https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/07/nasa-temporarily-loses-contact-with-one-of-its-most-distant-spacecraft/
The Voyagers were launched nearly half a century ago.
About a week ago, operators of the Voyager 2 spacecraft sent a series of commands that inadvertently caused the distant probe to point its antenna slightly away from Earth. As a result, NASA has lost contact with the spacecraft, which is nearly half a century old and presently 19.9 billion km away from the planet.
Testing in production, ultimate edition
How is it able to do that? Wouldn't that use up it's limited RCS mass? How does it know where to point?
Usually it’s accomplished with gyroscopes, not RCS fuels. It has a schedule where it auto-orients itself to point back toward Earth, that next scheduled self-fix is in October.
As for how it knows what exact point to look at, I’m not sure! Maybe we’re constantly streaming a radio signal for it to see
At 19 billion kilometers away, it takes about 18 hrs for a signal from Voyager 2 to be intercepted by Earth. Pretty crazy how long it takes at this distance.
But then again this isn't even that far. For comparison a message from Alpha Cenauri, the closest star system, would take four years for it to be intercepted...
If we ever become an species spanning multiple solar systems I wonder how communication tech will evolve to help reduce ~4 years down to well anything else lol
It would take some discovery that required rewriting the laws of physics, and a lot of what we currently think we know would have to be revisited.
Yeah, that’s why the quantum world is so appealing yeah? Seemingly breaks laws of physics that it shouldn’t. My only guess for communication exceeding light speed would be somehow using quantum entanglement, but that would be thousands and thousands of years in the future I think lol.
You say that, but some journalist said we were one million years away from flight and then something like a week later the Wright brothers conducted their first flight.
While we may not be quite that close, it may not be as far away as you think.
While I'd love this to happen, it's a very different proposition. We knew heavier than air flight was possible, birds had been doing it for millions of years prior to the Wright brothers. Even humans had demonstrated flight before, the Montgolfier brothers had demonstrated flight more than 150 years before the Wrights.
The issue is we know of nothing that can transmit faster than the speed of light, we have no model to work from.
Unfortunately, that's not how that works. Quantum mechanics doesn't break the laws of physics, is was simply that previous observations were not precise enough to observe quantum effects and the models we used before were incorrect because of that. As for quantum entanglement, see this for a better explanation than I can give.
Basically the takeaway is that messages can't be passed through entanglement faster than light because it requires knowledge known by the sender to actually decode the sent message.
Quantum entanglement was my first thought. They've already tested it and it holds when one is the entangled particles is up in space.
Id assume if we have figured faster than light travel, we'd also figured out FTL communication.
Hopefully both are possible.
If we ever figure out FTL travel, FTL communication is relatively simple: worst case, you send your message to a ship (possibly a drone) with instructions to FTL-travel to the destination and deliver the message. It's kind of the high-tech equivalent of a man on a horse delivering a sealed parchment, but it'd work.
If by that point we haven't figured out a better way to do it, at the very least we should have that method available.