Mastodawn

MicroWave May 16, 2025

Once ‘dead’ thrusters on the farthest spacecraft from Earth are in action again

Once ‘dead’ thrusters on the farthest spacecraft from Earth are in action again - Lemmy.World

Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout. A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle’s original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could help keep the veteran spacecraft operating until it’s able to contact home again next year. Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, uses more than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team.

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TachyonTele May 16, 2025

We need so much more money for NASA.

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BestBouclettes May 16, 2025

Swap the NASA and the Pentagon budget!

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Talaraine May 16, 2025

This is how we get to Mars y'all xD

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peoplebeproblems May 16, 2025

I’m of the opinion we can’t safely travel to mars. Not in our lifetimes.

The earth has a nice magnetic field that protects us from background ionizing charged particles, and an atmosphere that catches most other radiation (X-ray, gamma).

The length of time it would take with modern rockets to get to mars exposes the crew to extreme radiation. They could survive it, but radiation over time kills you with cancer, if you survive any acute effects.

We could maybe make superconducting magnets strong enough to create a field to reduce the charged particles, but then you have to keep them powered, and still deal with the uncharged background radiation (mostly gamma/X-rays). You could create a giant cylinder of lead around the crew capsule, but that would take an extraordinary amount of time to build in orbit.

Not to mention once you are on mars, you have to maintain those protections too - the Mars atmosphere is too thin to be very helpful and it does not have a a magnetic core.

There has been a notable lack of progress in that realm, and it will likely remain the reason we don’t see a human to mars program.

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Initiateofthevoid

The funny thing is we are a lot closer to the technology of successful Mars settlement than we are to the politics of successful Mars settlement.

The book, A City On Mars, is an excellent read that explores everything required to colonize the red marble, and you’re absolutely right - it’s a lot.

There are so many technological hurdles to cover. And any advocacy for Mars settlement as some sort of emergency evacuation of Earth is either very wrong or very dishonest. Or both.

The absolute hostility of the surface of Mars will always be orders of magnitude worse than anything climate change will throw at us. Humanity would be completely eradicated before we even got halfway to polluting Earth into the uninhabitable state of Mars.

If you can terraform Mars to support human life, you could easily terraform Earth to be a lot more hospitable. If you can’t terraform Mars, and instead just want to build a colony base… well, you can do that on Earth too. Dig deep into a mountain or pick a remote corner of Antarctica and guess what? Even with an epoch-ending asteroid or complete thermonuclear annihilation - it would still be easier to build an apocalypse-proof city on Earth than trying to build a city on Mars.

But the politics?

The same species that is actively destroying its own environment would just… move somewhere else. We would bring all of the same problems with us, plus all of the new problems of space travel and Martian colonization! The book makes an excellent case that there are virtually no conditions under which humanity in its current form would ever benefit from attempting to build A City On Mars. Probably not for at least a couple centuries.