What Will Happen to Voyager and Others in the Far Future?

right now there are at least five man-made objects which are on course to leave our solar system two of them Voyer one and two have already crossed The Helio pores the boundary where the solar wind and the interstellar wind are in equilibrium which some say is a measurable boundary and therefore one of the possible edges of the solar system But whichever way you look at it all of these objects and some others which no one thinks about are all on a one-way journey into inter Stellar space and if the human race never makes it past the outer planets these will be our emissaries that will Outlast us the Earth and even our sun so what are these objects and where do we think they might end up in the future and how long can they keep going even when their power supplies have died and have become inactive the first of these was Pioneer 10 which was launched on March the 3rd 1972 which was sent to investigate Jupiter which it arrived at in November 1973 this was followed by Pioneer 11 which was launched on the 5th of April 1973 to do the same to Saturn and Jupiter they were 13 months apart to take advantage of a favorable launch window which occurred only a few weeks every 13 months these were also test probes for what would become the Voyager missions but to find out why these were done in the first place we have to spoil back almost a decade to 1964 at this time American aerospace engineer Gary flandro at the NASA jet propulsion laboratory noticed an alignment of the outer planets which would happen every 175 years and would next occur in the late 1970s this would allow a single spacecraft to visit all the outer planets by using gravity assists something which would allow a complete survey to be conducted in less time and for less money than sending separate spacecraft probes to each planet this would be called The Grand Tour initially it called for four spacecraft two of which would visit Jupiter Saturn and Pluto and the other two would visit Jupiter Uranus and Neptune however this was an expensive program with an estimated cost of a billion dollar which occurred just at the same time as the cost cutting after the Apollo missions started so it ended up being cancelled and being replaced by what eventually became the two space probe Voyager program while in the 1970s NASA was sending probes to the far off planets of the solar system they didn't have to worry about malware in the data stream unlike today when it's easier than ever to get more than you expected from some websites and this is where today's sponsor nordvpn comes in nordvpn combines both threat protection features with a VPN service so you can not only hide your computer's real IP address but nord's built-in threat protection Pro also checks downloads for mware and also any links you may be looking to use for connection with known fake malicious fishing fraud or scam websites nordvpn also includes a dark web monitor that will check known hacker Hangouts to see if your details are showing up even if you're not using the vpm feature I use nordvpn because it allows me to visit websites in the us for research but without being geographically blocked because isps still think the UK is in the EU even though we left 4 years ago now you can do the same to view sports channels movies and TV that you might not have access to in your country and it can be used on up to six devices at once which is great for the whole family act now you can get my exclusive nordvpn 2year deal plus 4 months extra for free by using the link nordvpn. com curro which is the top of the description below and it's even a 30-day money back guarantee so it's risk-free as well Pioneers 10 and 11 were part of a two-part Pioneer program which initially ran from 1958 to 1960 to explore the moon and then from 1965 to 1992 and sent four spacecraft to measure interplanetary space weather two to explore Jupiter and Saturn that was Pioneer 1011 and two more to explore Venus in February 1970 TRW Incorporated were awarded the contract to build the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes the design and construction of which required an estimated 25 million manh hours these were based on spacecraft modules that had already been proven in the Pioneer 6 through n missions these would be small lightweight spacecraft weighing in at about 260 kg or 570 which would have to be magnetically clean in in order to measure the planet's magnetic fields and be able to perform an interplanetary Mission and take images and other measurements they would also have to withstand the high levels of radiation around Jupiter and would also need to be capable of carrying on if some of their systems were damaged by this they were powered by four radioisotope thermoelectric generators or rtgs mounted on two 3 m long trusses 120° apart and Power by plutonium 238 and a multi-layer protective capsules to Shield them from the onboard sensors initially these would to provide Power for just two years in space But as plutonium 238 has a half life of 87 years in the end pioner 10 actually kept going for 29 years the deterioration of the heat output from the plutonium and the thermo couple Junctions which generated the electricity caused a final shutdown when the power was not enough to operate the transmitters the Pioneer probes used a 2. 74 m or 9 ft diameter High Gain antenna and a redundant system of twin transceivers each transmitting 8 watts with a data transfer of just 256 bits per second the computer system on board could record up to 6,144 bytes of information gathered from the instruments which will be sent back to Earth so we can see just how basic the system was compared to the later voice as the missions were as much a test as an actual end result NASA soon discovered that the radiation in Jupiter's radiation belts was 10 times higher than designers had predicted the electron radiation along the magnetic equator of Jupiter was 10,000 times more than the maximum radiation around Earth Pioneer 10 received an integrated dose of 2,000 RADS from electrons and 56,000 RADS from protons to put that into perspective a whole body dose of 500 RADS is fatal to humans but the system survived although false commands were generated due to data corruption but Pioneer 10 succeeded in obtaining images of the moon's ganim and Europa Pioneer 10 was then put on a trajectory that would take it close to IO and then slingshot around Jupiter and out of the solar system in 1976 it crossed the orbit of Saturn then in 1979 the orbit of Uranus along June the 13th 1983 IT crossed the orbit of Neptune becoming the first man-made object to leave the proximity of the major planets of the solar system Communications with Pioneer 10 were eventually lost on January 2003 when it's believed its power output dropped below that being able to operate the probe its last known trajectory was heading in the direction of alabran a star 6 5 light years away in the constellation of Taurus meanwhile Pioneer 11 flew past Jupiter in 1974 and Saturn in 1979 and contact was lost in November 1995 its last known heading was towards a constellation of Aquilla Northwest of a constellation of Sagittarius which if nothing gets in its way or perturbs its path will pass near a star in that constellation in about 4 million years but the data which Pioneers 10 and 11 discovered would be used to build the Voyer probes which would go on to take a cutdown version of The Grand Tour with the voyagers Voyer 2 would be launched first in August 1977 on a mission to survey Jupiter which arrived at in 1979 and then Saturn in 1981 here the decision was made to continue on to Uranus and Neptune Voyager 1 was launched 16 days after after Voyager 2 its mission was to visit Jupiter Saturn and then onto Pluto however once it reached Saturn NASA realized there was an option to visit Saturn's moon Titan which was believed to have a considerable atmosphere but if it did this it would not be possible to carry on to Pluto because the trajectory to Titan would take it out of the plane of a solar system and into Interstellar space the slingshot Maneuvers that the Voyager probes used were originally proved by the Pioneer probes but the Voyager probes were much more advanced than the pioneers and were near three times the weight at 773 kg or 1,704 each the two Voyer spacecraft were identical and had larger 3.

7 M or 12T diameter dishes and had three radioisotope thermoelectric generators giving it more power the six computers on board the Voyages had a total memory of 32 kiloby and there was a digital tape recorder that could record about 67 megabytes of data when the voyagers were unable to communicate with Earth which it would then retransmit when Communications were reestablished Voyer 2 also holds the record for the longest continual operation of a computer since its Mission started on the 20th of August 1977 Communications were also greatly increased with a data rate sent back from Jupiter at 115,000 bits per second by the time it riged Saturn it was down to half of this and it's gone down continuously ever since to try and reduce the effects of the inverse Square LW due to the huge distance that the signal has to travel to reach the radio dishes of the deep space Network here on Earth the RTG power generators were again powered by plutonium 238 which produced about 470 wats at 30 volts DC when the spacecraft were launched by 2011 34 years after theun launch the power of a plutonium had been reduced to 76% of the initial output but the degradation of the thermocouples reduced this to about 57% it's estimated that by turning off various spacecraft loads and eliminating some of its capabilities there may be sufficient power for communications up until around 2032 at which point the probe will be on its own and no further Communications will be possible with Earth Voyer one is escaping at a speed of 3. 6 Au per year in the general direction of a solar Apex in Hercules and in about 40,000 years time it will be within 1. 6 light years of gase 445 Voyer 2 speed is about 3.

3 Au per year in the general direction of a star called Ross 248 which will pass within 1. 7 light years in about 40,000 years time and in 29 96,000 years will pass within 4. 6 light years of Delta Serius the brightest star in the night sky the last space probe to be heading out of the solar system is New Horizons launched in 2006 it flew past Jupiter in 2007 and Pluto on July the 14th 2015 the primary goal of the New Horizons was to explore the last remaining unexplored planet Pluto and its moons of course that was before it was downgraded to a dwarf planet it would also go on to explore the Kyer belt and the transformation of the early solar system New Horizons has been compared to a grand piano glued to a cocktail bars siiz satellite dish but it took its inspiration from the ulyses spacecraft which was used to orbit and study the sun it weighed in at 470 kg and by the time it reached Pluto it was down to 445 kg due to the use of its hydren Fel from frosters however Communications was actually slower at Jupiter than the Voyages at 38 kilobits per second and by the time it got to Pluto it was down to 1 kilobit per second from that distance of 4.

7 billion kilm it still took 4 and 1/ half hourss for the signal to travel back to Earth at near the speed of light the radio transceivers were a dual redundant 12w system and the dish was 2. 1 M or 7 ft in diameter storage was up to 8 GB for each of the low power solid state recorders again a dual redundant system being a much newer space probe the computer system was far more powerful being split into two duplicated systems for redundancy and it had a total of four computers with each one using a 5 12 MHz radiation Harden version of the mips R3000 CPU something which was learned from the Voyager missions when Vo 2's photographic scan platform jammed Saturn due to grease in the mechanism becoming hard New Horizons didn't have any mechanism and instead the whole space probe was turned to point the camera as it went past Jupiter and Pluto as it flew by Pluto it came within just 7,800 Mi of the surface whilst traveling at 38,000 mph or the Kyer belt and some of the larger asteroids and dwarf planets within it New Horizons has been called the fastest spacecraft ever launched because it left the Earth at 16.