Re:Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
by financypants on Friday December 15, 2023 @01:25AM
(#38651570)
I wonder if this same law applies to distance satellites like Voyager get away from earth. Like we sent out voyager 46 years ago, but in 100 years, we will send out another satellite that will very quickly catch up to Voyager and outpace it
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Re:Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
by mcmoor on Friday December 15, 2023 @02:07AM
(#38651771)
There's certainly some people who're troubled with this problem
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_cal...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightspeedLeapfr...
Re:Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
by financypants on Friday December 15, 2023 @02:09PM
(#38657488)
Thanks for this. I’ve been thinking about “lightspeed leapfrog” for many years but never searched it up!
But maybe we can only build this new probe that will outpace it with information with gathered from the original probe.
Re:Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
by idiotsecant on Friday December 15, 2023 @12:06PM
(#38656095)
Very long distance spaceflight like this is still basically only power d by gravity slingshot maneuvers where we steal an infinitesimal amount of inertia from planets to give a spacecraft some velocity. Voyager was launched during pretty favorable gravitational assist conditions, so unless we dramatically improve delta v and isp in the spacecraft or get a better configuration, probably not.