Why is it impossible to get recent pictures from voyager 1 or 2 ?

reply to post by chrismir



that is what I want.....

a recent picture, of the farthest a human eye and ability have seen. Our farthest manmade object is almost leaving the solar system and entering into interstellar space. I want a picture.

When you go on vacation, how many pictures do you take? Of like you next to a cactus, and then like you next to a statue, and then....worthless pictures in and of themselves.

Their worth is in that they commemorate the moment and remind you of where you went. Same deal here. Who knows what future generations will be able to get from our first pictures out that far....

EDIT:

We take pictures from airplane windows, where we don't see much, yet we take them because it changes our perspective of the journey.

NASA wants public support and funding, then this is what they need to do. Put up a live stream from all our satellites and explorer probes, the rovers, all of it. I said LIVE too, not just pictures. LIVE FEEDS....

Voyager 1
What's still working and what has been shut down

Also

When Voyager 1 is unable to communicate directly with the Earth, its digital tape recorder (DTR) can record up to 62,500 kilobytes of data for transmission at another time.[9] The length of time needed to send messages to Voyager 1 or to receive messages on the Earth depends on the straight-line distance between the two according to the simple equation t = D/c, where D is the distance and c is the speed of light (about 300,000 km/s). As noted below at the February 8, 2012 entry under Events, the communications signal transit time is over 16 hours.

Originally posted by zedVSzardoz
reply to post by chrismir

 

that is what I want.....

a recent picture, of the farthest a human eye and ability have seen. Our farthest manmade object is almost leaving the solar system and entering into interstellar space. I want a picture...

But the power generator on Voyager is running low. The power source may last only another ten years -- and that is in the current "energy conservation mode" that Voyager is in. Even simply powering-up the camera system again on and taking a picture would use some of that precious power.

Sure -- an image like that would be interesting (even if we only see the sun as a dot), but would it be worth the reduction of Voyager's useful life?

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


Depends, are we talking days weeks or years less?

If it is like a month worth of power or less then do it. IMO it is worth it.

Originally posted by zedVSzardoz

I just want to see the universe ahead of our solar system.....is that not OK? Is there a military reason for all this secrecy?

The universe ahead of Voyager would for all intents and purposes look identical to how it looks from Earth, the distances involved are so vast that what you are asking is the equivalent of looking up at the Moon from Earth and then taking a step to the right and looking up again to see if the Moon looks different.

The view behind Voyager is actually much more interesting than the view ahead of it.

reply to post by sonicology


ok, I want to see the sun as a dot.

I want pictures of this historical event. It is natural to have curiosity. It is why we sent the thing up there to begin with. I want to see.

Just take 1 picture. in any direction. I would prefer ahead, just because it is the farthest we have taken a picture. But hell, take one of us, the perspective of how we look coming in from interstellar space would be priceless....

Originally posted by zedVSzardoz
reply to post by sonicology

 

ok, I want to see the sun as a dot.

I want pictures of this historical event. It is natural to have curiosity. It is why we sent the thing up there to begin with. I want to see.

Just take 1 picture. in any direction. I would prefer ahead, just because it is the farthest we have taken a picture. But hell, take one of us, the perspective of how we look coming in from interstellar space would be priceless....

Here, I made one for you:


You're welcome

Originally posted by Maxatoria
From what i remember a lot of the systems have been turned off to save the remaining power and probably theres very little information in the visible spectrum when that far from the sun

Course there is...just need a longer exposure time.

If there's not much worth looking at 'out there', it kinda makes Hubble and other planned space telescopes pretty pointless.

reply to post by exponent


OR



Yeah nothing to see here.

Like the poster before me said. If there is nothing to see, then strip down NASA, and dedicate it to building commercial satellites....

reply to post by MysterX


Speaking of Hubble, maybe we should take a picture of Voyager with it. It images plenty of other things. Why not a shot of the farthest manmade object in space? We should be able to take a pretty good photograph with it based on everything else it's imaged.

reply to post by MCCXLIV


YEAH!

I was thinking about that. If we try to measure the size of things out there, what better than an object we made an know its dimensions exactly as a reference.

It would be nice to have that shot.

nice idea.

Originally posted by zedVSzardoz
reply to post by VeniVidi

 

so, uh, there is nothing out there huh....yeah, I just can't believe that. Call me nuts, but a picture of the farthest we can see is worth allot to me.

The farthest our eyes have ever seen, think about that.......It would be a treasure.

edit on 4-12-2012 by zedVSzardoz because: (no reason given)

nothing out there?
oort cloud/kuiper belt?
what about all those dwarf planets out there
and the possibility of discovering new ones?

perhaps it's all baloney
and v'ger already crashed into the wall of the fish bowl we're kept in?

I am sure they turned off the camera in favor of other telemetry. It is more important to them to dive deeper into the outer space than to take some noisy shots with outdated camera tech.

reply to post by DerepentLEstranger

It's not that there's nothing out there, but there isn't much that Voyager's cameras could see. The Oort cloud and the kuiper belt are sparsely populated regions, and Voyager's camera is not a telescope. Plus, the Oort cloud is very far out there -- WAY farther than Voyager (Voyager is closer to Earth then it is the Oort cloud).

Sure -- a long exposure shot would let in more light, but long exposure shots of things in the outer solar system would just be faint streaks of light (at best -- if the weak rays of the Sun can light them up enough to be seen), unless Voyager was moving at the exact same speed and direction of the object it was photographing.

Originally posted by DerepentLEstranger
nothing out there?
oort cloud/kuiper belt?

Real life is not star wars. The space between objects, even in the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt, is huge. You're not going to see any Kuiper belt objects unless you're deliberately flying to one, which Voyager is not, and Voyager is still thousands of years from the Oort cloud.

what about all those dwarf planets out there
and the possibility of discovering new ones?

You're not going to discover any with a probe on a random trajectory with the kind of cameras that Voyager has. If you want to discover a dwarf planet, use a telescope back on earth.

Originally posted by zedVSzardoz
reply to post by exponent

 

OR

Yeah nothing to see here.

Like the poster before me said. If there is nothing to see, then strip down NASA, and dedicate it to building commercial satellites....

edit on 4-12-2012 by zedVSzardoz because: (no reason given)

False dichotomy. NASA sees things by sending probes at them or building huge telescopes to collect lots of light. Voyager is a probe, not a huge telescope. Its cameras don't capture much light at all and as it's nowhere near anything the only valuable shot it can get is the Earth, which it already did.

There's plenty to see, but you use huge apertures and lots of light gathering for that.

Originally posted by MCCXLIV
reply to post by MysterX

 

Speaking of Hubble, maybe we should take a picture of Voyager with it. It images plenty of other things. Why not a shot of the farthest manmade object in space? We should be able to take a pretty good photograph with it based on everything else it's imaged.

Nowhere even close! Voyager is a tiny tiny spacecraft that's been shooting away from earth for a huge amount of time. Consider that the best image of pluto is only a tiny blurry mess.

The universe is much bigger and on a grander scale than you imagine

As for taking pictures of the Stars out there:

Let's say Voyager was going to take a picture of some of the relatively close stars -- say stars that are only 20 light years away. Voyager is only 0.01% of the way closer to those stars than Earth is. Considering Voyager is not a telescope, Earth-bound telescopes can get MUCH better pictures of stars 20 LY away than Voyager could.

Even if Voyager was going in the direction of the closest star (which it isn't) -- the closest star being 4.3 LY away, Voyager would only be 0.05% of the way to that star. Again, a picture from an Earth telescope would be better.

Two reasons for no pictures: power conservation, and there's really nothing to see there for the Voyagers. They are too far from any solar system body, and looking back they'd see pretty much what we saw on the "family portrait", only more distant and fainter.

For the universe ahead of the Voyagers, our space telescopes (including the Hubble) and ground-based telescopes do a much better job at taking pictures. The farthest view into the universe we have is actually from the Hubble. If the Hubble was where Voyager 1 currently is, there would be hardly any difference (only a slight parallax effect for nearby stars). Considering the size of the Solar System compared to the Milky Way, or even distance to the Oort Cloud, the Voyagers are still on the doorstep.

The Voyagers weren't sent to appease the public with pictures, they were sent to do science.