CNN: 47-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft just fired up thrusters it hasn’t used in decades
CNN: 47-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft just fired up thrusters it hasn’t used in decades
Engineers have mitigated an issue with Voyager 1’s thrusters, enabling the mission to stay in touch with mission controllers on Earth and send back unique data.
Really incredible that the thrusters still function at all after all this time - and that it has any fuel left / usable fuel after all this time.
How expensive would it be to make similar spacecraft now?
Assuming it's relatively cheap, what could we learn from sending out thousands today?
The voyager probes only got as far as they did because of their trajectory that got some massive (and rare) slingshots, it will take ages for the new horizons probe to get anywhere near as far.
We could probably spam missions to some other planets, who will pay for it though? We are not at the stage where an 'out of the box's mission can do that I think?
So comparing to New Horizons mission
- New Horizons mission cost is estimated to around 780mln in 2001-2017
- Voyager cost is estimated at 850mln in 1977, which is ~2.8bln in 2006 dollars
We could learn that we are intergalactic litter bugs. We should stick with fixing polluting our inner space.
Our first encounter is a littering fine from the neighbors overly aggressive HOA.
That headline could also be describing me and my fitness goals.
Speed!!
Finally far enough to safely engage ftl-warp drive.