Voyager Probes 14 Billion Kilometers From Home: NASA Wants To Pull Plug

The Voyager probes launched in 1977 still have more than 15 years of service life left in them. However a funding crunch may force NASA to abandon the probes which are travailing at 11 and 14 billion kilometers away from our planet and continue to relay information back to mission control. The Voyager program costs about 4.2 million a year to run.



REGIME CHANGE AT NASA!!! If they abandon the probes it will be a tragic loss. The probes represent the best of mankind. The golden records on them with greeting from earth represent the first steps at exploring beyond our solar system. I still fondly look back to my copy of "Murmurs From Earth" that details the mission and the golden record. I hope that the boneheads at NASA will think again. The popular Hubble and now this being trashed? Its a bit much and the whole NASA organization needs to be reworked IMHO.

Related News Links:
voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

[edit on 3/10/05 by FredT]

Well that sucks. Could someone adopt the program somehow? Or is it too risky since there are probably aliens probing the thing like crazy? lol

Thats ridiculous, you would think they would keep tracking the 2 furthest probes from earth, it doesnt even seem like it would too costly. 5 people at most and a couple recievers. Compare that price tag to all the money being dumped on spy satellites all over the globe.

Hopefully the Voyager probes can be privatized as a last resort.

Sounds like NASA needs to start holding bakesales to fund space exploration. Might as well give it up now and let the Europeans and Chinese take it over.

Heres a thought, quit spending hundreds of billions of dollars on welfare & free medicare to people who dont work and suck off the system and we would have plenty of money to put towards space, technology and the advancement of the human race through technology. Think of what we could do with the money that is pissed away for lowlifes. And dont get mad at me. You all know this is capitalism, not communism.

Train

This is sad news. It's only 4.2milllion a year. That's not really a lot when you compair it to there other programs. And this is really the worst time to cut the programs. They are 30 years into it, Voyager 1 is reaching the Termination Shock (or whatever it's called).

What makes this even worse is that NASA is asking for $77 million next year just to fund changes to their financial reporting systems, from what i've read.

Im sorta with BigTrain on this. But our government would probably just use it for their own selfish reasons anyway.

i bet its just a cover so they can keep secret anything they might discover out in deep space....... if they say they canceled it they dont need to disclose any more info the probes discover.

The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect.
voyager.jpl.nasa.gov...