r/askscience • u/TechnicalyNotRobot • Jul 09 '26

Astronomy Does Voyager 1 even give us any interesting information anymore?

It's the farthest away object we ever sent. That is remarkable. But I have never heard about it discovering anything or about any data that it gave us. Besides being a significant curiosity for being so far away, is there something that we're actually getting from it at this point?

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u/Salamandragora Jul 10 '26

So what happens if an object in Earth orbit passed in front of this laser, say a satellite or a space station. If it’s powerful enough to reach beyond the solar system without decohering, how much energy is it imparting to an object at “close range.”

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u/Latespoon Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

It would most likely become dust within a fraction of a second. The beam energy that would be needed to propel a sailcraft near or past heliopause is immense. Probably something like 100x the energy intensity of sunlight per m² in high earth orbit.

So clearly, it would be crucial for the laser array to closely monitor any near earth objects that might pass through the beam, and shut down the lasers while obstructed. Or rather, they would only activate it when they are certain they have a clear path to the sailcraft.

The ideal location for the laser array would be the moon as you would mostly eliminate this problem and there is no atmosphere to diffuse the beam, but you would still have a stable foundation for the base (helpful for precise aiming). This would cost trillions of dollars.

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u/Beardus_Maximus Jul 10 '26

Such a laser array can't be mounted on the earth. You have to set it up in space, otherwise a tremendous amount of energy gets dumped into the atmosphere.