[X] My Assistant

[dilo]

Nobody highlighted this and I didn't find any comment from Nasa/Voyager sites.
On August,11 the intrepid Voyager-1 probe will reach 14.960 billion Km from the Sun, one hundred times the average Earth-Sun distance!
This event will be followed, after 16 days, by the 100AU from Earth reach.
From astrophysical standpoint, first event is the most important but, I think, most people will be emotionally hit from the second one.
So I would like to start a poll on this.

[djellison]

Planetary Radio covered it this week with Ed Stone as the guest

Doug

[dilo]

Thanks for the highlight, Doug!
Ed had the incredible privilege to follow Voyager mission from development stage to Interstella Mission (34 years, till now! ).

Meanwhile, I made these plots based on weekly reports published in the Voyager sites (source: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly...orts/index.htm).

While first one show historic distance and velocity from Sun, second one is the most interesting because reports the propellent and power availability in last 11 years.
If we exclude very last points (which are probably wrong), linear interpolation show that hydrazine, with current consumption rate, should last 45 years on V1 and 50 years on V2.
On the energy side, Voyager-2 has a constant, 6 months advantage over his brother. The negative-exponential power interpolation of last 5 years trend suggest an average half-life time of 47 years (it was slightly shorter in previous years) - I guess this is the product of plutonium decay and termocouple/electronics slow degrade...
Finally, the margin figures are a little bit misterious to me, because the difference between actual power output and this margin isn't constant... anyway, shouldn't be so important for spacecraft life because, fortunately, they can switch off instruments in order to increase that margin.