Comments by "H. de Jong" (@h.dejong2531) on "NASA Is Ending Its Iconic Voyager Mission After 45 Years" video.

  1. That's incorrect. The Voyagers used programmable computers.
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  2. The video is incorrect: neither Voyager will pass Proxima Centauri.
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  3. The Voyagers don't use solar panels. It's far too dark in the outer solar system. They use radioisotope thermal generators: Pu-238 decays and produces heat, Peltier elements convert this to electricity. Pu-238 has a half-life of 87.7 years, so the output of the RTG reduces a bit every year. The Voyagers started out with 470 W, they're at about half of that now. APL is working on a new interstellar mission concept: twice the speed of Voyager, aimed at exploring the solar system out to several hundred AU.
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  4. The camera system has heaters: these were switched off along with the cameras themselves in 1989. They've been exposed to -200 ºC for 30 years, but were designed for operation near 0 ºC. They're probably broken.
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  5. What does science tell you to do before believing anything? Review the data. We found that space is empty. Space debris is a problem in low Earth orbit, not so much in interplanetary space. The average density is 1 atom per cm3.
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  6. Your phone didn't cost $400 million.
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  7. The title is incorrect. NASA isn't ending the mission any sooner than it has to. The end of the mission is determined by one parameter: the amount of power produced by the RTG. This drops steadily, at a rate of about 4 W/year. So they regularly have to switch off instruments to stay within that limit. When the last science instrument has to be switched off, the mission is over.
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  8.  @christinerobinson9372  The Voyagers use radioisotope thermal generators: there's a device filled with small pellets of Plutonium-238. This decays and produces heat, Peltier elements convert this to electricity. Pu-238 has a half-life of 87.7 years, so the output of the RTG reduces a bit every year. When the power output has dropped to the point where Voyager can't power one science instrument, I expect they will switch off the transmitter. This makes sure we don't receive random noise from the transmitter later on, this could interfere with radio telescopes. This is the standard way of ending a mission.
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  9. and yet people like you never come up with any evidence to support that claim.
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  10. That's not necessary. Using a single 34-m antenna, we can keep in contact until 2050 (Voyager 1) and 2057 (Voyager 2), if their power supply would last that long. NASA also have the option to receive data with an array of antennas, which could stretch this even further. The Voyager missions will end when there's not enough power left to operate one instrument. Not because we can't communicate with them.
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  11. There's a plan for a faster mission (APL interstellar probe), but even that will only be twice as fast (7 AU/year vs 3.5 for the Voyagers). That's the main problem: we don't have a way to get to the outer solar system fast.
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  12. More than 20 hours at the moment.
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  13. The cameras on the Voyagers were switched off in 1989 and no longer work. And I don't think the Voyagers are far enough away to do parallax measurements on a galaxy. The New Horizons mission has been taking some parallaxes recently.
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  14. My 14 year-old car is rust-free. Don't buy crap.
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  15. No, it has power to do something useful for 2-5 more years. Then the power drops to a level where it can operate the computers, but no science instruments for a few more years, pretty soon after that there's not enough power left to run the transmitter. Power output is still above 200 W and the RTG will continue to produce some power for hundreds of years, but operations will end when they can't transmit any more.
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  16. Well, yeah. That flyby wasn't done by the Voyagers, but by New Horizons.
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  17. Using a single 34-m antenna, we can keep in contact until 2050 (Voyager 1) and 2057 (Voyager 2), if their power supply would last that long. NASA also have the option to receive data with an array of antennas, which could stretch this even further. The Voyager missions will end when there's not enough power left to operate one instrument. Not because we can't communicate with them.
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  18. Your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
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  19. After Voyager, we switched to missions that study one planet in detail for many years: Galileo and Juno at Jupiter, Cassini at Saturn. They were all designed to answer questions that arose from the Voyager observations. The drawback of these mission is that they're expensive: about 10x the cost of the Voyagers. So we couldn't afford to do both. There's a recent plan for a faster mission (APL interstellar probe), but even that will only be twice as fast (7 AU/year vs 3.5 for the Voyagers).
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  20. Don't be ridiculous. The (tiny) funding for the Voyager project supports daily operations (we still get new data every day) for a small staff (5-10 people), plus the cost of using the DSN.
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  21. The Voyagers have several programmable computers on board. They replaced the software several times (each planetary encounter had a new program).
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  22. Using a single 34-m antenna, we can keep in contact until 2050 (Voyager 1) and 2057 (Voyager 2), if their power supply would last that long. NASA also have the option to receive data with an array of antennas, which could stretch this even further. The Voyager missions will end when there's not enough power left to operate one instrument. Not because we can't communicate with them.
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  23. Almost none of the information on that record is outdated. "hi, we're humans, this is what we look like, here are some of our languages and this is our location".
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  24. The farther away from the sun you get, the less light you have (1/r^2). We can run spacecraft on solar panels as far out as Jupiter; beyond that, the panels would get so large the spacecraft would be too heavy to launch.
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  25. Incorrect. NASA is not saying the Voyagers are about to shut down: some idiot outside NASA wrote an incorrect article that this video is based on. For decades, the plan for the Voyagers has remained the same: keep them operating for as long as possible. Switch off instruments as needed (the power source slowly degrades). When the mission ends is hard to predict: this degradation is slightly irregular, and occasionally the team finds a way to extend the mission. Recently, for instance, they switched off the heater for one of the instruments, to their surprise the instrument kept working at the lower temperature. The best estimates are that the missions will end between 2025 and 2030. All NASA has said about the "strange signal" (corrupted information from the attitude control system) is that it hasn't found the cause yet. It could be a program glitch, a hardware error, a connection issue etc.
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  26. NASA isn't ending the mission any sooner than it has to. The end of the mission is determined by one parameter: the amount of power produced by the RTG. This drops steadily, at a rate of about 4 W/year. So they regularly have to switch off instruments to stay within that limit. When the last science instrument has to be switched off, the mission is over. The transmitter can't be used at a lower power setting than 12 W: if power drops below that, the transmitter stops working at all.
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  27. The title is incorrect. NASA isn't ending the mission any sooner than it has to. The end of the mission is determined by one parameter: the amount of power produced by the RTG. This drops steadily, at a rate of about 4 W/year. So they regularly have to switch off instruments to stay within that limit. When the last science instrument has to be switched off, the mission is over.
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  28. We're learning more about the planets right now, with dedicated missions that can study the planets for years, instead of flybys that can study the planet for a few hours. Galileo, Juno, Cassini. There are mission proposals to do this at Uranus and Neptune as well.
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  29. Using a single 34-m antenna, we can keep in contact until 2050 (Voyager 1) and 2057 (Voyager 2), if their power supply would last that long. NASA also have the option to receive data with an array of antennas, which could stretch this even further. The Voyager missions will end when there's not enough power left to operate one instrument. Not because we can't communicate with them.
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  30. We don't need to. Using a single 34-m antenna, we can keep in contact until 2050 (Voyager 1) and 2057 (Voyager 2), if their power supply would last that long. NASA also have the option to receive data with an array of antennas, which could stretch this even further. The Voyager missions will end when there's not enough power left to operate one instrument. Not because we can't communicate with them.
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  31. They're using radio. You can receive a signal from so far away with careful design of the transmitter and receiver. Dish antennas concentrate the signal into a narrow cone, providing an enormous amount of gain over omnidirectional antennas. You can also build very sensitive receivers by cooling them to cryogenic temperatures (which reduces noise).
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  32. The Voyagers transformed our understanding of our solar system. You may not appreciate that knowledge, but some of us do.
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  33. New Horizons is slower, so it'll never pass the Voyagers. There's a plan for a faster mission (APL interstellar probe), but even that will only be twice as fast (7 AU/year vs 3.5 for the Voyagers).
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  34. The title is incorrect. NASA isn't ending the mission any sooner than it has to. The end of the mission is determined by one parameter: the amount of power produced by the RTG. This drops steadily, at a rate of about 4 W/year. So they regularly have to switch off instruments to stay within that limit. When the last science instrument has to be switched off, the mission is over.
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  35. The lineup the Voyagers used involved all 4 gas giants. The alignment we saw this year was missing Neptune, and had Uranus in the wrong place for a mission to fly by Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.
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  36. No, they don't. Every planet is a sphere: when you observe e.g. Jupiter through a telescope, this is clearly visible.
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  37. That's a bunch of nonsense. We have independent verification that the Apollo missions went to the Moon. And we have independent verification that the Voyagers are where NASA says they are.
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  38.  @Daveyo747  Your "witnesses" are lying. Look up tonight. You can see satellites pass overhead. With simple tools, you can measure their speed and altitude https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zApGNHOi0s You'll find an altitude of more than 200 km and a speed of 8 km/s. There is no way to fake that. During the Apollo missions, amateur astronomers could see the CSM/LM on its way to the Moon. Every day, you benefit from data generated in space. GPS, accurate weather forecasts, TV broadcasts. There's no way to fake all that data. There is no firmament. That whole concept is based on a translation error. In the original text, the Hebrew word raki'a is used. This word means simply "expansion." It denotes the space or expanse like an arch appearing immediately above us. In the Vulgate this was translated as 'firmamentum'. The original text does not describe a dome: that was added by the translators who created the Vulgate. God's cosmology is closer to what we know today than that of the Latin scholars of 380 AD who created the Vulgate. So there's no reason to diminish His creation by considering the heavens above a dome with lights instead of actual space with actual stars. We have a dozen ways to prove Earth is not flat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdcG5IQOVo
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  39.  @Daveyo747  In 1958, James van Allen and his team discovered the belts that were later named after him. He also measured the radiation intensity. This is what he found: in the part of the belt where the intensity is highest, it is high enough that if you stay for about a week, you receive a lethal dose. So for the Apollo missions, the trajectory was designed to minimize the amount of time spent there. When the Apollo astronauts flew through the van Allen belts (which took about an hour), they received a dose of radiation of between 0.16 and 1.14 rads, or less than 1% of a lethal dose.
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  40. After Voyager, we switched to missions that study one planet in detail for many years: Galileo and Juno at Jupiter, Cassini at Saturn. They were all designed to answer questions that arose from the Voyager observations. The drawback of these mission is that they're expensive: about 10x the cost of the Voyagers. So we couldn't afford to do both.
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  41. The point was to inspire people.
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  42. It did that in 1989 (Pale Blue Dot). Can't do it again, not enough power to run the camera system (and the cameras have been switched off since 1989, so they're frozen and probably broken).
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  43. We already know there's no planet 'behind the sun'. 1. we have spacecraft that can view that region. 2. even before that, it was obvious: orbital mechanics shows such an orbit is unstable and any planet in such an orbit would soon be ejected from that orbit.
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  44. Every spacecraft we've ever launched gets hit regularly. It's inevitable, so we build them to withstand those impacts. JWST will still be running in 8 years.
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  45. That's not how it works. They use radioisotope thermal generators: Pu-238 decays and produces heat, Peltier elements convert this to electricity. This decay happens whether you convert the heat into electricity or not.
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  46. Your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
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  47.  @americanknow8232  We have independent verification of both the Voyagers and the moon landings. I.e. we have proof they were not faked.
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  48. You've fallen for lies thought up by charlatans. We can prove Earth isn't flat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdcG5IQOVo and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDy95_eNPzM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQigLd2wjp8
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  49. We'd have noticed if physics were different.
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  50. That's not possible. The Voyagers are moving away from us at a speed of about 20 km/s. They have fuel to change that by a few meters/s, far too little to cancel out that huge speed.
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  51.  @mukuldave7767  In the region where the Voyagers are now, there are no large planets. You'd need a very large planet (larger than Jupiter) to change Voyager's course back into the inner solar system. A small planet doesn't have enough gravity for a large course change.
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  52. There's no point in doing that. Using a single 34-m antenna, we can keep in contact until 2050 (Voyager 1) and 2057 (Voyager 2), if their power supply would last that long. NASA also have the option to receive data with an array of antennas, which could stretch this even further. The Voyager missions will end when there's not enough power left to operate one instrument. Not because we can't communicate with them.
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  53.  @stevemorgan4715  To do what? They'll be in the middle of nowhere.
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  54.  @stevemorgan4715  Those stations would have to orbit the Sun, which means they don't line up with each other most of the time. Orbital mechanics really works against you in this case.
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  55. The farther away from the sun you get, the less light you have (1/r^2). We can run spacecraft on solar panels as far out as Jupiter; beyond that, the panels would get so large the spacecraft would be too heavy to launch. So for outer solar system missions, we use radioisotope thermal generators instead: Pu-238 decays and produces heat, Peltier elements convert this to electricity. Pu-238 has a half-life of 87.7 years, so the output of the RTG reduces a bit every year. The Voyagers started out with 470 W, they're at about half of that now.
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  56. It doesn't have enough speed to leave our galaxy, so it'll keep orbiting the center of our galaxy.
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  57. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEzcFXRKHUw
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  58. That's incorrect. They have 3 RTG modules, but these have all been used since launch. You can't keep RTGs in reserve: the Pu inside is going to decay at the same speed whether you use its output or not.
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  59. We can measure the position of the Voyagers with excellent accuracy. This position matches what you'd expect if they're in free flight for all those years. Any interception would alter their trajectory. All of the data we have shows no interception. The golden record contains images of people of all races. The cover image you're thinking about is just an outline, it has no color at all.
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  60. It did that in 1989 (Pale Blue Dot).
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  61.  @davidrummel133  Oh yes, I see now. I think it'd be difficult. There's not enough power available to run the camera system. And when the cameras were switched off, the temperature of the camera module dropped from 0ºC to -200 ºC. The camera uses a vidicon tube, that's probably broken.
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  62. Luck. It doesn't have a way to detect nearby objects. Fortunately space is empty enough that this method works.
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  63. Using a single 34-m antenna here on Earth, we can keep in contact until 2050 (Voyager 1) and 2057 (Voyager 2), if their power supply would last that long. NASA also have the option to receive data with an array of antennas, which could stretch this even further. The Voyager missions will end when there's not enough power left to operate one instrument. Not because we can't communicate with them. Sending a mission to Neptune with a large enough antenna to contact the Voyagers would require so much weight we'd need to launch it on SLS or Starship. All to reduce the distance from 150 AU to 120 AU. Then you have the problem that Neptune is moving away from the Voyagers, and pretty soon, it'll be farther away from the Voyagers than Earth is. It's much easier and cheaper jut to build more antennas on Earth.
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