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?
*Joe forces estimated
Using current technology we could probably make an object go faster than that so yes, it would be able to catch up.
However, we'd probably just put better instruments on this new object and make that the priority.
Im not sure if thats what you wanted but australias per day is my new favourite unit.
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
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.
It's the 24th century version of jacking with Wikipedia.
We are truly lost in a “The Deep” … as in absolute nothingness
Australians call it "soccer" too. Disambiguates it from Australian Rules, Rugby League and Rugby Union
Nope, not true. Not every second. Depends on the time of year. For a few months, each year, Voyagers actually get closer to Earth.
please tell me you are being sarcastic!
“Only”.
It’s probably not worth it.
So to catch up, you would have to be faster. Let's say you were able to travel around the equator in 15 minutes, so you're gaining 30 minutes per equator. If my napkin math is right, it would take you roughly 45 years to catch up to voyager.
We could achieve slightly greater speed immediately after launch but we wouldn't be able to exploit the planetary gravity assists that accelerated the Voyager spacecraft.
(1) https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...
It's also near the end of its usable life so it wouldn't be worth it anyway.
And actually, according to https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ it's actually 19,936,472,690 km from Earth so I think like 20ish light hours or so.
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.
The term soccer comes from Oxford "-er" slang, which was prevalent at the University of Oxford in England from about 1875, and is thought to have been borrowed from the slang of Rugby School. Initially spelled assoccer, it was later reduced to the modern spelling.
“Football” almost always means soccer (association football) in the UK, but there are also things like rugby football and Gaelic football.
Edit to add: you need to disambiguate when other forms of football are popular (eg at Oxford university) but these days soccer is the most popular sport by a huge margin.
or something, dunno.
If it's 15 billion miles away (sorry for my Freedom Units), it is 22 light-hours away, or 0.0026 light years away (unless my Google-fu is way off). If we could move at the speed of light, which we can't, it would still take nearly a day to get there. So if we were on the Enterprise moving at Warp 1, it would take a day to get there and reorient it back towards Earth. If we could move at Warp 10, we'd have already been there and fixed it.
I feel like that line is somewhere between 5 and 15 for americans, and not "thousands". And probably at around "oh the handegg one, no, I have no idea how big one is in the first place" for rest of the world
But it's not aircraft ? It's trivial for spacecraft to achieve it
But yeah, it is not comparable as the challenges for spacecraft and planes are completely different.
To reach the point 2 degrees from earth would take 1.64 years at that speed.
To reach that point before October 15th it would need to travel about 9x faster than falcon 9 second stage or almost twice as fast as the fastest spacecraft in history.
But it would need significant additional time and fuel to slow down such that it didn't immediately blow past that point and become useless, so it would need an even higher speed.
Possible, maybe. Little or cheap, definitely not. Both Voyager probes relied on a unique alignment of the planets in the outer solar system that allowed them to get a series of speed boosts using gravity assists from the gas giants. If we wanted to launch a rocket anytime in the near future that would be able to catch up with Voyager 2 we'd probably have to rely on good old fashioned brute force (rocket power). But then if you want the rocket to catch up in the next thousand years it's going to need REALLY big ass rockets to catch up with Voyager... and if you want it to rendezvous with Voyager instead of just zipping past, it will need to haul more rockets all the way out to Voyager so it can slow down and match speeds (which means even bigger rockets to launch from earth, etc.).
tl;dr - space is big and the rocket equation is brutal.
>>I beg anybody to rephrase it understandingly with using some units similar to football fields.
More like it can go from Earth to Moon in like 8 hours(or so).
32 billion kilometers is about 100 times the distance a satellite travels from earth to Mars. [1]
That Earth-Mars trip is estimated in the same article to take 4 months, so figure 400 months or 30+ years to shoot another satellite out to reach Voyager 2.
This is ignoring planetary slingshot math, the extra speed to 'catch' voyager 2, and surely lots of other details. Personally I find years and "mars" to be more intuitive in this case than trillions of football fields.
[1]https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline/cruise/#:~:text=The%....
If that's not enough for human scale understanding, it's gone the same distance Earth goes in its orbit in 34 years.
More realistically, even if say we did have a light speed capable craft, we'd be limited by the forces for accel and decel to have a starting speed of 0 relative to Earth, and ending speed of 0 relative to Voyager. The limits would be determined by the withstanding capability of the bodies of the pilots, or the mechanical strength if it were another drone.
I don't feel like doing the math properly, so I asked GPT4 this question:
> let's say we wanted to move a human astronought in a spacecraft to the current position of Voyager 2 which is 22 light-hours away. We want to get there as fast as possible, and arrive at a co-moving frame with Voyager, which has a relative velocity of 32000 miles per hour moving away from the Earth. Assuming the astronaut can withstand a g-force maximum on their body of 6G, and using that to inform the maximum accelleration and deceleration for the voyage, how long does it take to reach the Voyager 2 co-moving frame?
Response:
Firstly, let's convert everything to consistent units. Here we'll use hours for time, miles for distance, and miles per hour^2 for acceleration.
1 G is approximately equal to 22 miles/hour^2. Therefore, 6G is approximately 132 miles/hour^2. The distance to Voyager 2 in miles is 22 light-hours * 670616629 miles/light-hour = approximately 14753561838 miles.
Assuming we accelerate at 6G until halfway, then decelerate at 6G for the second half, we can use the kinematic equation:
d = 0.5 * a * t^2
Solving for t when d equals half the total distance gives:
t = sqrt((2 * d) / a)
Substituting in the values:
t = sqrt((2 * (14753561838 miles / 2)) / 132 miles/hour^2) = 84331.5 hours
So, the total time to reach Voyager 2 while maintaining a maximum acceleration/deceleration of 6G is approximately 84331.5 hours * 2 = 168663 hours, or about 19.25 years.
This is a rough estimation and doesn't take into account the relative velocity of Voyager 2 or relativistic effects at high speeds.
It also assumes constant acceleration and deceleration, which wouldn't be feasible with today's technology due to fuel constraints.
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So our 22 hour lightspeed trip would still take 19 years if it had a human onboard.
The biggest limitation with sci-fi travel isn't breaking relativity, it's finding a way to accelerate squishy meat-bags. This person will be living at an effective weight of nearly 1000lbs for 20 years, which will really mess them up.
For the sake of the longevity of our pilot, I asked to re-run the calculation limiting the on-board gravity to 1G. It now takes 114 years to reach Voyager's current position, which by then will be much farther. It turns out we will never catch up, and reaching it is impossible if we limit our craft to earth like conditions necessary for human health.
This probably wasn't your intention, but putting it in terms like this, for me anyway, actually drives home just how short a distance the Voyager probes have travelled.
And come on, you can sanity check those numbers.
"1 G is approximately equal to 22 miles/hour^2."
Think about this. That means it would take you an hour to reach 22mph.
The real speed you'll be going is 22 miles per second.
And sqrt(14753561838 / 132) is 10572, not 84331. That's not even close.
Also it used the Voyager 1 distance which is significantly different.
Once we fix all the numbers, each half of the trip is sqrt(20 billion km / 60m/s^2) which is a week. So two weeks total.
At 1G, each half is 16.4 days, so it takes a month total.
Technically, the speed of sound depends on the medium, and 15km/s is much slower than the speed of sound in interstellar space. (Which the sources I can find give at ~100km/s.)
“Lucky”, only in the sense that (1) completing a large government project on time, and (2) not having some kind of disaster (particularly, at launch) screw up the mission require a certain degree of luck of luck on top of planning and execution (though, not relying completely on that luck is also why there were two Voyagers): we got all the gravity boosts because the mission was planned around an alignment that enabled it to do that and visiting each of the outer planets (which was really the main goal; the beyond the solar system part was gravy.)
Supposedly you could literally slap them out of the air if you were at the muzzle, when they had just begun accelerating.
They were in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice.
- my quick calculation shows just over 7 hours 6 minutes based of google saying the moon is 384,400 km away.
- It took 3 days for Apollo 11 to reach the moon.
The New Horizons probe was launched at much faster speed than Voyagers, actually beating the record of the absolute fastest launch in history, but because of not getting those gravity assists it will never overtake Voyagers.
