Good news! I just invented a FTL drive and, after day trips to Mercury and Pluto, have decided I’d like to zip out for a peek at Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 (don’t worry, I won’t touch them). The radar on my starship is a little wonky, though. Can NASA give me the probes’ locations to within a hundred miles? Within ten miles? Within a mile? To the foot?
Voyager Mission Operations Status Report # 2009-12-04, Week Ending December 4, 2009
The site reports the probe’s distances from the sun to the nearest million kilometers, but they also give round trip signal time to the nearest second. A light second is about 299,792.458 kilometers, so that pins the position to within about a half a million km.
They can probably get more accurate numbers than that, certainly if they can still get a response from the probes; perhaps within a light millisecond or two. That’d be within 300 miles or so.
After emailing my father-in-law who designed instruments on both of the Voyagers, he responded:
He is still doing space probes so I think this is a pretty good answer; although he does instruments not navigation.
Outstanding - thanks! Now off to warm up the starship…
Once again, the Dope blows my mind.
“I have a goofy question!”
“I’m related to someone who can get you the best possible answer factually to your goofy question!”
Epic win.
“Goofy question”?
Harrumph. :mad: 
well, I would have said a “specialized” question.
great question and great response!
Slow down there, Pirx. You’re gonna need three coordinates to find this puppy. Disheavel’s description only mentions the range from the transmitter. How accurately do we know the direction? Even at a fraction of an arcsecond, you’re still looking for a needle in a bigass two-dimensional haystack.
I’m sure my contact at NASA will be able to tell me what I need to know. She’s always been very helpful in the past.
And in under 2 hours. Wow.
They’ve got sun- and star-positioning systems on-board; i.e., they’re not relying on angle measurements from traditional radar processing. Think “sextant.” For some reason, I woke up at 3:00 AM, so I’m not looking for real numbers, but just from the star positioning system, I’d assume they could find themselves within a few hundred km.
The Voyagers rotate slowly around an axis coming out radially from the Earth, with their high gain antenna always pointed at us. If they did it right (and they seemed to do an awful lot right with the Voyagers), they’d have arranged it so that taking observations of star positions is completely passive, just waiting until the stars they’re tracking come into view as the craft rotates.
Or you could just look it up on the internet thing: Spacecraft escaping the Solar System. No, I don’t understand a word of it.
Star positioning systems are for telling the spacecraft its orientation. I very much doubt they’d be able to get useful location information from them. With the craft’s orientation, a Sun sensor, and already knowing the Earth’s direction, they could back out a position, but I doubt it would be very accurate.
But people been tracking it for 30 years, we know it’s direction of motion and can just extrapolate a path from that, the distance has to be along that path. If you look at Squink’s link, you can see that over the course of a year, the distance to each of the two Voyagers fluctuates due to the Earth approaching each of their trajectories. I believe that if you did a straight distance calculation over the time of year and aligned the results in 3D space, you would have a very linear trajectory- but the scientists have been doing this continuously so I would expect just from extrapolation they would be nearly bang on top of it to begin with.
Back when I was a newbie, we’d have the response in less than 20 minutes.
Boy this board has really gone down hill.
Well, to be fair the OP did not say “Need answer fast!”.
Why go so far afield? Just use your FTL drive to take you into the future and wait. V’Ger will be back some time in the 22nd century, looking for its creator and packing an attitude.
All the more reason to visit now.
I can’t get over how marvelous the Voyagers are, 33 years and still functioning and communicating useful data. Wow 33 years, incredible.