Voyager 1 reaches interstellar space

[john]

Amazing accomplishment. Voyager 1 is currently 18 billion kilometers from the sun. It was launched in 1977 and it's plutonium power source is expected to allow it to continue communicating with earth until 2025. It takes 17 hours to send a command or receive a response from the spacecraft (lightspeed).


http://www.nature.com/news/voyager-1-has...ce-1.13735

A selection from the golden record onboard V1

Question: How fast are the Voyager computers?

Answer:Not very fast compared to today’s standards... A typical instruction takes 80 microseconds, that is about 8,000 instructions per second. To put this in perspective, a 2013 top-of-the-line smartphone runs at 1.5 GHz with four or more processors yielding over 14 billion instructions per second. http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html

V1 looking back (2010).

http://www.space.com/22781-voyager-1-int...video.html



Score one for the rocket scientists.

[Himm2]

I wish Randy Jackson was on board that craft and he took the spaced-out Nikki Minaj with him. Maybe they should change the name "URANUS" to Randy Jackson since he is one.

[Miguel]

8,000 instructions per second versus 14 billion instructions per second

Big difference. At least it was built to last.

[john]

Not Voyager, but a look way out in space. Basically the Hubble telescope was pointed to an "empty" spot in the sky for more than 550 hours for what amounts to a very long time exposure photograph. This same picture was published in the past, but time has been added with improved equipment (revealing more). The light from some of the reddish galaxies has been traveling for more than 13 billion years. They are the most distant objects ever photographed and are seen as they were when the universe was very young. The image reveals about 5500 galaxies and hundreds of trillions of stars. So, this is what lies in a random black spot in the sky if you collect enough photons. To capture the whole sky you would need 30 million of these images.

This image, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), combines Hubble observations taken over the past decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax. With a total of over two million seconds of exposure time, it is the deepest image of the Universe ever made, combining data from previous images including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (taken in 2002 and 2003) and Hubble Ultra Deep Field Infrared (2009).

Here is a video that gives you a perspective on the size of the image below in the sky. Click the link.
. . .Link

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[My Alter Ego]

Cool! John, you have varied interests, don't you?

[Himm2]

That photo sure makes me feel small.

[Tusk]

That photo sure makes me feel small.

I can handle that, the concept that makes me really start spinning is we are literally looking into the past, the light that reached the lens came from a star/galaxy that likely burned out many millenia ago.

Seems our quest to find life other than our own continues to throw unimaginable, almost impossible to overcome, obstacles in front of us. The old adage comes to mind, The more you learn, the more you realise how little you know

What I mean is, even if we overcome travel, whether by bending physics by traveling (much)faster than the speed of light, wormholes, even teleportation of matter, add to that, the challenge of muscular atrophy from space travel, then looking out using these sensors, analyzing the nature of the captured waves to determine the geological and gaseous make up of planets to see if they can sustain life....

The planets we identify as potentially life supporting, may have gone out of existence aeons ago.....:/

It will take a great shift in the way we view/experience/understand EVERYTHING if there is even a remote chance of achieving the dream of Space exploration, travel and extra terrestrial communication or colonization.



Thanks to guys like Jules Verne, HG Wells, Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenbery, humanity will never stop trying

[john]

Cool! John, you have varied interests, don't you?

I find some of the Hubble photographs fascinating. Like Himm2 suggests, it's all very humbling.

The most distant galaxies are the red ones, especially some that are really hard to see. Since the distances are so great a photograph like this one is like a time machine. We can see many galaxies that are "small" and weakly organized (e.g. not big crisp spirals) where the light was emitted at a time far before our solar system existed. Some of these deep space images also include strange phenomenon like gravitational lensing where the galaxy is only visible because the light has been magnified as it passed through a strong gravity field. The magnification is caused by the bending of spacetime as predicted by Einstein's theories.

There is a beauty in all that (that is way beyond my comprehension). It gets into a spiritual realm.

[Tusk]

Ironic that our understanding of the space time continuum through our technology lets us 'see into the past' but never go there, yet the same set of understandings lead us to believe the 'into the future' part of time travel is possible through faster than light, and or space travel ......

We can't see the future but can travel there, we can see the past, but as of now, is beyond even our theoretcial reach

[john]

Earth as seen from Mars


Earth and moon photographed from Mars (acquired by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter).

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The first exoplanet (outside the solar system) was identified in 1995. Here is the current count from Nasa's Exoplanet Archive:
1,035 Planets around 774 Stars
179 Systems with Multiple Planets
3,602 Kepler Candidates and Confirmed Planets


Nasa and related entities have tons of data that hasn't been analyzed. They have open archives of Hubble images and exoplanet data from the Kepler mission and other sources. Many new discoveries are made by amateurs.