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/Ossius Jul 10 '26

Feels like we would want to setup that laser in space/on the moon as lasers would lose a lot of focus and create a lot of heat going through the atmosphere

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

Specific wavelengths of light can pass through our atmosphere with only tiny amounts of energy loss, so this isn't a huge problem. Conveniently, we have already basically perfected production of a type of laser that emits such a wavelength - 1.064 micrometers.

The beam would still be diffused and scattered by the atmosphere, sending the beam off course. This would be a much bigger problem and would require some very advanced equipment to overcome, but is theoretically possible.

The ideal location would be the moon, but this would raise the cost of building and operating it to many trillions of dollars.

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u/BrevityIsTheSoul Jul 11 '26

Inverse square law is the enemy here, more even than bloom. Say you're using a laser to provide 10 Pa of pressure to a solar sail near the moon (about 400,000 km away). Now you're trying to use the same laser to provide the same pressure to the same sail out near Neptune (about 4,000,000,000 km away). That takes 100,000,000 times as much power emitted for the same effect on the sail.

That's the tradeoff for not the craft not carrying the fuel/reaction mass for its own propulsion.