Space - The Final Frontier

[turbo89]

Some good news from Voyager 1:

NASA's Voyager 1 Finally Phones Home After Worrying Communications Glitch

The spacecraft was forced to rely on a radio transmitter that hadn't been used in 43 years.

gizmodo.com

 

[CaptTom]

It boggles my mind what they can accomplish with that 47-year-old technology.

 

[turbo89]

Those thermo nuclear reactors are rock solid! Definitely impressive; it’s equally impressive that NASA has been able to keep funding for it just as long!

 

[Gumby]

It boggles my mind what they can accomplish with that 47-year-old technology.

The technology is older than that. Spacecraft take a long time to design and build.

 

[Chuckanut]

Those thermo nuclear reactors are rock solid! Definitely impressive; it’s equally impressive that NASA has been able to keep funding for it just as long!

FWIW, I have read that the Voyager control center employs a few people and is located in a rented small strip mall store close to JPL. No, I did not make this up.

Perhaps somebody can confirm this.

 

[audreyh1]

Ha ha Voyager launched the year I graduated from high school!

 

[JoeWras]

The world spins, and one doesn't always see the other side. In my case, when I graduated in the mid 80s, I could never see the other side of working for a place like NASA or JPL. I don't know why. They didn't recruit at my Midwestern school for starters. Plus, I had this childhood dream of working for IBM, which I achieved.

But what if I got a job at JPL? Maybe today I'd be working on Voyager, in my 60s, instead of ER'd out of frustration from a string of jobs after IBM?

I've seen the problems the JPL team has had. They are right in my wheelhouse. I'm a "bit fiddler," as we say in software engineering. Working right down to the bare metal, bit by bit. I managed to do that for the first 15 years of my career in non government jobs, but then was pushed to "libraries and the stack," which I despise, and was part of why I ER'd.

Oh what could have been.

I wonder if they have any "kids" working on this stuff? The world of low level coding is so small now. In addition, all the NASA stuff is proprietary and the knowledge is not readily transferable, even in the small world of hardware interface microcode. Kids want to job hop. Learning about 18 bit direct microcode makes no sense to the kids who want to drop a library into a phone app. But for some of us, we dream at night in weird things like 18 bit microcode loops.

 

[dixonge]

Got to see the Starship 6 launch up close (from a boat) - got a little video

 

[Texas Proud]

Got to see the Starship 6 launch up close (from a boat) - got a little video

Nice... DW and one of my sisters got to see 5 from a boat and also the catch...

Curious... was the water landing of the booster close enough for you to see?

 

[dixonge]

Nice... DW and one of my sisters got to see 5 from a boat and also the catch...

Curious... was the water landing of the booster close enough for you to see?

I saw the big ball of flame and smoke, and I got a picture just before it went down behind the land. It was too far out.

 

[audreyh1]

Got to see the Starship 6 launch up close (from a boat) - got a little video

Yeah, we saw those boats in the channel from SPI (first launch). Those raptor engines get really loud, don’t they?

Quite the sight taking off! There is a at least a second webcast delay if you can even get hold of it due to cell congestion, and I happened to have my bins trained on the launchpad and said “it’s going!” before anyone around me had even realized. I later noticed the same thing happening in some of the feeds. There may have been a countdown pause that got folks off track and distracted. Just interesting to experience.

 

[REWahoo]

Those raptor engines get really loud, don’t they?

A few years ago we were at an RV park near Waco when we heard a huge roar one evening that lasted a couple of minutes. It was very loud. We learned it was SpaceX testing a raptor engine at their McGregor test site 15 miles from our location.

33 raptor engines blasting only a few miles away must be deafening!

 

[audreyh1]

Yeah, we were 5 miles away and it took a while for the sound to reach us after launch. By then the Starship was even farther away overhead yet it was deafening! They make this higher pitch constant popping noise and it’s terrible.

 

[joesxm3]

My friends were among the last two or three houses to sell out to SpaceX in Boca Chica. They hate Elon.

They told me how SpaceX gave everyone in the town ear muffs because of the noise.

 

[audreyh1]

We very much enjoyed witnessing the launch and the whole thing including the failure to separate, slow tumble and subsequent self-destruction. Could see everything through bins. But we sure wish we had left our AirPods in!

 

[dixonge]

Yeah, we saw those boats in the channel from SPI (first launch). Those raptor engines get really loud, don’t they?

Quite the sight taking off! There is a at least a second webcast delay if you can even get hold of it due to cell congestion, and I happened to have my bins trained on the launchpad and said “it’s going!” before anyone around me had even realized. I later noticed the same thing happening in some of the feeds. There may have been a countdown pause that got folks off track and distracted. Just interesting to experience.

I missed the initial few seconds because of that delay! They were piping the broadcast audio through speakers on the boat. You can hear it in my video, probably a 7-second delay!

You can *feel* the sound as much as hear it. It's so crazy it just makes you laugh!

 

[audreyh1]

Wow, that’s a long delay. Probably redirected multiple times. You still caught the spectacular launch fireball.

Even watching the launch through bins it was a while before the sound of the launch reached us. You initially watch the blast off in silence (well except for people cheering).

Very interesting experience all around.

 

[JoeWras]

Any of these launches are wild to see in person. I saw a few shuttle launches in FL in the 80s.

One stands out: a night launch. I was coincidentally in a rural swampy area west of Titusville that time. It wasn't super close. I wasn't there for a launch, instead we were doing some car rallying. Anyway, we stopped the activities for the launch.

Oh man. I thought the sun was rising. We were in pitch black, and suddenly, the sun was rising. It took a good long time to hear it, but as dixonge says, we more *felt* it than heard it. It was an amazing site and sound, and just impressed on me how much energy is being expended in these launches.

If you ever get a chance, go ahead and watch a launch of a heavy space vehicle. Amazing.

 

[Chuckanut]

Voyager 1 is now a light day away from Earth. Think about that for a moment. 15 billion miles away.

https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-1003-notes.pdf

The above PDF is from a recent Security Now episode. Besides security the hosts love to talk about space travel, science fiction and other geeky subject. On page 16 you will find an explaination of Voyager’s most recent problem, what led up to it, and how it was fixed. It’s real geeky stuff. But, it is amazing because the spacecraft is still working despite numerous problems it was never designed to handle.

The latest problem occurred when engineers warmed up part of the spacecraft, hoping that
some degraded circuits might be “healed” by an annealing process. Badaruddin explained that
“There's these junction field effect transistors (JFETs) in a particular circuit that have become
degraded through radiation. We don't have much protection from radiation in an interstellar
medium because we're outside the heliosphere where a lot of that stuff gets blocked. So we've
got this degradation in these electronic parts, and it's been proven that they can heal
themselves if you get them warm enough, long enough. And so we knew we had some power
margin, and we were hopeful that we had enough power margin to operate this heater ... and
as it turned out, we didn't. It was a risk we took to try to ameliorate a problem that we have
with our electronics. So now the problem is still there, and we realize that we can't solve it this
way. And so we're going to have to come up with another creative solution.”

 

[Gumby]

Only about 1/1460th of the way to the nearest star other than Sol, if it were headed in that direction. Space is a big place.

 

[ls99]

Silly question. If Voyager 1 is in interstellar space, can it still be "flying"?

 

[CaptTom]

I wonder about the use of words like spaceflight, too. I suppose there's no hard and fast rule which says flight must happen in an atmosphere. Still, it seems like there should be some distinction between movement in the two very different environments. We "swim" in water but "fly" in air. We need a third verb for movement in a vacuum. I haven't come up with one yet.

 

[Gumby]

I wonder about the use of words like spaceflight, too. I suppose there's no hard and fast rule which says flight must happen in an atmosphere. Still, it seems like there should be some distinction between movement in the two very different environments. We "swim" in water but "fly" in air. We need a third verb for movement in a vacuum. I haven't come up with one yet.

What's wrong with space "travel"?

 

[Walt34]

Wouldn't "coasting" be an accurate description? The only trouble with that is it doesn't sound cool.

 

[Koogie]

All this talk of V1 and its distance of travel made me wonder which "way" it is heading in space. Up, down, sideways or round and about ?

The interweb offers: "Voyager 1 is currently traveling in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus, at a distance of approximately 24,872,042,385.0 kilometers from Earth. The spacecraft is escaping the Solar System at a speed of about 3.6 AU per year, 35° north of the ecliptic in the general direction of the solar apex in Hercules."

So, upwards.. for those of us North Hemispherically inclined.