One or two of our regular readers may also be a little misaligned…
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Well that’s what I get for reading the headline only - that’s on me. RTFA. I’m glad we can eek out some more life.
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Anyone who identifies even a little with space geeks will love this documentary:
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Are they all set up that way?
I don’t know much about these probes, but I think it’s cool to imagine them getting far enough in one direction that they’re eventually seeing like, the big bang itself, or rather, light emanating from it that shows what was like near the beginning, however many light years ago.
Is that even something astrophysicists and such are hoping to “see” some inkling of via these probes? Are most sent in a certain direction for that reason? Do we even know that direction, or at least a good theory of which it would be? 
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As @VeronicaConnor already pointed out, this isn’t over yet.
The next automatic recalibration is due on 2023-10-14.
Just a quick reminder why all this isn’t easy: Voyager 2 is now more than 20 light hours from Earth, adding 15 km every second, and the datalink’s bandwith is 160 bits per second.
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Yeah, that’s some really smart engineering!
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Captain Klaa at it again. Qapla!
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Unless humanity invents warp travel or discovers wormholes, rockets are not going to get us any significant distance from earth.
In the 50 years it’s been in space, Voyager 2 has traveled 12.3 billion miles. Which sounds like a lot (and it is!) but that is about 18 light hours away from earth. The nearest star is about 4 light years away, or about 35,000 light hours. At its current speed of about .36 light hours per year, Voyager 2 would be on a journey of about 100,000 years just to get to our closest neighbor. (Star Trek’s V-GER was science fiction, not science fact.)
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, of which the Sun is a nondescript star off in one of its spiral arms, is a disc about 80,000 light years across and 1000 light years thick. And the nearest galaxy, which is in our “local galactic cluster”, is about 70,000 light years away from the Milky Way. So things are really, really far apart in space. We’re never going to get appreciably closer to the center of the big bang.
But don’t give up hope just yet. Just because we can’t travel to our neighbors doesn’t mean there isn’t value in traveling a long distance.
Your depth perception allows you estimate distances to nearby objects using stereo vision from your two eyes, which are set about 2.5 inches apart. When you focus on a nearby object, the more the angles between your eyes increases, the closer you perceive the object. Astronomers use the same principle to estimate the distances to distant things by using “stellar parallax”. They use photographs taken from opposite sides of earth’s orbit of the sun. The distance from the earth to the sun is 1 AU, so pictures taken 6 months apart puts the two “eyes” 2 AU apart. The ability to measure the angles accurately places a limit on the distance they can accurately measure. So given a specific limit to the accuracy of measuring angles, the farther you can get two cameras apart the more you can improve the maximum effective distance you can measure.
And Voyager 2 is now 133 AU from earth. That’s the equivalent of setting your eyes 27 feet apart. It would be a massive improvement in your ability to measure a distant object. So Voyager should make a huge improvement in our ability to measure distances using parallax.
Your idea is absolutely sound.
Except there’s one other major problem. Voyager’s onboard camera was state of the art – in 1977. It simply doesn’t have the resolution needed to take pictures that compare with the accuracy of modern sensors.
Now you may give up hope. 
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Thanks, interesting stuff! Whether hopeful or not. 
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Voyager 1: Phone home!
(Typed up a reply to @milliefink, but @jaded said it better, so this is all I had left)
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So glad I kept reading instead of typing first!
Yeah, exactly, it’s 2 1/2 months. It’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. It’s not the end of the world.
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One of my friends who is also into astronomy pointed out a fun thing about galaxies. Of course we can’t travel between them, but:
- If you try to draw the solar system on an A4 or Letter sized sheet of paper, and make it to scale, you can’t draw it. Not in a way that allows you to recognize the planets, sun, etc. It won’t fit on the paper and still be something you can draw. If you draw the Earth big enough to be even slightly recognizable, the sun and planets won’t fit on the page. Venus, our nearest neighbour planet, is over 3000 Earth-diameters away. If your Earth dot is 1 mm wide, Venus will be 3 m (10 ft) away.
- Likewise, if you draw the solar system as a dot and eight concentric rings, you can’t draw the nearest star to the same scale. If you can see eight rings, the other star will be much too far off the page. Proxima Centauri is over 4000 Neptune-orbital-diameters away from our sun.
- But you can draw some of our local galaxies to scale on one sheet of paper. They’re a lot closer together, relative to their size, than planets or stars.
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Lazy humans. Why don’t you just go and get it?
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We don’t need Voyager to ‘see’ the Big Bang. An analogue TV will do.
Because we’re inside the Universe (I just checked), the radiation from the Big Bang is everywhere, not concentrated in one spot. And because the Universe has expanded, the electromagnetic waves of that radiation have been stretched into microwaves. These produce a faint hiss called the Cosmic Background Radiation and it was first detected in 1965.
Part of that hiss from an old fashioned untuned television set is the radiation from the Big Bang.
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This was a great documentary! Highly recommended!
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It’s back!
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I have no idea why it happens but a lot of NASA equipment just keeps on working long after it was supposed to expire. Rovers keep trundling about on Mars, probes keep streaming back data, telescopes keep sending images-even poor Skylab was operational for far longer than anticipated. Maybe it’s the love and passion of the engineers who create them keeping them alive.
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