the Earth is a closed system. We cannot leave the Earth. There’s no place to go. There’s no place to throw your trash. And I wouldn’t be surprised if maybe not you but your kids develop ways to mine our landfills.” Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society, an organization that promotes spaceflight, advocates for it and has even run its own satellite. Nye is not a space denier. It's pretty simple to verify this yourself, too: you can look up at night and see satellites, even with the naked eye. With simple tools, you can measure their speed and altitude, and confirm they really are in space and not in our atmosphere.
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  33. The main secret is that the tape decks on the Voyagers don't see constant use. You can make a Revox tape deck last this long if you don't use it for 8 hours a day.
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  34. Sure. It'd cost millions to buy, and you'd have a laptop that produces 500 W of heat to get 50 W of electric power.
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  35. The power supply is no longer able to power the camera system, which draws a lot of power.
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  36. Yes, they use a consumable gas. These thrusters are designed to provide very little thrust, and they can be operated in brief bursts (milliseconds). So one thruster firing consumes a tiny bit of fuel. And after the planetary encounters, they only have to adjust the spacecraft's attitude occasionally.
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  37. JHUAPL is working on an interstellar probe mission. They worked out we can make a spacecraft of Voyager's size travel twice as fast. The big limitation is the efficiency of chemical rockets, which has not improved much since Voyager. The Voyagers got most of their speed from gravitational assists. We've gotten better at those, so we can design trajectories that pick up more speed from more planetary flybys. They even considered doing a sun flyby, but that would have required so much thermal shielding on the spacecraft that the net gain would be zero. Once Starship is operational, this is likely to improve: when you can refuel a rocket in Earth orbit, you can acellerate the spacecraft to a higher speed.
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  38. No. the energy in those particles is not enough to power the Voyagers.
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  39. RTG-powered spacecraft are a tiny fraction of the total number of satellites we've launched. More than 10,000 satellites, less than 50 use RTGs.
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  40. The Voyagers were launched by a rocket, which gave them a speed of about 35 km/s. They're in space, so there is no drag to slow them down. The only factor that slows the Voyagers down is the Sun's gravitational pull: the farther they get from the Sun, the slower they will travel. At each planetary flyby, the spacecraft was pulled in by the planet's gravity, accelerating the spacecraft.
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  41.  @andrewjenery1783  The same way the stages of a rocket separate from each other: either via a spring-loaded mechanism, where latches open and release the spacecraft, or via pyrotechnics that sever the connection.
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  42. Incorrect. Voyager transmissions have been received by radio telescopes not operated by NASA. NASA is still operating the Voyagers because they are the only spacecraft that can inform us of conditions beyond the heliosphere.
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  43. There's no point in doing that. With the antennas we have on Earth right now, we could keep in touch with the Voyagers for another 25 years. The power supply on the Voyagers will cease to provide enough power to run the transmitter long before that.
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  44. The usual: mechanical engineering or electronics engineering degrees. Maybe some aerospace engineers (but IDK if that was available as a specialization by the 170s). Mix in some scientists with physics, mathematics etc. background.
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  45. That would not help. With our current ground systems, we could contact Voyager out to 200 AU (Voyager is at 150 AU now). We will lose contact because the probes run out of power, not because they're out of range. It's much cheaper to just build a larger antenna on Earth than to send relay probes. A receiving antenna on Earth costs $100 million, and has a diameter of 34 meters. Sending an antenna that large on a Voyager-like trajectory would cost several billion, because you'd need a Saturn V to send a spacecraft that large and heavy.
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  46. Instead of more Voyagers, we built spacecraft that could visit one planet for years: Galileo, Juno and Cassini. These are expensive missions, so we can't do many of them, but they gave us so much more information than any Voyager-type flyby ever could.
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  47. NASA uses a power source that cost $100 million to manufacture, and could produce 450W at the start of the mission, down to about half that now. That's $500 per kWh, if I'm not mistaken. Are you prepared to pay that much for power?
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  48. No, the data it sends us takes about 20 hours to reach us.
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  49. ​ @paulwonderley538  No. Data from Mars takes 3 to 22 minutes to reach us, depending on where in their orbits Earth and Mars are. Voyager 1 data takes 22 hours and 34 minutes to travel to Earth, Voyager 2 data takes 18 hours and 50 minutes. Those are al flight times. Then there's the data rates. The Voyagers currently send data at 40 bits per second.
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  50. The Voyager RTG cost $100 million, and can provide an average of 200 W for 50 years. Solar panels that can provide that much power cost a few thousand.
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  51. Right now, we can build a spacecraft that can catch up to the Voyagers in about 35 years. Twice the speed of the Voyagers is the fastest we can achieve today.
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  52.  @mikestephens5200  The speed of a spacecraft depends on where it's going. Parker Solar Probe gets up to huge speeds as it's flying towards the Sun: the Sun's gravity accelerates it. Spacecraft to the outer solar system are flying against the Suns' gravity: they are slowing down all the time. On an escape trajectory from the solar system, twice the speed of the Voyagers is the best we can do.
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  53. There is no evidence to support that claim.
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  54. The Voyagers were the first manmade objects to reach interstellar space while they were still active. Pioneer 10 and 11 got there before them, but had run out of power by then.
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  55. Radio is blocked by obstacles, like buildings. No buildings between Voyager and its receiving antennas here on Earth.
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  56. Pinball machine parts?
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  57. At the moment, no. The best we can do is launch a spacecraft the size of Voyager (weighing about 1 ton) that will catch up with one of the Voyagers in 25 years. To retrieve the Voyagers, we'd need to send 10,000 tons of fuel to each, to slow them down, and accelerate them back into the inner solar system.
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  58. As far as I've been able to find, no. They are in a heated compartment, but not pressurized.
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  59. RTGs are very expensive (on the order of $100 million per spacecraft) and production is limited so they're only used when there is no other option.
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  60. I just retired my 10 year-old iPhone 5s, not because the hardware was failing, but because the OS no longer supported some of the apps I'm required to use.
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  61. Voyager 1 used thousands of components that went out of production 45 years ago. None of the parts of the Voyager computers are still being made, for instance.
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  62. Each photo was 800x800 px with 8 bpp, so 5.1 megabits, or 640kB.
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  63. I just retired my iPhone 5s after 10 years, because it no longer ran the apps I needed. The hardware was still in good shape.
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  64. Those 11 are stuff that was launched with those 5 spacecraft (de-spin weights, solid boosters).
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  65.  @truckloadoftruth4772  There's nothing in science that says "time stops to exist" outside of Earth's influence. The clocks on the Voyager spacecraft continue to operate normally at 150 AU from Earth, far from any measurable influence of Earth.
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  66.  @truckloadoftruth4772  Einstein's concept of spacetime has been proven again and again: his theory makes predictions of phenomena we should encounter in nature. Every time, we find that these phenomena exist. Time dilation: we have loaded cesium clocks onto airplanes and flown them around the world in opposite directions, and we found that the two clocks display a time difference that is predicted by GR. Curvature of spacetime: light is bent by gravity, as predicted by GR. We see this in starlight from stars behind the sun. We see this when the light from entire galaxies is bent by galaxies in front of them. Gravitational waves, Mercury's orbit, and more all show that Einstein was correct.
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  67. It's much cheaper to build a few more antennas here on Earth.
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  68. It's called an 8-track tape because there are 8 tracks of data side by side on the tape. But yeah, this is not the consumer 8-track cartridge system.
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  69. 20 minutes is the average, rounded up. Close enough for the purposes of this video.
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  70. NASA has not been defunded: their budget is not smaller than it was before SpaceX started operating. SpaceX has done NASA a huge service by providing launch services at much lower cost than NASA managed with the rocket programs they operated.
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  71. No, the paperwork for Apollo did not "disappear". Millions of documents for Apollo are available in public archives. All of the drawings for the Saturn V, tens of thousands of technical reports on every aspect of Apollo, all of the science data etc.
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  72. Maximum comms distance will be reached in 2050 (assuming only the current DSN is used. If we use e.g. the VLA, we can stay in contact much longer). Of course, the power will run out long before that.
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  73. Nope. The Pioneer missions ended when their RTG could no longer power any of the science instruments. They were followed for several years after, but the only data we received was internal telemetry. This continued until the RG could no longer power the transmitter.
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  74. The answer is that nothing physical was snuck onto the probes. The requirement was for a spacecraft that could do a 5-year mission. The design team went ahead and designed the spacecraft to last as long as possible, i.e. they avoided design choices that would limit the lifetime.
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  75.  @mukfay  The Star Trek movie is about Voyager 6...
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  76. Only a few months ago, I retired my iPhone 5s, which was 10 years old. The hardware was still operational. If you buy cheap junk, you get what you pay for.
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  77. No. The cameras were shut down in 1989 after the last planetary encounter. The cameras were no longer useful, and shutting them down meant more program and data storage was available for the rest of the instruments.
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  78. No. The cameras were shut down in 1989 after the last planetary encounter. The cameras were no longer useful, and shutting them down meant more program and data storage was available for the rest of the instruments.
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  79. Voyager 1 and 2 massively increased our knowledge of the gas giants, but that data also led to new questions. To answer those, we built Galileo, Cassini and Juno. Galileo and Cassini were hugely expensive missions, so we can't afford a lot of those. A mission to Uranus or Neptune is likely to be next.
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  80. Yes, the tape recorded is in a heated compartment along with the rest of the electronics.
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  81. That software patch was done around 1990. At that time, the power to the camera system was also switched off, including its heaters. It's unlikely the cameras survived that.
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  82. The electronics are in a heated compartment, still around 0ºC.
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  83. Some landers use RTGs: Curiosity and Perseverance have RTGs. But they are very expensive and production is limited so they're only used when there is no other option.
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  84. There is no video "telling everyone Nasa finally lost contact with Voyager". There are videos about temporary losses of contact (e.g. because the only antenna that can send commands to Voyager 1 was offline for refurbishment), but no claims that contact was lost permanently.
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  85. An RTG uses thermocouples. This is an electrical device consisting of two dissimilar electrical conductors forming an electrical junction. A thermocouple produces a temperature-dependent voltage as a result of the Seebeck effect. So it converts heat directly into electric power, without any moving parts.
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  86. The Voyager tape recorders are kept at room temperature.
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  87. The Voyagers use digital computers.
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  88. eh, no. Radiation does not recharge an RTG. And they can't turn everything on: at the moment, the RTG only supplies around 250 W and when all the instruments are on, they consume more than that.
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  89. Yep. That demonstrates how empty space is.
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  90.  @dennishagans6339  They are scarce because most of them have been thrown away by now...
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  91. All of Voyager's computers are digital. Both Voyagers have developed faults over the years. Instruments have failed, some of the computers are dead. But the Voyagers were built with redundancy: each computer has a backup. So do the transmitters, and various other parts. So they were able to keep the spacecraft operational by switching to backup systems. Voyager 2 has a failed component in its one remaining receiver, which means the receiving frequency slowly drifts. They compensate for this by sending signals at different frequencies, to find out which frequency the receiver is listening to now. The 1970s electronics helped in some aspects: the integrated circuits contain large components, so when the IC is hit by radiation, it's unlikely to cause a problem. Modern electronics with their tiny transistors are more susceptible to this problem.
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  92. Nope, not a fact, just drivel.
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  93. After Voyager, we switched to missions that would spend decades examining a single planet in far more detail than the Voyagers were capable of.
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  94. Most missions today orbit planets, which tends to take more fuel, the mission ends when the fuel runs out, and the amount of fuel you can carry is limited. This is what ended Cassini and Galileo, for instance.
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  95. Because you didn't spend $500 million on it.
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  96. The heliopause is the boundary of the Sun's electromagnetic dominance. The Hill sphere is the boundary of its gravitational dominance (and this is ~halfway to the next star).
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  97. Your 8-track was a Rube Goldberg contraption, using a single reel to make sure you'd have lots of problems with the player eating the tapes. The Voyagers use a two-reel design that has nothing in common with your 8-track apart from the number of tracks across the tape.
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  98. Multiple much newer spacecraft that routinely work for decades prove that that isn't the case.
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  99. A few hundred million. $100M for the nuclear power source alone. $250M for a launch on the largest rocket you can find, plus you have to nuclear-certify it.
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  100. In 1900, Marconi was able to communicate across the Atlantic ocean using radio. Extending the range of a radio signal turns out to be pretty simple: you can increase transmitter power, you can increase the size of the antennas on either end, or you can make the receiver more sensitive. For Voyager, we use a huge antenna here on Earth, with a receiver cooled to 4 K to eliminate all noise coming from the receiver electronics. The range of a radio link is limited by simple physical principles. We can calculate the range of any radio system using a simple equation, and that equation tells me the radio system used for the Voyagers has enough range to receive signals at 200 AU distance. So, you don't "know" we don't have the technology, you assume based on not doing any research.
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  101.  @zorrosuperme2356  I'm not an American. I am, however, capable of examining the evidence for projects like the moon landings and Voyager. And all of the evidence is clear: these projects are real. As an electronics engineer, I can verify what I've said in my previous post about calculating the range of a radio signal. I can create my own radio signals and measure their range, and see how this changes when I replace the antenna, for instance. Millions of others around the world can do this as well, and every time our results are the same: the radio range equation is correct, and works the way it's claimed to work. I am also capable of examining the arguments that are produced by those who claim the moon landings were faked. And every time I do that, I find that those arguments are full of holes.
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  102.  @zorrosuperme2356  Moon landers have to use rockets to slow down and land on the moon. This is made easier by the low gravity of the moon, which means you need less fuel. Still it forces you to design the lander to be as light as possible. For Apollo, the spacecraft was split up: the command module and service module (which would return to Earth) stayed in lunar orbit, and only the LM landed on the moon. The LM was split into two modules: only the upper module launched from the moon into lunar orbit, where it met up with the command module so the astronauts could transfer into the command module. Then the LM was discarded. This design meant that the CM and SM (which were big and heavy) did not need to land on the moon, which made the moon lander a lot lighter.
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  103. High-quality marques like Mercedes and BMW come pretty close to that standard.
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  104. The retirement of engineers was a problem, but I've seen no indication that documentation was lost.
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  105. With the DSN antennas we have now, we could stay in touch with the Voyagers until 2057. Their power supplies will run out long before that.
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  106. They aren't.
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  107. They did that in 1989. Portrait of the solar system, Pale blue dot.
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  108. The Voyager program was sold to the US government as an exploration of Jupiter and Saturn, which would take about 5 years. The team that did the proposal was fully aware of the 4-planet alignment, but they were also aware that an earlier proposal for a 4-planet mission had been decided against because it was considered too expensive. Voyager was a reduced version of that proposal, with two spacecraft instead of 4, with simpler spacecraft than were proposed for the Grand Tour, and focusing on Jupiter and Saturn. The spacecraft were designed to last at least long enough to visit all 4 planets, and from the beginning, the team was hoping for a mission extension once the Jupiter and Saturn encounters had proven a success.
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  109. They found that the plasma instrument can detect the flash of tiny dust particles hitting at high speed and disintegrating. There are lots of impacts like that, fortunately no large impacts.
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  110. SpaceX is in the middle of developing their moon-capable rocket, Starship. NASA took 5 years to develop the Saturn V to the point where it could be launched into orbit. SpaceX is in year 4 of its work on Starship, and they are developing a more ambitious vehicle. they don't just want to launch 100 tons into Earth orbit, they want to launch more than that and then be able to recover and reuse both stages.
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  111. That's not how scientific missions work. Sooner or later we're going to launch another mission to beyond the heliosphere and verify the Voyager data.
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  112. JHUAPL is working on a proposal 'Interstellar probe' at the moment. They found that the highest speed we can achieve for such a mission is twice that of the Voyagers. If we launched one today, it'd catch up to Voyager 1 in 25 years.
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  113. In terms of general relativity, the Voyagers aren't traveling fast. Their age is within one second of that of an observer here on Earth.
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  114. Voyager 2 is operational. Voyager 1 has a problem with one of its computers, and is not sending us any science data at the moment.
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  115. No. After Voyager, we went right along and prepared missions that examined Jupiter and Saturn in detail, by orbiting those planets for years - instead of the few hours that the Voyagers spent in their vicinity. We've sent missions to Mars, to asteroids, to comets. We sent a mission to Pluto.
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  116.  @jamesflake6601  Nobody has ever produced evidence that NASA has lied about anything. Why would we not trust NASA?
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