Voyager 1 hears the hush of interstellar plasma

Re:Voyager 1 hears the hush of interstellar plasma by mjgs on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @09:59AM (#27118191)

Tiny spacecrafts and sails with lasers. Yeah pretty sure that was it. Such a cool idea, and it would only take 30 years, which means a lot of us will still be alive to see it. Imagine seeing actual closeup pictures of “earth 2”.

Anyway if they used the same technology, but sent spacecraft out into space from locations all around the Earth at the same time, then we could gather data as this fleet headed into deep space.

Like one of those big planet explosions in science fiction movies, but instead of an explosion, just tiny space crafts.

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Re:Voyager 1 hears the hush of interstellar plasma by Jeff_Brown on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @09:36PM (#27125708)

There's no way to get a gravity assist in directions orthogonal to the solar plane, which makes travel in those directions either far more expensive or far slower.

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Re:Voyager 1 hears the hush of interstellar plasma by mjgs on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @10:31PM (#27125970)

I hadn’t thought of that, but your totally right. In the article’s picture, one of the space craft appears to be heading off in a direction outside of the solar plane, but it’s not by a huge amount.

That’s why we need a way to create gravity artificially if we are going to do any space exploration. It would be a bit crap if we could only move in 2 dimensions.

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