I hope they’ve sent more Chuck Berry along with it.
No matter where the missions are going, I do like it when they look back towards home.
A Flash Fiction story on New Horizon encounter with Pluto.
OP,
Thanks for starting this thread. I watched a documentary on voyager recently, and was thinking along same lines.
Amazing that the probes are still going even after 30+ years. Engineers are an under-appreciated lot.
This is exactly why I never post links to pictures of me.
I follow the Mars Rovers on Twitter. That excites me.
You can give us periodic updates.
I don’t take it for granted at all. What’s amazing to me is how all of this has occurred within my lifetime. I was 1.5 years old when Sputnik was launched, too young to notice it, but I did notice and watch most of the manned space program as well as the unmanned probes. I think I was almost as fascinated by the Viking landers as I was by Apollo.
I actually got to write code for GE for a NASA satellite ground terminal. I was part of a team, of course, so I only wrote a small piece. I don’t even know if that code is in use any more, but the downloads of some of the images you mention may have been scheduled using the code I wrote, as were possibly some shuttle communications.
What is a good web site for hi-res Voyager images? All I ever see is small pics posted in news articles.
Back when I was a teacher I ran the astronomy unit in an elementary school. I used a Starlab inflatable planetarium to do a star show, but also used a laptop with projector to show slides. I used a lot of the Voyager images of the planets as well as newer Hubble photos and the kids were always mesmerized.
As for myself, I check in with the various probes every few weeks. I’m very excited to see Pluto three years from now. And I’m a big fan of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. One of the great things about LRO is that in addition to the science it’s doing, the team has also made a point of imaging the Apollo landing sites. There’s something very cool about using new technology to show the remnants of our old technology in situ on the lunar surface.
The NASA page on the Voyagers has counters ticking off the distance they are from Earth and the sun in real time. They’re moving a hundred kilometres about every ten seconds in relation to us–but the numbers are running backwards!? I have a guess as to why that is, but I’ll put it in a spoiler box in case anyone else wants to try. And in case I’m wrong.
Because of where Earth is in its orbit. It has come from behind the sun, from Voyager’s POV, and is now moving around to the front, towards the spacecraft at a faster speed than the they’re travelling away from us.
Yes, it’s funny now to think back on how, when I was a kid, we still knew almost nothing about the other planets beyond the most basic facts (and in some cases not even those; I think things like the rotation of Mercury and Venus were still not known). The only images we had were those fuzzy pictures taken from Earth telescopes. People pretty much knew there were no canals on Mars, but it was still possible to imagine life of some kind on either Mars or Venus. It was a different age, one which started with Galileo and came to an end just about the time I entered first grade.
Correct. The (admittedly rather small) “FAQ” link under the counters addresses this.
Either that, or else they’ve learned all that is learnable and are now returning to Earth in order to become one with their creator.
I don’t want to hijack, but I thinks folks here will appreciate this. I know the Pale Blue Dot is famous and all, but this photo (composite) is my favorite. The first time I saw it, it almost brought me to tears, and I’m not even sure why. That’s an image from the Huygens probe. During its descent onto the surface of Titan, it took those photos. That’s a shoreline of a methane lake on another world. You can even see what appear to be lines of combers advancing on the shore.
Oh my God, that’s just amazingly, incredibly powerful.
Ah yes, missed that.
So, we’re gods to them. Yippee!! (Well, the scientists and engineers at NASA would be, but I’m not too proud to take credit by association.)
I watched the webcast of that landing and felt I was watching science fiction come to life. And that’s the real answer to the OP–as amazing as the Voyager images were, there’s so much else that brings us to our knees in awe.