zlacker

>>belter+(OP)
> The probe is currently around 32 billion kilometers from Earth, and gets 15km further away every second.

I beg anybody to rephrase it understandingly with using some units similar to football fields. Is it possible to launch a little cheap rocket with a transmitter just to correct Voyager's position?

>>eimrin+m6
It's about 3.5 trillion NFL football fields away. 15km/s is about 33,000 mph - more than 10x the speed of sound, and faster than a bullet. Does that help?

We are talking about distances that are so big, there is no comparison that makes sense. Nothing else IS that big. The numbers are literally "astronomical". If you're struggling to wrap your head around it, you're doing it right.

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams

>>ohtheh+y8
> 15km/s is about 33,000 mph - more than 10x the speed of sound

Well, technically, 15km/s IS "more than 10x the speed of sound". An average car, is, TECHNICALLY, more than twice the size of a bicycle.

>>onetim+w9
honestly I was just shooting for easy round numbers. "More than 43x the speed of sound" doesn't have the same ring to it. And besides, as we all know "technically correct is the best kind of correct!" :)

>>ohtheh+9b
So what was wrong about "40 times the speed of sound"?

Also, I don't particularly like the speed of sound for this comparison. Most people think of speed of sound as speed of sound at about sea level pressure, in gas composed of around 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen and at roughly 25C temperatures. But the speed of sound is highly dependant on the medium and its temperature and pressure. There actually can be sound waves in space (pressure waves in interstellar gas resulting from various astronomic phenomena) and they propagate at very wide range of speeds, typically somewhere between 10 and 100km/s.

The main reason to use "speed of sound" is because important things change when objects travel at little below or above speed of sound in the medium they are in. But this is only useful in relation to the actual medium the object travels through.

One place where it trips people up is when they are talking high altitude airplanes or rocketry. They are talking about something traveling at "X Mach", or "X times the speed of sound" and then I try to figure out if they mean X in relation to the speed of sound up there or the speed of sound at sea level. Just a nightmare trying to use it to convey speeds even within confines of our atmosphere.

>>onetim+8i
A nice feature of using the speed-of-sound as a measurement unit is that people know how difficult it is for aircraft to achieve it. So it makes it clear how much faster these things are going. We don’t have anything comparable between the speed-of-sound and the speed-of-light, do we? I suppose you could use escape-velocity, that isn’t something as many people know, but does I guess get you closer to the speeds in question.

>>blueje+Mo
> A nice feature of using the speed-of-sound as a measurement unit is that people know how difficult it is for aircraft to achieve it.

But it's not aircraft ? It's trivial for spacecraft to achieve it

>>ilyt+Xs
There is nothing trivial about it. The only reason Voyagers are traveling so fast is we were very lucky at the time and got gravity boost from pretty much everything we could get gravity boost from.

But yeah, it is not comparable as the challenges for spacecraft and planes are completely different.