Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout.
A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle’s original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could help keep the veteran spacecraft operating until it’s able to contact home again next year.
Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, uses more than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team.
We need so much more money for NASA.
Swap the NASA and the Pentagon budget!
This is how we get to Mars y’all xD
Humanity is not yet ready to be a space-faring species as it hasn’t reached certain prerequisites and there’s still inequality and inequity in human society
Since Mars is one of the bodies in the solar system that might support life, I think that it’s morally wrong to send humans there. That will contaminate Mars.
We have plenty of work to do colonizing the moon and asteroids. Let’s wait a few hundred years until we have done really, really thorough investigation of Mars before potentially wiping out tue alien life that might be there.
I’m of the opinion we can’t safely travel to mars. Not in our lifetimes.
The earth has a nice magnetic field that protects us from background ionizing charged particles, and an atmosphere that catches most other radiation (X-ray, gamma).
The length of time it would take with modern rockets to get to mars exposes the crew to extreme radiation. They could survive it, but radiation over time kills you with cancer, if you survive any acute effects.
We could maybe make superconducting magnets strong enough to create a field to reduce the charged particles, but then you have to keep them powered, and still deal with the uncharged background radiation (mostly gamma/X-rays). You could create a giant cylinder of lead around the crew capsule, but that would take an extraordinary amount of time to build in orbit.
Not to mention once you are on mars, you have to maintain those protections too - the Mars atmosphere is too thin to be very helpful and it does not have a a magnetic core.
There has been a notable lack of progress in that realm, and it will likely remain the reason we don’t see a human to mars program.
The funny thing is we are a lot closer to the technology of successful Mars settlement than we are to the politics of successful Mars settlement.
The book, A City On Mars, is an excellent read that explores everything required to colonize the red marble, and you’re absolutely right - it’s a lot.
There are so many technological hurdles to cover. And any advocacy for Mars settlement as some sort of emergency evacuation of Earth is either very wrong or very dishonest. Or both.
The absolute hostility of the surface of Mars will always be orders of magnitude worse than anything climate change will throw at us. Humanity would be completely eradicated before we even got halfway to polluting Earth into the uninhabitable state of Mars.
If you can terraform Mars to support human life, you could easily terraform Earth to be a lot more hospitable. If you can’t terraform Mars, and instead just want to build a colony base… well, you can do that on Earth too. Dig deep into a mountain or pick a remote corner of Antarctica and guess what? Even with an epoch-ending asteroid or complete thermonuclear annihilation - it would still be easier to build an apocalypse-proof city on Earth than trying to build a city on Mars.
But the politics?
The same species that is actively destroying its own environment would just… move somewhere else. We would bring all of the same problems with us, plus all of the new problems of space travel and Martian colonization! The book makes an excellent case that there are virtually no conditions under which humanity in its current form would ever benefit from attempting to build A City On Mars. Probably not for at least a couple centuries.
IIRC, we have greater chance on Venus than Mars. If we can get ourselves to get something to hover in the upper parts of Venus, we would be shielded and all that.
With Mars, most ideas are basically Vaults from fallout. Get there, find the biggest cave with smallest exit and start to isolate the walls so that air won’t run off through the soil…
This all is my knowledge, as in “knowledge”, from scraps caught on the net so yeah, take with not a grain but whole barrel of salt.
The radiation hazard still exists, it’s a long trip, easily 6 moths for a flyby, probably closer to 9-10 for an orbit transfer or atmospheric entry. You’re right, once they’re in Venus’s upper atmosphere, the combination of its thick atmosphere and induced magnetosphere would create radiation shielding once there.
There is a nice “zone” that’s about 15km tall 50km above the surface. Still have to deal with the carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid rain, and have to provide your own oxygen and nitrogen to mimic our atmosphere. Surface exploration is probably out of the question without some serious material science discoveries to withstand the temperature, pressure, and corrosion.
I think you may have missed the jibe. NASA’s missions to the Moon were just as hazardous considering how little we knew at the time and we pulled it off. The pentagon’s budget is more than a trillion dollars and with the know-how we have these days I don’t think Mars is unattainable at all if those resources were at our disposal. They just won’t be… I guess unless China decides to try and one up us to Mars first. All it takes is injured pride for some of these people.
No, going to the moon and back was a week long, and going just TO Mars is 9 months long at the closest point.
Your looking at least at a 10x-20x increase in radiation dose over the mission which would be around 1Sv to 2Sv. That’s a very high lifetime dose in a short period of time.
And honestly, while it would be cool, there is little point of sending humans to Mars.
People really underestimate how unique and cool our planet is with all that’s going on.
Now, sending robots, and bringing some stuff back for analysis… Why not? Way cheaper too.
Not to mention, there is still a scale of size, time and resource contraint. We can’t send humans to Mars with all the tools they don’t know they need yet, just like we can’t send the rovers with all the tools we can imagine.
For humans to benefit from rapid discovery on Mars, they’d need to be able to produce those tools, chemicals, power, etc.
It would take decades to set up anything useful for a longer term mission on Mars, and it again becomes a numbers game. The longer period of time you have to account for, the wider the room for error. I don’t know many people who would be comfortable traveling through space knowing that they may not see Earth again either.
You can compare the trip to the circumnavigation attempts in the age of discovery, you may never see your home again, and die of dehydration in the middle of endless ocean.
But you can still breathe freely in the middle of the ocean. Space is more akin to sittting in a submarine, where to surface you need to travel for several months.
It is, and other factors would exacerbate the debilitation and cancer risk from that dose besides. I did some searching and found NASA currently uses a lifetime dose limit of 600 mSv before grounding an astronaut, and there’s also a handy chart of the relative radiosensitivity among different parts of the body.
The bioengineering challenge of mitigating 1-2 Sv of hazard starts to look more approachable with that data on board, but I know jack and shit, and am merely curious, and want NASA to cure cancer. What do you think?
Lifetime dose limit, fine. 100mSv/year is the lowest associated with a significant increase in cancers. 2Sv is severe radiation poisoning, possibly even fatal. Of course we’re talking over maybe a 18month period, probably more like 2 to 3 years.
Ok, so let’s say upper side of the full dose is 2Sv over 3 years. That’s 666 mSv/year, so right now that doesn’t look great. But it gets worse as you break it down. ~55mSv/ month. ~2mSv/day. That’s a lot. Like ~500 dental X-rays a day. Obviously distributed throughout the body.
5% of people exposed to 1Sv lifetime dose will die of a fatal cancer.
I can’t find a lot on what 666mSv/year would do to you, but from everything I gather, it would definitely shorten your lifespan. I certainly wouldn’t volunteer for it.
The superconducting magnets you describe, do not require ongoing power, only ongoing cooling. Which in space, is more manageable.
Heat rejection is actually a huge issue in space. The only way to get rid of heat is radiation. There’s nothing to conduct or convect into in vacuum.
So I was curious about this from a superconducting electromagnet aspect which prevented me from responding to OP on the radiation thing so thanks for getting to that.
There isn’t a way to efficiently convert heat into radiative heat fast enough to keep a superconductor cool enough long enough.
You could, theoretically, create a system that exchanges the heat through convection and conduction that then stores it in something like water. Then with the water, you pass that through fins to radiate the heat. This would give you more time with the magnet being cool enough to function.
I didn’t have any useful numbers, but it looks like at some point along the trip you’d need to disable the magnet cooling system or dump the stored water. At some point the system will just not be able to maintain the temperature.
Superconducting magnets don’t heat up naturally, not without breaking. All we’d need to do, is engineer an isolated environment for the magnet, and there’ll be no chance of it heating up, except maybe for an intense solar storm overwhelming it’s magnetic shield.
Unlike earth, where there are multiple potential sources of heat, in space the only one of note is the sun. So yes, you can’t remove heat via conduction or convection, but that also means that you can’t gain heat from it. If anything, that simplifies the design.
Cooling isn’t really easier in space unless you can keep it facing away from the sun at all times.
I’ve heard a plan for water tanks that surround the crew & food supply areas would be a decent shield and useful too. But I’m not sure if you’d end to with heavy water in 9 months.
Robots would need to go to mars in advance and build reliable shielding for them to live in as well.
The energy requirements for keeping a magnet out of the sun at all times, is probably considerably less than powering a conventional electromagnet for the equivalent duration.
We’ve already achieved this on the extreme end via the new horizons probe, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.
alas, public funding of actual technological wizardry steals eyeballs away from the social sideshow, so… *snip*
And science in general. Those NIH cuts are insane.