NASA wants the Voyagers to age gracefully, so it's time for a software patch

Re:NASA wants the Voyagers to age gracefully, so it's time f... by JumpCrisscross on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @04:16AM (#37996132)

> use their gravitational influence to skip to the next one

You are correct in that the Voyagers' launch window was unique.

Nit pick: gravity assist doesn't fundamentally rely on gravity. It extracts energy from planets' motion about the sun [1]. If we could somehow "bounce" a spacecraft off a planet's surface, it would impart momentum similar to that of a gravity assist. (In my opinion, it's a badly-named term.)

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/learn/basics-of-space-flight/primer...

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Re:NASA wants the Voyagers to age gracefully, so it's time f... by Tabular-Iceberg on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @05:18AM (#37996584)

Good point, it’s a bit like calling hitting a baseball with a bat an “electric assist”. It’s not wrong, it’s just not very helpful.

It’s also a good illustration of why we call some forces strong and others weak.

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Re:NASA wants the Voyagers to age gracefully, so it's time f... by baseballdork on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @07:05AM (#37997311)

> gravity assist doesn't fundamentally rely on gravity

I'm not sure how you can make that claim. If you were to bounce off the surface, that would likely not be considered a "gravity assist", no?

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Re:NASA wants the Voyagers to age gracefully, so it's time f... by dctoedt on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @07:53AM (#37997813)

> If we could somehow "bounce" a spacecraft off a planet's surface, it would impart momentum similar to that of a gravity assist.

When my kids were little, I showed them by holding a basketball in one hand and a tennis ball in the other, with the tennis ball on top of and touching the basketball. When I dropped them simultaneously, they fell together and bounced off the driveway — and the tennis ball took off like a rocket (no pun intended).

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