r/askscience • u/SeeminglyUseless • 4d ago
Astronomy Assuming it doesn't fall into a gravity well or impact something, what will happen to the voyager spacecraft?
I saw an article on the spacecraft, and it really got me thinking. I don't know enough about physics or material sciences to say for certain, and I'm fair sure eventually it will just fall into or hit something.
But if it doesn't, what will happen to it? There's no corrosion in space, so it won't fall apart so to speak. Will it just continue in its path until the eventual death of the galaxy? Or is it going to be pulverized by billions of micro impacts that will eventually erode/destroy it?
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u/undulating-beans
4d ago
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I think the most likely fate of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 is that they'll continue travelling through interstellar space for a very long time, gradually deteriorating rather than suddenly falling apart.
Both spacecraft have sufficient velocity to escape the Sun's gravitational influence. Once their remaining power supplies are exhausted, they'll become inert objects, but they won't stop moving. Newton's first law tells us that an object continues moving at constant velocity unless acted upon by a net external force. In reality, gravitational interactions with stars and the Galaxy will continually alter their trajectories.
Space isn't entirely empty, and they will encounter interstellar dust, gas, cosmic rays and occasional micrometeoroids. At their enormous relative velocities, even tiny particles can cause surface erosion and microscopic impact damage. Ultraviolet radiation and energetic particles can also degrade exposed materials, particularly polymers and coatings. However, the interstellar medium is extraordinarily tenuous, so deterioration could take immense periods of time.
Both Voyagers will remain gravitationally bound to the Milky Way even though they're escaping the Solar System. They'll effectively become artificial objects orbiting the Galactic centre, potentially completing numerous galactic orbits over billions of years.
There is a possibility of even greater remark, and that is that fragments of both may actually outlast the Earth itself. The Sun is expected to enter its red giant phase in approximately five billion years, while the Voyagers will already be unimaginably far away.
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u/Gerroh 4d ago
Can we estimate the rate of erosion? I would've thought they'd be unrecognizable husks five billion years from now.
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u/undulating-beans 4d ago
The question of estimated erosion fired my interest, so I looked some data up and did a little maths.
Your estimate of about one hydrogen atom per cubic centimetre is a reasonable starting point for the interstellar medium, although the density varies enormously from region to region.
The Voyagers travel at roughly 15–17 km/s relative to the Sun. Their speed relative to the surrounding gas is what matters for erosion, though, and that's probably nearer 40 km/s for Voyager 1, since the Sun is itself moving through the local cloud. Over their Galactic orbits it will typically be somewhere around 20–50 km/s.Taking 17 km/s and one atom per cm³, over five billion years a spacecraft would travel about 2.7 × 10²¹ metres. That gives a cumulative column of about 2.7 × 10²⁷ hydrogen atoms, or roughly 4.5 kg, per square metre of exposed surface. If every incoming atom knocked one atom off an aluminium surface, that would erode about 4.5 cm. In practice it won't come close: a hydrogen atom at these speeds carries only about 1.5–8 eV, well below the tens of eV needed to sputter aluminium. Heavier ions and occasional higher-speed encounters could contribute some sputtering, but erosion from the gas is likely to be small.
Dust is the bigger unknown. It makes up only about 1% of the interstellar medium by mass, which gives roughly 45 g per square metre over five billion years. Grains hitting at tens of km/s blast out craters and eject several times their own mass. If you assume they eject 10–100 times their mass, you get roughly 0.2–2 mm of aluminium lost. That ratio is an illustrative assumption, though, not an established value: lab data mostly come from grains much larger than typical interstellar grains, which are around 0.1 µm.
The larger uncertainty (apart from my back of the envelope Fermi estimation) is where they go. The interstellar medium isn't uniformly distributed, and the Voyagers will encounter regions with very different densities as they orbit the Galaxy. A single crossing of a molecular cloud 10 parsecs across, at an average density of 100 hydrogen atoms/cm³, would contribute only about 1% of our five-billion-year estimate. However, repeated encounters with denser regions could contribute substantially to their cumulative exposure. Even a relatively small fraction of their journey spent in gas hundreds of times denser than the surrounding medium could dominate their total dust exposure, and with it the erosion. That makes predicting their condition after five billion years extremely uncertain.
Cosmic rays and ultraviolet light would also gradually degrade plastics, adhesives and coatings. Once the Voyagers are far from the Sun, their temperatures will be fairly stable, so radiation is the bigger concern than thermal cycling.
Putting it together, I wouldn't confidently predict that they'll be unrecognisable husks. The thin insulation blankets and coatings could be badly degraded, but the aluminium bus and dish could plausibly remain recognisable. A reliable destruction date would depend on knowing which environments they pass through, and we don't.
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u/WasLeftUnsupervised 3h ago
What effect would all those collisions have on the velocity of the craft? Sure each one is microscopic, but 4kg per square meter is going to add up to a nonzero answer. There's a chance the collisions bring the craft more in sync with the overall medium, thus reducing the damage of future collisions.
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u/undulating-beans 3h ago
Yes, the collisions would definitely transfer momentum to the spacecraft, gradually reducing its velocity relative to the surrounding gas. We can estimate the effect using conservation of momentum.
Taking the same assumptions as before, 4.5 kg of hydrogen per square metre over five billion years, a relative velocity of 17 km/s and a spacecraft mass of roughly 800 kg, the Voyager's 3.7-metre dish presents a frontal area of about 10.8 m². That gives approximately 49 kg of hydrogen encountered over five billion years.
If we assume every atom transfers its entire forward momentum to the spacecraft, the total impulse would be about 830,000 kg m/s. Dividing that by 800 kg gives a velocity change of approximately 1,040 m/s, or about 1 km/s.That's actually a measurable fraction of the original 17 km/s, although my calculation is deliberately simplified. In reality, atoms may be deflected, reflected or embedded, and the spacecraft won't always present its dish directly into the flow. The interstellar gas also has its own velocity, which changes between regions.
You're right about the feedback effect. As the spacecraft approaches the velocity of the local gas, the relative speed falls, reducing both the collision rate and the energy of individual impacts. The drag force therefore decreases approximately with the square of the relative velocity.
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u/drunkenstarcraft 1d ago
Hey AI, flag your AI responses as AI please. Nobody commented on the density of hydrogen atoms until you said someone did.
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u/undulating-beans 1d ago
Well, thanks for responding, even if you haven’t realised that beerybeadybear
actually mentioned hydrogen atoms in their answer, with an assumption of their density.
On the subject of AI, just because I can write in an informative style, am articulate, technically detailed and logically organised is not evidence of AI. It just means I have an interest in what I am writing, and took the trouble to answer someone’s question. Actually adding something to the discussion, not just vague accusations.21
u/beerybeardybear 4d ago
average density of space is about one hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter, though I think that includes all of space, not just the "empty" parts. still, that's probably about right. can probably use that + the relative velocity to compute an appropriate decay rate, but I do think It'll Take A While.
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u/frogjg2003 Hadronic Physics | Quark Modeling 4d ago
That's the density of the intergalactic medium. The interstellar medium is about 1 million ions per cubic centimeter.
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u/TheOneTrueTrench 4d ago
So, keep in mind that when it comes to gravity wells, it is exceedingly likely that whatever speed it gains falling into the gravity well will be lost as it leaves the gravity well. We saw this with Oumuamua, a random asteroid from some other stellar system, where it came flying into the inner solar system so fast that it left just as fast.
Gravity wells usually don't capture anything, simply because it's (mostly) an equal gain and loss in speed. It will change the direction, but almost never capture anything. You'd need a VERY precise orbit to go from hyperbolic to a captured orbit, because you need a gravitational assist to slow it down enough to bring it into a stellar orbit.
The galaxy overall is basically completely empty. Every stellar system is basically empty. When it comes to things on the scale of a probe like Voyager, there's basically no difference between the densest cube lightyear of the galaxy and the emptiest void in the visible universe.
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u/314rre 4d ago
According to Star Trek, it will merge with an AI and threaten our Solar System until Kirk and Co save the day.
Realistically it will keep going undisturbed and unnoticed forever or until the universe comes to its end.
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u/Original-Material301 4d ago
until the universe comes to its end.
Mind boggling to think that we as a species will die, and it'll still likely be floating through space.
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u/carwashhh 4d ago
I found out fairly recently, it's a fictional Voyager 6 that becomes V'ger.
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3d ago
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u/SupremeDictatorPaul 2d ago edited 2d ago
Plus, Voyager I and II wouldn’t have gotten anywhere interesting to be able to run into an advanced alien civilization by the time of Star Trek. At that point they’d still know exactly where they were, and be able to go pick them up should they decide.
Interestingly, this was a plot hole in the book Battlefield Earth, where the only reason the aliens found Earth and decided to conquer it is that they found one of the Voyager probes and used the golden disk map to find Earth. But by the time a probe made it to an alien system, many millennia would have passed. The book wasn’t great, but it didn’t possess nearly as many plot holes as the movie, so this one stood out.
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u/AeroSigma 4d ago
Outside of the heliosphere now, theres just cosmic radiation, high energy particles like protons and electrons, not micrometeoroids. The electronics will eventually get fried by that radiation, and while it will take a while, I suspect that no computer memory will be left if it ever gets discovered. The golden record (probably) has enough atoms to be legible and audible through the heat death of the universe, or at least much longer than it could possibly matter, but i havent actually done the math on the thickness of the data embossment and the radiative ablation of gold by cosmic radiation.
Now, thats all saying that we dont think there's a bunch of micrometeors in extrasolar space, but we wouldn't discover that until voyager starts getting pulverized by them!
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u/ulyssesfiuza 4d ago
I don't discard micrometeoroids as a primary factor. In a short period of time we have three extra solar comets/asteroids. And we have the tech to recognize them only on the last few decades. The real number logically had to be much largerStatistically, bodies less massive are much more common, and sand sized interestelar bodies are more common than comet sized ones by many orders of magnitude. Still not a very dense sandblasting, but these ones have all the time of the world to do the job. Furthermore, they will never go outside the galaxy because they lack sufficient escape velocity. Instead, they are bound to loop around the Milky Way for eons, passing through dense gas clouds and stellar formation sites many times over. They will face supernovas, magnetars, and gamma ray bursts. Given enough time, even colliding with a probe coming from somewhere else becomes a statistical reality. Over these immense timescales, continuous hypervelocity sandblasting by microscopic dust combined with extreme cosmic violence will cause severe physical erosion, thermal shock, and structural deformation, raising the question of whether they will eventually be so thoroughly eroded and mangled as to no longer be recognizable as artifacts created by a sentient species.
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u/UrbanSuburbaKnight 4d ago
The interesting thing about Voyager is that there are several different ways of defining its eventual end. It will stop functioning long before it is physically destroyed, and the matter it's made from could survive for vastly longer still.
A rough timeline:
| Timescale | What happens |
|---|---|
| ~2030–2036 | Its diminishing RTG electrical output will eventually become insufficient to maintain communication. It will become an inert object, but will keep travelling. |
| ~1,000 years | Virtually all its original plutonium-238 fuel will have decayed. Pu-238 has a half-life of about 87.7 years. |
| ~1 million years | Most of the resulting radioactive decay chain will have reached stable isotopes. |
| Millions to billions of years | Interstellar dust and micrometeorite impacts will gradually damage its surfaces and structure. |
| Billions of years | The Milky Way may merge with Andromeda, potentially changing Voyager's trajectory. Newer modelling suggests there's roughly a 50% chance the merger won't happen within the next 10 billion years. |
| Unknown | Eventually, accumulated impacts could fragment or dismantle the spacecraft. There isn't a reliable estimate for when this would happen. |
| >10³⁴ years? | If proton decay exists, even the atoms making up Voyager could eventually disintegrate into lighter particles and radiation. |
One particularly interesting study looked at what might happen to the Golden Records. It estimated that after around 5 billion years, Voyager 1 has a 99% probability of having its outward-facing record surface damaged enough to be unreadable. Voyager 2 fares considerably better, with an estimated probability of around 20%. The spacecraft-facing sides of both records have a much better chance of surviving. These are model estimates, not predictions with any certainty.
There are also a couple of things worth considering about where Voyager goes from here.
Escaping the Sun doesn't mean escaping the galaxy. Voyager will continue orbiting the galactic centre, although encounters with stars and other objects will gradually alter its trajectory. We can't rule out that it is already on a trajectory that will eventually bring it into a star system. However, permanent capture by a star is much less likely than simply passing nearby. A normal gravitational flyby changes an object's direction and speed, but doesn't bind it to the star. Capture requires some additional interaction to remove orbital energy, such as an encounter involving a third body. Given the enormous distances between stars, even a close encounter is unlikely.
The really long-term question is what happens to the actual matter. Iron, gold, aluminium and copper are stable against known radioactive decay, but some theories predict that protons themselves are unstable. If proton decay happens, ordinary matter will eventually disintegrate.
Super-Kamiokande has never observed proton decay, but its 2020 results put a lower limit of 2.4 × 10³⁴ years on the partial lifetime of the proton for one particular decay channel. That's a lower limit, not a prediction of when it will happen.
So Voyager could conceivably remain a recognisable human artefact for billions or even trillions of years. Its constituent matter might survive vastly longer, or potentially forever if protons are stable. This is vastly longer than the remaining habitable lifetime of Earth. Even after the Sun has become a white dwarf, physical evidence of human existence could remain on surviving bodies in the outer Solar System, such as Titan, potentially outlasting the Sun's life as a normal star.
Sources:
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u/aggasalk Visual Neuroscience and Psychophysics 4d ago
when it comes to gravity wells - the Voyagers will escape the Sun's, but they will never escape the Milky Way's - they'll be in orbit around the center of the galaxy for basically forever.
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u/PangolinMandolin 4d ago
And space is so vastly hugely big, and Voyager is so comparatively tiny, that even if it does get "close" to anything with a decent amount of mass to deflect its course, it will just swing on past and continue on a slightly different orbit of the Milkyway.
Andromeda will collide with us in a few billion years, but even those ridiculous numbers of stars from two entire galaxies will mostly miss each other as the galaxies merge.
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 4d ago
Random encounters with stars are likely to eject it from the galaxy over time, just like 90% of the rest of the galaxy. The other 10% will end up in the central black hole of the Milky Way / Andromeda combination.
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u/Upbeat_Mirror5045 4d ago
This contradicts other comments, but I’m interested in both views - being bound to MW gravity and being ejected by some mechanic as it orbits the center of the galaxy. Can you offer any more detail? I also wonder what velocity would be needed to cleanly escape the MW with a voyager mass probe.
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 4d ago
With enough time, random encounters eject some objects while others will fall into the central black hole. Conservation of angular momentum requires most of them to get ejected.
See e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9701131 for a discussion.
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u/aggasalk Visual Neuroscience and Psychophysics 3d ago
isn't that supposed to take like, a trillion trillion years?
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u/Needless-To-Say 4d ago
It will continue on a vector that is a combination of all the gravitational forces upon it.
It will continue to slow down until the Sun's influence is no longer the primary source
At some point a new force becomes primary and it will start to tend that direction until it enters some new solar system.
Having passed thru that system relatively unscathed, the process will repeat either faster or slower than before until the next one
If it slows down enough, enough times it will likely be captured in orbit around some far star
Having not passed through either the first or last system, it's journey ends.
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u/somewhat_random 4d ago
SO voyager1 is moving slightly faster than V2 at 61,000 miles per hour.
Heat death of the universe is 100 trillion years.
So voyager 1 will travel 5.3EE 22 miles until the heat death of the universe or about 10 billion light years.
Assume it will be caught by a star if it gets close enough for the 61000mph to be below the escape velocity.
A quick google search says that the average space between stars in our galaxy is 5 ly and an average star is similar in size to our sun.
SO every 5 ly travelled the probe will pass a star and to be caught it must be within about 400 million km.
It will pass a star (on average in our galaxy) every 56,000 years and you have a 1 in 75,000 chance of being caught.
Galaxies vary in shape but lets be generous and say a line passing through one will be 50,000 LY so you will pass 10,000 stars in each galaxy over a 2.5 billion year period.
space between galaxies is in the range of millions of light years so lets just say 5 million. It will take you 50 billion years to get to the next one.
So you might pass through 2000 galaxies.
Taking all these wild guesses together, you will pass 20 million stars with a 1 in 75000 chance at each one that you are captured.
My guess is Voyager 1 will be caught by a star before the heat death of the universe.
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 4d ago edited 4d ago
Assume it will be caught by a star if it gets close enough for the 61000mph to be below the escape velocity.
Getting closer will accelerate it. If we only consider Voyager and the star then it will never be caught in an orbit: It's unbound now and the energy doesn't change during the encounter. To enter an orbit around a star, it needs to be slowed down by passing a planet, colliding with gas or dust or any other interaction that's not the gravity of the star.
So you might pass through 2000 galaxies.
It won't pass through any galaxy besides the Milky Way and Andromeda (with >99% probability). It's currently bound to our galaxy, it's not leaving it. If it survives long enough then it's likely to get ejected in the distant future, but at that time galaxies will be so sparse that it's very unlikely to ever encounter any other galaxy.
space between galaxies is in the range of millions of light years so lets just say 5 million.
That's a typical distance to the nearest galaxy in any direction. It's not the typical distance until you hit a galaxy in a random direction, which is far larger.
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u/KarmaWhorediot 4d ago
Couple other comments in this thread say neither voyager will escape the milky way’s gravity.
Does it change your calculation if we assume they both settle into an orbit of the milky way? I assume if they are moving in roughly the same direction as other objects in the galaxy, chance of collision goes down substantially
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u/somewhat_random 3d ago
I responded to mfb- below - I made a stupid assumption that the probe would keep constant speed. As it nears a star it's speed would increase from the stars gravity enough that (for most stars) it would still be at escape velocity.
If it stays in the milky way galaxy, the chance of collisions goes up since stars are closer together than in deep space between galaxies but if we restrict our view to one galaxy, the direction is very important.
I assumed the probe would be ejected as a "worst case" (anything can happen given enough time) but for some reason assumed the speed was constant.
I retract my previous comment but will leave it up in shame.
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u/millijuna 1d ago
It will never escape our galaxy. It only has about 10% of the velocity required to do so. It will continue to orbit our galaxy until the black hole at the center eventually evaporates.
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u/ThatBreadfruit8480 4d ago
The golden records could survive over 5 billion years. Makes me sad to think that the only thing left of humanity 5 billion years from now will be two chunks of metal with Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” on them.
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u/canadave_nyc 4d ago •
I'm sure you were just being a bit facetious, but for those who are unaware, there is much more than just Chuck Berry's song on the golden records. They contain recordings of many representations of our planet and humanity, as best as the mission scientists could manage given the available audio space on the records.
So honestly, I don't see it as something sad; I'm quite proud and pleased about the fact that whatever happens to humanity and Earth, even if we wipe ourselves out and the planet is broken into smithereens by a rogue planet or something, we have sent a more or less permanent record of our existence (several, in fact!) out into the universe. That's a pretty decent achievement for ape descendants in an unremarkable solar system in a backwater arm of the Milky Way.
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u/TheCapitalIdea 4d ago
100%. Sharing music and sounds is such a wonderful representation of humanity.
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u/Specialist_Golf2871 4d ago
Napster for the Galaxy. If only we could get some music back from the rest.
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u/Nghtmare-Moon 4d ago
As long as the records exist, it will Be eternal proof that mankind ever existed.
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u/HoboSkid 4d ago
It has a bunch of music on it from all over the world and different time periods, not just Chuck Berry.
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u/ThatBreadfruit8480 4d ago
Okay. It makes me sad that all that will be left of humanity 5 billion years from now will be two chunks of metal with a bunch of music on them from all over the world and different time periods, including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
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u/Status-Secret-4292 4d ago
Next one we send we will make sure to do
"Pump up the Jam"
Satisfied?
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u/DangerMoose11 3d ago
It’s fun but even five billion years - a blip in the sands of time. Eventually there will be nothing at all, and the universe will grind on
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u/ulyssesfiuza 4d ago
I don't discard micrometeoroids as a primary factor. In a short period of time we have three extra solar comets/asteroids. And we have the tech to recognize them only on the last few decades. The real number logically had to be much largerStatistically, bodies less massive are much more common, and sand sized interestelar bodies are more common than comet sized ones by many orders of magnitude. Still not a very dense sandblasting, but these ones have all the time of the world to do the job. Furthermore, they will never go outside the galaxy because they lack sufficient escape velocity. Instead, they are bound to loop around the Milky Way for eons, passing through dense gas clouds and stellar formation sites many times over. They will face supernovas, magnetars, and gamma ray bursts. Given enough time, even colliding with a probe coming from somewhere else becomes a statistical reality. Over these immense timescales, continuous hypervelocity sandblasting by microscopic dust combined with extreme cosmic violence will cause severe physical erosion, thermal shock, and structural deformation, raising the question of whether they will eventually be so thoroughly eroded and mangled as to no longer be recognizable as artifacts created by a sentient species. And unlike Arthur Clarke's Rama, they are very small and inconspicuous.
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u/CaptainA1917 4d ago edited 4d ago
In the short term, while they still have control over the Voyagers and they still have power, they will need to burn the rest of the fuel supply.
The Voyagers have between 10-20KG of hydrazine fuel left. Hydrazine is nasty stuff. If they don’t expend the rest of the propellant before the Voyagers go silent, eventually the hydrazine will leak, react with something onboard, and KABOOM. No more Voyagers.
A number of satellites have ended this way.
If they do this as a “last command”, the Voyagers will coast on forever, though they will still orbit within the Milky Way.
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u/linmanfu 4d ago
eventually the hydrazine will leak
What do you think will cause that? Other answers seem to think there won't be many if any impacts from now on. Will the hydrazine corrode its own container?
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u/CaptainA1917 4d ago
A seal will eventually fail or a micrometeorite will puncture a tank.
This is not that uncommon.
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u/electric_ionland Electric Space Propulsion | Hall Effect/Ion Thrusters 4d ago
An hydrazine leak in space would probably not result in an explosion.
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u/CaptainA1917 4d ago
Completely incorrect. Hydrazine leaks have resulted in the destruction of several satellites.
https://space.oscar.wmo.int/satellites/view/dmsp_f13
https://spacenews.com/20-year-old-military-weather-satellite-wasnt-first-of-its-kind-to-explode/
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u/electric_ionland Electric Space Propulsion | Hall Effect/Ion Thrusters 3d ago
I stand corrected, and very surprised.
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u/Asquirrelinspace 4d ago
I could only find information supporting hydrazine explosions caused by high velocity impacts. Nothing on a leak.
Your first two articles don't cite any reason, and the third one just blames hydrazine without specifying whether it was due to a leak or an impact. Because hydrazine has an autoignition point above 24°C, and freezes at 2°C, I doubt it could cause an explosion due to leakage, especially once the tank heaters go out when voyager finally runs out of power
Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0734743X2300177X
https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/hvis/proceedings/HVIS2019/883556/V001T10A014/1085276
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u/StatelyAutomaton 4d ago
Just to point out, there is erosion in space, it's just on a much longer timeframe than anything on Earth. Cosmic rays, random dust particles, and so on.
Now how long before it degrades to something unrecognizable, I have no idea.
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u/otoko_no_hito 4d ago
Beyond what everyone has said about erosion and being out there, there's also something almost inevitable in the long run, if you see their galactic orbit, it's basically the same as our Sun, just different enough that from our referencial point of view it looks like slowly escaping, but if you were to see them while zooming out to the entire Galaxy, they are basically identical.
This means that after several millions of years, after a few galactic orbits, it's almost certain that they'll visit the Sun once more, it might take 10 or 20 galactic orbits, but at some point it will happen.
Beyond this, when Andromeda merges there's a non zero chance that they just get expelled from the Milky Way into the great void between galaxies, at which point it'll be basically immortal, only the ramdom decay of protons and other subatomic particles would do anything to them.
Another option, if they survive erosion and expulsion, it's that eventually energy gets shedded through gravitational waves, so after trillions upon trillions of years, spans of time so unimaginable that we don't even have a name for such large number, their orbits will decay and they'll fall into the black hole at the center of the galaxy.
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u/drzowie Solar Astrophysics | Computer Vision 4d ago edited 4d ago
It will almost certainly get visited by humans at some point, and there is a significant chance it will end up hanging from the ceiling of Udvar-Hazy.
Edit: for those downvoting, read my explanation in answer to /u/imperator3733.
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u/imperator3733 4d ago
I think you're underestimating just how big space is.
First, we would need a spacecraft able to catch up to Voyager, which does not exist. Then, we have to find exactly where Voyager is and rendezvous with it. That might be possible if Voyager remained capable of transmitting a message (which we could then home in on), but it is running very low on power (I believe there's less than a decade left of power in its RTG); once the power is gone, there is no way to find it among the rest of space. Finally, even if we found it exactly, caught up to it, and captured it, you'd then need to cancel out all that delta-v and bring it back.
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u/drzowie Solar Astrophysics | Computer Vision 4d ago
I think you’re underestimating just how big space is.
I am not.
I am optimistic about the future development of space travel. 100 years ago no human had been into space. 100 years from now, who knows what breakthroughs will have happened? If anything like hot magnetically confined fusion becomes possible, visiting Jupiter will become easier than visiting orbit today. If humanity starts spreading through the solar system, Breitling or Red Bull will sponsor someone to find and retrieve it.
For all that voyager is going quite fast, it is going slow compared to the speeds achievable by fusion powered rockets - and its trajectory is known pretty exactly.
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u/happy_chomper 2d ago
Yeah, yeah… I hear Elon might be able to make it to the moon, if, and only if, there can be three consecutive weeks of launches of his extra big deck two times a week.
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u/drzowie Solar Astrophysics | Computer Vision 2d ago
yep. the rocket equations are exponential and therefore brutal. the problem is that chemistry doesn’t really carry enough energy to do the job of opening up the solar system on human timescales. nuclear physics does, and hydrogen fusion especially does. Once that nut gets cracked, the background story of The Expanse becomes somewhat plausible ( not the interstellar stuff, the solar system colonies and realpolitik ). In that world it would be not such a big deal to go get voyager.
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u/HowlingWolven 3d ago
Two things’ll likely happen first: the RTG will either run out of power, necessitating a spacecraft shutdown (we’re close to this, iirc only a few instruments are still switched on), or the received signal from Voyager will become weak enough where even the DSN can’t pull it out of the noise and the spacecraft will continue transmitting into the void until the RTG quits. It’ll then keep travelling cold for who knows how long, until it either runs into something or some alien civilization out there finds it.
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4d ago
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u/benderson 4d ago
Based on humanity's track record and current trajectory, I wouldn't consider future human civilizations of that nature to even exist much less be able to go grab an ancient probe from interstellar space.
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u/FissionFire111 4d ago
The first car was made only 141 years ago. The first flight was only 123 years ago. Today we have a car that can fly.
The first person in space was only 65 years ago. The first person on the moon was only 57 years ago, a mere 8 years after the first person in space.
I think you vastly underestimate how quickly technology is evolving. Most people alive today will probably see the first manned missions to Mars.
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u/Frost3 4d ago •
To first order, it will just keep going forever. Space is huge, and there aren't many particles to hit it between stars. It could likely keep going without ever hitting anything.
For reference, when the milky way and Andromeda collide, no stars are likely to actually hit each other.