re: Voyager I thrusters fired for first time in 37 years

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To put that into perspective, that "close" encounter with another star is still about 65,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Or 1,300 times the distance from the Sun to the Kuiper Belt.

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Ok now I can perfectly picture it. You really put it all in perspective for me.

I'm a little surprised the propellant hadn't all leaked out. They usually incorporate one-time-opening isolation valves in the propellant lines to ensure zero leakage until the thrusters are first used, then electrically operated valves to control propellant flow after that. The control valves are not generally considered to be leak-proof.(That's why they need the isolation valves in the first place.)

Yes. That Ludacris story sounds plausible but mentioning God gets you laughed at.

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t was launched in 1977, left our solar system in 2013 and wont get close(1.7 light years) to another star for 40,000 years.

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That, to me, is the real kicker in the article. The romantic idea that we can just look around for another habitable planet is ridiculous. We have to take care of this one. It is the only world we will ever know.

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To give you an idea of how vast space is: 

The distance from Los Angeles to New York is 2,450 miles. 

The Earth's circumference is 24,900 miles. 

The distance from Earth to the moon is 238,900 miles. 

The distance from Earth to the sun is 93,000,000 miles. A little over 8 seconds at light speed. 

The distance from Earth to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri is 25,872,000,000,000 miles. That's 278,193 times the distance to the sun. 4.4 light years away. Or 10,560,000,000 round trips between New York and LA. 

Kind of mind boggling.

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As for the engineers and technicians from the 60s and 70s who worked on the Voyager project, you SOBs were either that good or that lucky.

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How the heck do you send a command to something that far away? Blows my mind

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I'm no Nasa guy but reading another article it seems similar to what we now call PLCs(Programmable Logic Controller) or DCS(distributed control system).
It's why an operator at a keyboard can use key strokes to to perform tasks like switchs, open or close valves, etc.


A human inputs signals into these devices that in turn execute physical tasks. Radio signals can do this as well, whether it's telephone tones or morse code for example.

Anyone have a technical article on how they do this with Voyager? I'm interested.

Cruise control is a very simple example people can relate to.

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The distance from Earth to the sun is 93,000,000 miles. A little over 8 seconds at light speed.

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Pretty sure that's 8 minutes, not seconds.

Yet another good story in its face that Hollywood just had to exaggerate to the point of ridiculousness to make it as strong of a social justice message as possible.