This implies that since 1977, the probe has travelled 26 billion kilometers, a figure that stands in no comparison whatsoever to the vast scales of the universe. Who are we to even begin to understand this?
I love the Voyager missions so much, it was truly the golden age of curiosity. I can’t imagine people coming together nowadays to take a spacecraft and just freaking fling it into outer space just to see what’s up over there. They also have lasted a lot longer than initially anticipated, with the operators using every trick in the book to keep them going. Today I work at the place that built them, and damn is it different :/
Excited and grateful for Europa Clipper though, Europa is fascinating.
NASA has been literally sending robotic probes pretty nonstop since the 1950s. Most recently, Europa Clipper. The Voyager missions were impressive but Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons were all just as complex and impressive.
I’m not saying we stopped sending probes, I’m saying the golden age of space competition that gave us the gall to aim for interstellar space is no longer there, at least not via govt. JPL, which builds the craft, just had one of the most brutal years on record. Hundreds of mission engineers laid off, managers were praying to get the clipper off the planet before something else punches them in the face, and now Trump is appointing some billionaire ex-SpaceX military entrepreneur as the NASA admin while his magat cronies in congress shit all over budget for some air time
Hi, did you work directly with the Clipper? I remember years ago, the main mission to Europa was to send a craft into the ice. But this one is only doing fly-bys, what are the fly-bys intended to do? Does the Clipper have a small probe on it to send into Europa?
No, I’m just a tech nobody there. No remote probe, it’s flying through jupiter’s most intense radiation area so it’s armored up and locked down. It’s doing many (50ish?) very close flybys though, and has equipment that can ping under the ice for water, sense the atmosphere it’s flying though, take high res images and the usual spectrometers magnetometers etc. I’m excited for the photos to come back, crazy to think it will be over half a decade before this pays off in any way lol
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u/Glittering_Box_4118 Dec 11 '24
This implies that since 1977, the probe has travelled 26 billion kilometers, a figure that stands in no comparison whatsoever to the vast scales of the universe. Who are we to even begin to understand this?