Will Voyager 1 ever find its way in the Smithsonian?

[coremelt]

@dtilque

how can they be said to have left the Solar System when they haven’t even reached the semi-major axis (519 AU), much less the aphelion (937 AU) of Sedna? Doesn’t that planetoid count as part of the System?

For NASA’s purposes leaving the Heliosphere is the interesting point as the instruments that are still working can then return measurements on true interstellar space which we’ve never been able to do before.

If you count the Oort cloud out to 50,000 AU as the solar system it won’t leave for millennia.

[Leo_Bloom]

@whc.03grady

Of course, by a long shot.
There are all kinds of forces on Earth–weather, plate tectonics, rust, erosion, artillery–that conspire in one way or another to make short work of everything we make, not just buildings. The oldest known man-made structures are no more than 6,000 years old.

The Pioneers, Voyagers, and others we’ve sent out on the other hand face none of these challenges. They get hit by micrometeorites once in a while but as they get further away from a star (e.g., the Sun) and all its attendant debris they’ll come into contact with fewer and fewer objects of appreciable size. Even radiation–which doesn’t exactly destroy them in any case–will be less of a factor.

Current projections say Voyager 1 will come near a star again some 40,000 years from now. Voyager 2 will stray near Sirius 296,000 years hence. Pioneer 10: Aldeberan in 2 million years.

You’re going to bet on the Sears Tower being here in the year 298,000 AD? Over a couple ~6 foot probes that will be floating through, for all practical purposes, nothing for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of years?

OK then, design challenge for what could be used as best-case OP:

A monolithic 18x3 ft long, say, rectangular parallelepiped that lasts four million years in space. Motion control and one-time interplanetary signal to be designed later.

[dtilque]

@Leo_Bloom

OK then, design challenge for what could be used as best-case OP:

A monolithic 18x3 ft long, say, rectangular parallelepiped that lasts four million years in space. Motion control and one-time interplanetary signal to be designed later.

Nope. Won’t work unless the dimensions are in a 1:4:9:16:25… ratio.

[EvilTOJ]

@sco3tt

Not to mention that ship 3 needs to accommodate both 1 & 2, #4 would need space for the preceding 3, ad infinitum. It’s going to get crowded out there.

If our civilization is advanced enough to where we’re making a commute between the stars, why would we need a manned ship to stop and pick up the slow boat full of cold sleepers? Surely we’d have the old plans from the original ship on file somewhere, we’d send a robotic ship to retrofit the ship with faster engines. Or, build a ship that’s completely unmanned and have the AI go wake them up, then transfer everyone to the new ship.

[Jamicat]

@spifflog

Voyager 1 has been in the news lately. It’s ~120 astronomical units from here and moving away at about 38,000 MPH, soon to leave the solar system.

So will Voyager ever make it’s way back home?

The sun’s escape velocity is 42.1 (kilometers / second) = 94 175.0179 mph.

At 35,000 mph, it will come back all by itself…eventually. :dubious:

Escape velocity

[coremelt]

@Jamicat

The sun’s escape velocity is 42.1 (kilometers / second) = 94 175.0179 mph.

No the 42.1 km/sec figure is the suns escape velocity at the distance from the sun of Earths orbit.

From the same table at Nepture’s orbit it’s 7.2 km / sec. Voyager 1 is on a true solar system escape orbit.