Originally published at: NASA's Voyager I has stopped sending data home | Boing Boing
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I know exactly how you feel, Voyager I.
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15 billion miles - 22 light hours distant. 44 hours for a reply. Kinda like talking to teenagers, amirite?
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I see our probe has hit the Galactic Federation of Sentient Beings’ “Dangerously Un-evolved Life-form Containment Zone” border.
I for one humbly seek refugee status admittance!
I can offer to contribute to Galactic Culture uniquely monkey-based artistic expressions in the form of dub techno.
If you guys can arrange transport.
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Anything for a friend of V’ger.
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The Voyagers are still my favorite ever NASA projects and maybe the best value for money. In college as a baby engineer I took orbital mechanics from Gary Flandro. To say it was interesting would be an understatement. (I just looked at his Wiki and realized I’m a 12th generation pupil of Euler. Neat!)
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Sheesh. And I thought some of our older patron computers were slow!
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With how things have been going, I just might stop communicating with Earth, as well…
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Whenever these probes do finally go offline, I would love to see their obits compared to living stories of people and maybe animals who were born in the same year, comparing their journeys to those of these amazing and inspiring space probes over the same time.
I “launched” into the world a year earlier than the Voyager, and am happy of my life’s journey, but I’d still love to see the comparison.
What a thing we humans hath wrought!
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cool. i suppose my own “blast off” was a little over a year after Alan Shepard did his first American orbit of our blue marble.
i like the visualization you describe, how many trips around our Sol, how much partial transit of our own system in the galactic neighborhood have we been traversing in our miniscule lifetimes.
i remember tha National Geographic photo essays of the Pioneer and Voyager passes of Jupiter and Neptune and being gobsmacked at the clarity and definition never before seen through ground-based observatories. then we got Hubble and Webb space tele’s and i continue to be wowed!
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I’m a bit of an animist and have gotten V attached to our good babies on Mars and in outer space. Like so many of the scientists who worked on and with them, I weep when they die.
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Not to put too fine a point on it, but Shepard went ballistic (suborbital) with Freedom 7 in 1961 and did his first orbit in Apollo 14’s Kitty Hawk in 1971.1)
John Glenn in Friendship 7 did the first American orbit in 1962.
1) Allegedly Shepard briefly went ballistic again on at least three occasions. He had lobbied to use the last remaining Mercury capsule for a long term flight with him as the pilot. He was pretty serious about this and even had Freedom 7 II painted on the capsule, but NASA decided that Mercury had achieved its goals and getting on with Gemini had to have priority over anything else, what with testing docking manoeuvres and whatnot. There may or may not have been doubts whether Mercury would have been up to it, not really having been designed for it. Not to mention the potential bad press from a failure and the political fallout re NASA’s budget. The space programme never was quite that popular in certain circles at the time.
Then Shepard was scheduled to be commander of Gemini 3 (Gemini’s first crewed flight) but was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease and wasn’t fit to fly.
This also cost him the command of Apollo 13. Shepard had regained active status after an inner ear operation, but because of that he was behind his training schedule. So NASA swapped the crews of 13 and 14. Which, in the end, meant that Shepard got to play golf on the Moon.
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Working nonstop since 1977? Voyager I just might have decided to retire.
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Okay, so this one is about Curiosity, not Voyager, but still …
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snif *
Thank you. Dearest Curiosity.
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