Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Dreams of Star Trek

Will technology ever catch Voyager I?

Dreams of Star Trek.

Launched in September 1977 the Voyager program was a Grand Tour to study the outer planets. The Grand Tour would take advantage of an alignment of the outer planets discovered by Gary Flandro, an aerospace engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1960s. This alignment, which occurs once every 175 years, would occur in the late 1970s and make it possible to use gravitational assists to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto with very little fuel. It took a year and a half to get to Jupiter, another year and a half to get to Saturn. The big planets were used to speed up the spacecraft and after Voyager passed Saturn it was moving over 39,000 mph.

It still is.

August 25, 2012 Voyager I entered interstellar space. It took 45 years just leave the influence of the solar wind. It is now 13 billion miles from Earth but still in the gravitational range of the solar system. Sedna, a dwarf planet discovered in 2003, orbits 90 billion miles from the sun taking 11,400 years to complete. Beyond that is the Oort Cloud, a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals believed to surround the Sun to as far as somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 AU (3 light years, 19 trillion miles).

So insteller travel is still way beyond our technology. Way beyond. Even "locally" we've discovered Jupiter has deadly radiation belts extending out 7 million kilometers from the planet making sight seeing possible only from a distance. It took Voyager II twelve years to get to Neptune. Interplanetary travel is also way beyond or technology.

Star Trek the dream is only that. Nothing more.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov