I have to be honest. Considering it was covering the only man-made objects to leave the solar system, the script was a bit flat. No, that wasn't a physics joke either. This one could have been more inspiring, like usually with the space videos there's some personal story about someone involved or the development etc before the specs and a glimpse of hope for the future in the closing. It felt a bit too encyclopedic and not quite Whistlerific.
One thing I found really cool about the Voyager probes is that they could be reprogrammed while in flight. So when Voyager II reached the outer planets where it is very, very dark (and the craft was going very, very fast because of the gravity assist it got from its loop around Saturn) they were able reprogram it to pivot while in flight and use a longer exposure so it could still take clear images. They basically had to teach it how to take a picture in the dark
My dad worked on both missions at NASA/JPL in Pasadena, Ca. At that time he worked on the calculations for the trajectory of both Voyagers. Fun fact: The engineers were told not to make them go farther than Jupiter and Saturn, said that would cost to much! (But the engineers decided that they could do that and still keep their budget.)
I've been working on the Voyager project (one mission) since my first days as an undergraduate. Sadly, the person responsible for the plasma wave instrument, Don Gurnett, just died yesterday.
That sounds like what the engineers say everytime one is interviewed for a space documentary/docuseries about 70-80% of projects, they also talk about ways they could save money and do more at the same time which always gets poopooed by the higher-ups
@@alexanderwelshwelsh9931 in a month or two there'll probably be one about some of the insane discoveries made by JWST. Maybe a year or two actually to allow time between videos and for maximum amount of discoveries to choose from.
@@aceundead4750 You're going to be very disappointed when the JPL eggheads start releasing IR datasets, while everyone that paid for JWST is expecting amazing visible light images.
@@MrTexasDan JWST can see in the visible spectrum, red and orange wavelengths. The Hubble pictures we see aren’t natural, Hubble has what is basically a black and white camera and they add colour later when the images are processed (the images are known as false colour). JWST images will be processed the same way.
The golden records are honestly such a beautiful concept. We, humanity, know it's almost guaranteed that no other civilization will find the records, but still put so much effort into trying to communicate with these hypocritical beings. We did desperately do not want to be alone out here in space, that we made a message in a bottle in an attempt to find anyone out there. It's so beautiful, painfully human to not want to be totally alone
Pretty sure we made those records as a public relations project among ourselves. Nobody who was seriously involved with the project could possibly have thought anyone else would ever find them. I will say though that at the time, they probably had no clue just how much radiation and dust there is in interstellar space. So maybe some of them thought the records would last for millions of years.
I was in high school when this was launched and our science teacher mentioned it in class. We talked about what it’s mission was and I remember someone asking when did our teacher think it would complete it’s initial mission and he said it could continue on into our later years long after college or whatever. He said it probably wouldn’t last much longer than that. Well we’re now about 40 some years later and damn if it’s not still going. It outlived our science teacher, something no one would have believed back in the day. Now it seems it will outlive me too lol. Definitely one of the better investments NASA has made.
Technically the Voyagers are going to out live the human race. They’ll still be travelling through space years after we’ve all gone. It must be mindblowing to have made these and their legacy will last forever. Imagine if you were in one of those pictures, it’s a (slim) possibility that an alien could be looking at you in a million years from now.
@@notmenotme614 Never really looked at like that but you’re right. It could travel forever in theory and who knows what might find it if it does stop somewhere or is grabbed by some intelligent race.
I am a mere 27 years old, and I do hope that that I still have more than a few decades yet left in me. On top of that, I only recently listened to a podcast of some of the Voyager staff - in their 70s and 80s at this point - still continuing the mission. If that isn't inspiring, I don't know what is. Don't you worry, Mr. Pitts - if we have anything to say about that, we'll stand on the shoulders of giants and carry on even further :)
I remember the thrill of seeing the Voyager pictures of Jupiter for the first time back when I was 18. The images were so far ahead of what anyone had ever seen. Then The-Gift-That-Kept-On-Giving sent pics of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Nobody had imagined the breathtaking detail. Simply astounding.
The Voyager space crafts have always been my favorites to come out of NASA. I'll be sad the day that both these pieces of technology finally run out of fuel around 2030. Thanks Simon for covering this one!
Something I love about any sort of content about Voyagers 1 and 2 is the sombre music that's almost always played. There's such a mysterious sense of amazement when you realise just how far away we've been able to reach.
Great post, Simon. Being 65, I have fond memories of when a big black & white TV on a high cart was wheeled into place and our studies were interrupted to watch the Gemini launches, live. You know this stirred allot of kids hearts including my own. But being a musician from age 4, I left this work to more competent individuals! :^)
You know how on Star Trek or other sci-fi shows they sometimes show the children in classrooms or museums listening to experts on a video explaining the past? That's exactly the feeling I got watching this video. I could totally see this video being used in the far future or even on a sci-fi movie now.
We know what will happen to Voyager 1 though. It will be picked up by an alien race of sentient machines, upgraded to the point of not only scanning, but converting what it encounters, and then, upon amassing enough information to gain sentience, attempt to return to earth, at which point it will be intercepted first by Klingon battle cruisers, and eventually by the USS Enterprise, under the captaincy of James T Kirk. Because we have all seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture, no?
I've said it before and I'll probably say it every time, but I LOVE how Simon and team geek out over space topics. I really do. It's absolutely wonderful! Also, I happen to be just a smidge older than Voyager 2 - so the "human age" comparisons were brilliant. Also hilarious - "Gee I haven't accomplished much yet" hahah One missed opportunity - in all those mentions of probability, not ONCE did you guy choose to say the odds were ASTRONOMICAL. Aim high with the dad jokes y'all! :D Also, good on Simon for making through that entire section on Uranus without once cracking a smile about the planet's name. A rare thing to see, hahaha! Man, this video was just SO GOOD. Thank you so much - y'all do fabulous work!
It blows my mind to think in 2022 years time from now, or even 2 000 000 years. The Voyagers will still exist and will still be flying through space. For those who made the Voyagers, what a legacy! They’ll always live on.
Fun Fact : Since the late 1970s, we've discovered two very inconvenient facts that will most likely render Earth infuriatingly unfindable by any intelligent alien life that happens to locate it. 1. There are likely about one billion pulsars in the Milky Way. 2. Which pulsars point their pulses at Earth change over time in an unpredictable fashion. Soo we send nudes to our neighbors and then give them wrong address that is just rude
Fry - "This is great! Eh, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus" *laughing* Leela - "I don't get it" Prof. Farnsworth - "I'm sorry Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all." Fry - "Oh... what's it called now?" Prof. Farnsworth - "Urectum."
Where are you from and how old are you? While Simon goes into some great details, I'm surprised that the basic knowledge of its existence isn't known by anyone who has or is close to reaching adulthood. This isn't a knock on you. I remember learning about all the space missions by the US and Russia back when I was in school.
I was born the year they launched and I remember my father showing me the first two flybys, the flyby of Neptune was the last time my dad, Grandfather and I were in the same room with each other.
In a game about interstellar diplomacy called Stellaris, there's a rare event that you can in fact detect and capture Voyager 2. It leads you straight to the Sol System, showing you exactly where it is and how to get there. I used it to set up an observation station. Another time a friend landed a devouring swarm and ate all like estimated 9 billion of us. Yet another basically used us like the Xenomorphs and keep us around to mature their young in but we consider it a great..."honor". Yet another friend Borged us. I've gotten the event the most over the years, about five times or so, and only once did humanity make it to a type one civilization. All the other times we nuked ourselves to death. Once though, after nuking our selves, giant cockroaches began to learn how to use bows and arrows on our irradiated Tomb World.
Thanks for this Simon, I've been avidly following the progress of the Voyager probes since their launch over (unbelievably) 40 years ago. As you say, surely up there with the most 'mega' of megaprojects. There have been many docos on this subject over the years, not least of which (and that which most memorably stuck with me as a child) the great BBC Horizon episodes from the early 80s when they were undertaking their historic flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. In this video, you have given us a nice, concise summary of their progress to date and hopefully inspired your younger viewers who were not around to witness it from the outset. Will be interesting to see what documentary-makers present to us Voyager-wise in another 40 years' time - although unfortunately, I doubt I'll be around to see it!
My 11 year old son is fascinated with space. He just did a report on Voyager 2. Thank you for, more, awesome information, he and I can share together. Can I have some free bottles of Beard Blaze oils?
It is astounding with a group of humans was able to do with less technology then you have in your pocket, and they're still serving us.. The fact that they squeezed so much out of having so little.... it's almost embarrassing.
I've thought this many times. Like... how is it possible to have done this while only having basic rudimentary computer systems? If it were 1950 and you told me we were going to the moon before that calculating machine in the corner got much more powerful, I'd be like... idk. That seems pretty.... hard. It really speaks volumes to the engineers, but also the pilots, Neil and Buzz, because almost everything is manually controlled. I guess they had the touch.
You see that a lot throughout our history. We are capable of getting amazing stuff done when we actually set our minds to it, and now we have people saying it must've been aliens. But no, humans got together, figured out how to do the thing, and got it done. We just lack collective focus and get distracted a lot, because we're still basically fancy apes
They weren’t as concerned with political correctness and diversity back then….. in fact they kinda hired actual nazis to do a lot of the stuff for them…..
@@jonathanmillner Basically, they took risks. They cut corners. They rolled the dice. They just WANTED to do it, so they did it. And the fact nothing bad happened is either extreme levels of good fortune or some incredible planning (or both). There's nothing stopping us doing the same thing now - but now there's no drive to do it and its seen as 'not profitable'. There's no Space Race competition going on anymore, so the US has no interest in doing it. Which is a huge shame. With modern technology we could explore the solar system - and we don't even need to send people, we can send drones and quasi-intelligent machines to explore for us and transmit their findings back to us. Yet we don't, because its not profitable and there's no 'great enemy' to 'beat'.
*"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special."* -Stephen Hawkins
You should do a video about how they reversed the flow of the Chicago River, a feat dubbed the "Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium" by the American Society of Civil Engineers
The answer to your question about what else works perfectly after 30 years- my Atari 2600. Come to think of it, the voyagers and ataris were made about the same time. Solid tech.
@@owenshebbeare2999 they didn't say it was, they said profits are being put ahead of making a product that lasts ... only a nutjob makes everything political for no reason whatsoever
@@owenshebbeare2999 The LOVE of profit is, if it makes you forsake things like ingenuity, integrity, and honesty. Reich-wing Trumpists always projecting their faults onto others.
What's astonishing is that they kept track of the spacecraft's trajectory and orientation with enough accuracy to take photos of planets as they flew by. All this during the time when engineers had to use slide rules to do calculations. Astonishing!
@@Agarwaen that's exactly what I mean. Wouldnt that mean what was launched was years behind the current state of tech at the time the spacecraft were in service?
If it’s possible, please do a video on the Cassini Huygens mission. It’s one of NASA’s most successful missions, and showed us new views of Saturn like never before.
How about the story of Dounreay? From cutting edge research years ahead of it's time through the 'least polluting' nuclear power station ever to it's demise and closure due to farcical mismanagement and the nuclear waste pit explosion. The biggest UK Megaproject that nobody knows about.
Great video. Awe inspiring that a craft launched in 1977 (I was 9) is still going. Disappointed that Simon did not go into detail of how/when V2 will lose contact with Earth. That will be a sad day. We should have International Voyager 2 Day to commemorate the event. Got to give credit to NASA for the effort that went into the Golden Record
I was waiting for you to show up again. I wonder if you do this on all his other channels rather than side and mega protects, cause that's alot of channels
Simon, dude, you are a god among history and science communicators. I'm sure Discovery channel could learn a thing or two about how to get back into the education game from you.
Little known fact: Voyager 1 could have been sent to Pluto, but the mission scientists deemed a closeup study of Titan to be of more scientific value. The close Titan flyby meant zero chance for the Pluto "keyhole" gravity assist. New Horizons would have been unnecessary had Voyager 1 visited Pluto instead...
So we don't need to send out Voyager at all since Pioneer 10 and 11 already visited Jupiter and Saturn. Every probe visit is necessary to learn more about the planet and the solar system.
Titan IS more interesting than Pluto, at least with the instruments on V'ger. Pluto really needed New Horizons to do it justice. Things have a way of working out.
I think it was the right call. Titan was a sure thing and it was right there and is at the very least of comparable scientific value. New Horizon is technologically more advanced, so was able to do much more at Pluto than Voyager would have been able to. So it was a win-win.
The spacecraft actually retains its mass of ~720 kg in space. This mass interacts with the gravitation fields of the sun and planets throughout its mission.
Last time I picked up a 30+ year old piece of technology and it worked? Define technology. I regularly use a 1950s Esterbrook fountain pen that has had nothing repaired or replaced since new, and still works well. Does that count? 😁
Got a 1960 Nikon F camera, was tested a few years ago, still within factory settings. The most advanced camera of its day, brought together many then-new technologies into a compact, reliable package, the first true professional SLR camera.
The number of times Simon says "Uranus", e.g. "made contact with Uranus", "obtained a wealth of knowledge about Uranus", etc., without breaking character shows just what a professional he is. (Of course we don't know how many takes he did.)
Megaprojects, you pointed at the wrong circle at 23:07, it's supposed to be the other circle inside a rectangle. The one you pointed at is the instructions on how to play the LP.
It's kind of crazy to think that there's a legitimate chance of Voyager II hurtling through interstellar space long after the human race has gone the way of the dodo.
The funny thing about theoretical space travel is the objects first sent out into space will eventually be overtaken by future, faster craft. One scenario is a generational ship is sent to a nearby habitable star system only to arrive and find the system already inhabited by humans. In the time it took the generational ship to travel there, their descendents on earth built faster, more capable craft that get there first. I always think of this when I picture voyager drifting slowly through space, relatively speaking.
@@Benson_aka_devils_advocate_88 Certainly a possibility - especially if we ever manage FTL equivalent propulsion (either near-light speed, warping space, folding space or wormholes, etc - who knows what the future will dream up?). In fact its one possible way for a form of time travel, though only visual - overtaking light beams and then looking back with cameras so advanced that we can actually observe events in real time from hundreds or thousands of years ago (obviously from a bird's eye view and only things directly visible from that angle of space). Whether or not its ever possible to travel that far and fast remains to be seen. But even the idea of it makes me realise just how insignificant our planet is in the grand scheme of space and time.
Great video! Though just a quick correction (if one maybe so bold), Voyager 2 launched from LC-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, not from Kennedy.
@@sandybarnes887 It reminds me of how amazing we humans can be when we want to be. Plus, how amazing our universe is. Just thinking about the generations of engineers who have and will be on this project is really cool.
I told my girl fiend about the Voyager probes... aand she started crying... apparently NASA are very cruel and callus people for sending them in each their direction so they had to go out of the solar system all alone. I've since had to compromise on my view of the emotional life of unmanned space craft. They're now officially uncomfortable with being alone in the darkness of the ice cold space unimaginably far away from everything they know and love.....
Actually, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the probe that came back was Voyager 6. The O, Y, A and 6 were obscured by dust and it called itself V'Ger.
Amazing, another year on they are both still working. I had a car that was built in 1977..... it is fair to say that it didn't last almost 50 years like these excellent machines.
'heliopause' is a cool word... seriously though, I have always thought the Voyager missions to be among our greatest achievements so far. nice one Simon for covering this one!
Yeah... it's pretty damn amazing that you can yeet a thing out of the solar system... and it's even more impressive that you can make said thing visit 4 planets and 27 moons in the process. I mean, hurling shit stupidly fast is hard in it self. Doing it with this level of precision in the mid 70s is... bonkers to say the least.
I'm not a native speaker of English but I distinctly remember learning that the plural of 'craft' (a ship, vehicle etc.) is 'craft'. Has this offficially changed? 'Crafts' sounds strange to me.
@@owenshebbeare2999 I just love it when someone makes a typo while they're taking a dig at the lack of intellectual prowess of others. Thanks for the laugh! :P
I enjoy and appreciate many of your videos. That said, I don't understand why so many videos state that Voyager has left the Solar System. Whenever I ask astronomers and space enthusiasts if the Ort Cloud is part of the Solar System, the answer is nearly always "yes". The Voyager spacecrafts have not even entered this vast region and will not leave the Ort Cloud for thousands of years. Therefore, I respectfully question the notion that "the Voyager spacecrafts have breached the limits of the Solar System" when they will still be gravitationally bound to the Solar System far into the future.
Current definitions are a bit confusing. Like the reply earlier said, the area past the heliopause is called interstellar space. However, a star system is considered to include all bodies held to a star by attraction. Meaning gravity. The Oort cloud is still theoretical, but scientifically accepted as the extent of our solar system. The Voyager spacecraft still have tens of thousands of years before they leave the solar system.
@@kodiakjak1 Thanks. Yes, that has been my argument for the past couple of years. When the spacecraft do exit the Solar System, I wonder if there will be anyone around who knows of their existence. :)
I'd love for NASA to do another round of Voyager missions. Yes it would take longer without the planetary alignment but with our technology today we could make a few impressive spacecraft for fairly cheap. They don't need to be cutting edge, just enough to bring back valuable data and pictures.
After the Voyagers, we switched mostly to missions that orbit a planet for years. We've sent Galileo and Juno to Jupiter, and Cassini to Saturn, they spent years orbiting and gathering far more data than a flyby ever can. Missions to Uranus and Neptune are being discussed at the moment. The only recent flyby mission was New Horizons to Pluto.
The golden record always fascinated me. I imagine if we ever found something similar from another advanced civilization and it being the ultimate riddle. I think the Arecibo dish sent out something similar and I've watched some videos on it and I'm like how would ANYONE every guess the message.
This just made me think of something weird: Anyone ever seen beast wars transformers there was a a part in the series where the decepticons had 2 golden discs which held information about the planet they had crash landed on and gave insight as to the future events that would occur and about the species that would thrive there. I just realized that those discs are meant to be the ones we sent out via the voyager crafts. I swear cartoons are brilliant in their stories I got more information from them than most teachers in school
Apollo was quite impressive in the moment. Interest in Apollo dropped off dramatically after the first landing. But that first one practically everyone watched. I know I did. A quarter of the world's population watched the first landing live. Now a quarter of the population thinks Apollo was fake. Because they're stupid!
Great video, as always, but I would disagree with one point. I'm pretty sure that those two man hole covers left our solar system before Voyger one or two.
If we wanted to send a similar message to those included with the Voyager spacecraft, the best choice would still have to be something similar. The advantage of an LP is that it encodes sound as a physical record of the vibrations originally received. All that's necessary to play it back is a needle running over the groove at the correct speed, and amplification. Nowadays the needle is part of a transducer that reads the sound as a varying electrical impulse, enabling electronic amplification. But the earliest record players such as the Gramophone picked up physical vibrations from the needle which were mechanically passed on to a diaphragm which vibrated to the same frequencies. Amplification was achieved by connecting the diaphragm to the large, characteristic horn, later by resonance chambers in the body of the machine. To this day, such a system will work. If you play back a vinyl record with the amplifier turned off and listen very carefully in a quiet room with your ear close to the needle, you'll hear the music playing back. So the basic mechanics of playback are relatively trivial, and any sufficiently advanced culture ought to be able to figure it out. There's no need to try and describe any kind of digital encoding system. If they hit upon the idea of the transducer, they'll get much more fidelity and dynamic range, and so may be able to decode the images, but low-fidelity sound can still be heard. Of course, this assumes the alien race that finds it uses sound vibrations for communication, or at least has organs for detecting them. Otherwise, we may have a swing and a miss here.
![Voyage Beyond the Solar System [4K]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZzglosGjrlM/mqdefault.jpg)
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V ger 🖖🖖🖖
Hey Simon, you should do a video on ajanta and Ellora caves in India .
I have to be honest. Considering it was covering the only man-made objects to leave the solar system, the script was a bit flat. No, that wasn't a physics joke either. This one could have been more inspiring, like usually with the space videos there's some personal story about someone involved or the development etc before the specs and a glimpse of hope for the future in the closing. It felt a bit too encyclopedic and not quite Whistlerific.
Bald looks good on you. Don't sweat the keeps lol
I wonder how many micro meteor holes are in it.
One thing I found really cool about the Voyager probes is that they could be reprogrammed while in flight. So when Voyager II reached the outer planets where it is very, very dark (and the craft was going very, very fast because of the gravity assist it got from its loop around Saturn) they were able reprogram it to pivot while in flight and use a longer exposure so it could still take clear images. They basically had to teach it how to take a picture in the dark
My dad worked on both missions at NASA/JPL in Pasadena, Ca. At that time he worked on the calculations for the trajectory of both Voyagers. Fun fact: The engineers were told not to make them go farther than Jupiter and Saturn, said that would cost to much! (But the engineers decided that they could do that and still keep their budget.)
My dad worked on my mum. Fun fact: that led to my existence and me writing this comment.
That's awesome!!
I've been working on the Voyager project (one mission) since my first days as an undergraduate. Sadly, the person responsible for the plasma wave instrument, Don Gurnett, just died yesterday.
That sounds like what the engineers say everytime one is interviewed for a space documentary/docuseries about 70-80% of projects, they also talk about ways they could save money and do more at the same time which always gets poopooed by the higher-ups
💙💙💙💙
Simon, we need a James Webb Telescope Megaprojects!!
There is one
Right here:
ruclips.net/video/CowU0QK0Pjs/видео.html
@@alexanderwelshwelsh9931 in a month or two there'll probably be one about some of the insane discoveries made by JWST. Maybe a year or two actually to allow time between videos and for maximum amount of discoveries to choose from.
@@aceundead4750 You're going to be very disappointed when the JPL eggheads start releasing IR datasets, while everyone that paid for JWST is expecting amazing visible light images.
@@MrTexasDan JWST can see in the visible spectrum, red and orange wavelengths. The Hubble pictures we see aren’t natural, Hubble has what is basically a black and white camera and they add colour later when the images are processed (the images are known as false colour). JWST images will be processed the same way.
The golden records are honestly such a beautiful concept. We, humanity, know it's almost guaranteed that no other civilization will find the records, but still put so much effort into trying to communicate with these hypocritical beings. We did desperately do not want to be alone out here in space, that we made a message in a bottle in an attempt to find anyone out there. It's so beautiful, painfully human to not want to be totally alone
Well, we won't think that way if someday they come to colonize us.
You mean Hypothetical... Right?
Yeah way to doxx humanity
@@PrimericanIdol What if he actually meant hypocritical... XD
Those damn aliens. Fucking hypocrites all of them...
Pretty sure we made those records as a public relations project among ourselves. Nobody who was seriously involved with the project could possibly have thought anyone else would ever find them. I will say though that at the time, they probably had no clue just how much radiation and dust there is in interstellar space. So maybe some of them thought the records would last for millions of years.
Hey, you mentioned the pulsar map!
I've got that tattooed on my chest so I can be sent home when I die in a John Crichton from Farscape scenario!
I was in high school when this was launched and our science teacher mentioned it in class. We talked about what it’s mission was and I remember someone asking when did our teacher think it would complete it’s initial mission and he said it could continue on into our later years long after college or whatever. He said it probably wouldn’t last much longer than that. Well we’re now about 40 some years later and damn if it’s not still going. It outlived our science teacher, something no one would have believed back in the day. Now it seems it will outlive me too lol. Definitely one of the better investments NASA has made.
Technically the Voyagers are going to out live the human race. They’ll still be travelling through space years after we’ve all gone.
It must be mindblowing to have made these and their legacy will last forever. Imagine if you were in one of those pictures, it’s a (slim) possibility that an alien could be looking at you in a million years from now.
@@notmenotme614 Never really looked at like that but you’re right. It could travel forever in theory and who knows what might find it if it does stop somewhere or is grabbed by some intelligent race.
I am a mere 27 years old, and I do hope that that I still have more than a few decades yet left in me. On top of that, I only recently listened to a podcast of some of the Voyager staff - in their 70s and 80s at this point - still continuing the mission. If that isn't inspiring, I don't know what is. Don't you worry, Mr. Pitts - if we have anything to say about that, we'll stand on the shoulders of giants and carry on even further :)
I remember the thrill of seeing the Voyager pictures of Jupiter for the first time back when I was 18. The images were so far ahead of what anyone had ever seen. Then The-Gift-That-Kept-On-Giving sent pics of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Nobody had imagined the breathtaking detail. Simply astounding.
The Voyager space crafts have always been my favorites to come out of NASA. I'll be sad the day that both these pieces of technology finally run out of fuel around 2030. Thanks Simon for covering this one!
Same here! They're truly awe inspiring.
They have lasted so long but the power runs out in a few years and then they will assume radio silence.
I'm sad you believe this is real
@@davidsheckler8417 what
@@JmKrokY I didn't stutter 🐑
Something I love about any sort of content about Voyagers 1 and 2 is the sombre music that's almost always played. There's such a mysterious sense of amazement when you realise just how far away we've been able to reach.
Great post, Simon. Being 65, I have fond memories of when a big black & white TV on a high cart was wheeled into place and our studies were interrupted to watch the Gemini launches, live. You know this stirred allot of kids hearts including my own. But being a musician from age 4, I left this work to more competent individuals! :^)
You know how on Star Trek or other sci-fi shows they sometimes show the children in classrooms or museums listening to experts on a video explaining the past? That's exactly the feeling I got watching this video. I could totally see this video being used in the far future or even on a sci-fi movie now.
Simon in starship troopers
@@benjaminrees6665 OK what was that all about?🤔
@@benjaminrees6665 would you like to learn more?
Researching the history of hair loss treatments and space probes at the same time!
Yeah, until a Klingon Bird of Prey destroys it.
30 years old tech, kept in a barn for two decades, works like a charm after a deep cleaning: presenting the Commodore 64!
The C-64 was great!
Heyy Ive one 2 in my parents attic.
Mine only would show black when turned on.
Centuries, or even millennia old tech works like a charm every time. It’s called a hammer.
READY
We know what will happen to Voyager 1 though. It will be picked up by an alien race of sentient machines, upgraded to the point of not only scanning, but converting what it encounters, and then, upon amassing enough information to gain sentience, attempt to return to earth, at which point it will be intercepted first by Klingon battle cruisers, and eventually by the USS Enterprise, under the captaincy of James T Kirk. Because we have all seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture, no?
I've said it before and I'll probably say it every time, but I LOVE how Simon and team geek out over space topics. I really do. It's absolutely wonderful!
Also, I happen to be just a smidge older than Voyager 2 - so the "human age" comparisons were brilliant. Also hilarious - "Gee I haven't accomplished much yet" hahah
One missed opportunity - in all those mentions of probability, not ONCE did you guy choose to say the odds were ASTRONOMICAL. Aim high with the dad jokes y'all! :D
Also, good on Simon for making through that entire section on Uranus without once cracking a smile about the planet's name. A rare thing to see, hahaha!
Man, this video was just SO GOOD. Thank you so much - y'all do fabulous work!
It blows my mind to think in 2022 years time from now, or even 2 000 000 years. The Voyagers will still exist and will still be flying through space.
For those who made the Voyagers, what a legacy! They’ll always live on.
Truly impressed with how many statements you made about Uranus without cracking up.
Fun Fact : Since the late 1970s, we've discovered two very inconvenient facts that will most likely render Earth infuriatingly unfindable by any intelligent alien life that happens to locate it.
1. There are likely about one billion pulsars in the Milky Way.
2. Which pulsars point their pulses at Earth change over time in an unpredictable fashion.
Soo we send nudes to our neighbors and then give them wrong address that is just rude
Imagine the reply from Planet Pa Jeet: beech lasagna.
Changing the name(s) to Voyager, probably one of the best under appreciated decisions taken by the program.
Imagine if they had kept the Mariner name. Captain Kirk would have had to deal M'Ner instead of V'ger
I'm proud of him not making and of the typical "Uranus" jokes... I wonder how many takes were needed to not burst into laughing.
Depends on if this was recorded before or after Brain Blaze, cocaine tends to affect one's funny bone
Hahahaha... i though that too
"First stop, Uranus."
I couldn't help it, I had a "Ted Mosby's naked lady chuckle".
Fry - "This is great! Eh, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus" *laughing*
Leela - "I don't get it"
Prof. Farnsworth - "I'm sorry Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry - "Oh... what's it called now?"
Prof. Farnsworth - "Urectum."
Back then, I got suspended from school when I announced to my science teacher that they had just "found rings around Uranus".
This video renewed my faith in Humanity a little bit. Thank you Simon.
Where are you from and how old are you? While Simon goes into some great details, I'm surprised that the basic knowledge of its existence isn't known by anyone who has or is close to reaching adulthood. This isn't a knock on you. I remember learning about all the space missions by the US and Russia back when I was in school.
I was born the year they launched and I remember my father showing me the first two flybys, the flyby of Neptune was the last time my dad, Grandfather and I were in the same room with each other.
“The odds of life bumping into them are, well, fairly small …” Best line ever 😂
Well, that's the nature of a message in a bottle.
Understatement of the millennium....
I personally thought astronomical.
@@zydicious I see what you did there.
In a game about interstellar diplomacy called Stellaris, there's a rare event that you can in fact detect and capture Voyager 2. It leads you straight to the Sol System, showing you exactly where it is and how to get there. I used it to set up an observation station. Another time a friend landed a devouring swarm and ate all like estimated 9 billion of us. Yet another basically used us like the Xenomorphs and keep us around to mature their young in but we consider it a great..."honor". Yet another friend Borged us. I've gotten the event the most over the years, about five times or so, and only once did humanity make it to a type one civilization. All the other times we nuked ourselves to death. Once though, after nuking our selves, giant cockroaches began to learn how to use bows and arrows on our irradiated Tomb World.
"The chance of the Alien race speaking English, being again Zero" .....I laughed so much !! Fantastic writers you have.
I've watched a lot of science fiction and aliens always speak English!
Thanks for this Simon, I've been avidly following the progress of the Voyager probes since their launch over (unbelievably) 40 years ago. As you say, surely up there with the most 'mega' of megaprojects.
There have been many docos on this subject over the years, not least of which (and that which most memorably stuck with me as a child) the great BBC Horizon episodes from the early 80s when they were undertaking their historic flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. In this video, you have given us a nice, concise summary of their progress to date and hopefully inspired your younger viewers who were not around to witness it from the outset.
Will be interesting to see what documentary-makers present to us Voyager-wise in another 40 years' time - although unfortunately, I doubt I'll be around to see it!
My 11 year old son is fascinated with space. He just did a report on Voyager 2. Thank you for, more, awesome information, he and I can share together. Can I have some free bottles of Beard Blaze oils?
omg haven't even watched the video yet so excited. I have a tattoo of voyager 2!
👍🏾😂
Is it on youranus thank you im here all week !!
It is astounding with a group of humans was able to do with less technology then you have in your pocket, and they're still serving us..
The fact that they squeezed so much out of having so little.... it's almost embarrassing.
I've thought this many times. Like... how is it possible to have done this while only having basic rudimentary computer systems? If it were 1950 and you told me we were going to the moon before that calculating machine in the corner got much more powerful, I'd be like... idk. That seems pretty.... hard. It really speaks volumes to the engineers, but also the pilots, Neil and Buzz, because almost everything is manually controlled. I guess they had the touch.
You see that a lot throughout our history. We are capable of getting amazing stuff done when we actually set our minds to it, and now we have people saying it must've been aliens. But no, humans got together, figured out how to do the thing, and got it done. We just lack collective focus and get distracted a lot, because we're still basically fancy apes
Imagine what we could accomplish today if tick tock and Facebook didn’t exist
They weren’t as concerned with political correctness and diversity back then….. in fact they kinda hired actual nazis to do a lot of the stuff for them…..
@@jonathanmillner Basically, they took risks. They cut corners. They rolled the dice. They just WANTED to do it, so they did it. And the fact nothing bad happened is either extreme levels of good fortune or some incredible planning (or both). There's nothing stopping us doing the same thing now - but now there's no drive to do it and its seen as 'not profitable'. There's no Space Race competition going on anymore, so the US has no interest in doing it.
Which is a huge shame. With modern technology we could explore the solar system - and we don't even need to send people, we can send drones and quasi-intelligent machines to explore for us and transmit their findings back to us. Yet we don't, because its not profitable and there's no 'great enemy' to 'beat'.
Yeah it's odd it took this long to have a mega projects video on voyager 2, and yeah it's definitely one of the biggest and truly a true mega project
*"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special."*
-Stephen Hawkins
I don't think that's accurate
@@lagrangian143 I believe it is. Seems I heard Stephen Hawkins say that before.
@@christophergruenwald5054 it was similar but i dont think its exactly that
Almost accurate, but a very average star is a red dwarf.
humans are not special at all. it doesnt matter what anyone dead thought or said.
Do any space exploration, and I'll always watch.
This was a great video! I love when you do space stuff!
🌌
You should do a video about how they reversed the flow of the Chicago River, a feat dubbed the "Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium" by the American Society of Civil Engineers
2:25 - Chapter 1 - The craft
4:35 - Chapter 2 - The mission
6:45 - Chapter 3 - Jupiter
8:10 - Chapter 4 - Saturn
10:15 - Chapter 5 - Uranus
13:00 - Chapter 6 - Neptune
15:30 - Chapter 7 - Interstellar space
19:05 - Chapter 8 - The golden record
Thanks
Didn't know i needed that before i saw it. Thanks for the effort!
You sir, are titan amongst the human race!
You bastard. I chuckled every time you said "Uranus"
My dad, an engineer at JPL would get pissed off every time I said that! He would always say: Your a nus and I would always laugh.
The answer to your question about what else works perfectly after 30 years- my Atari 2600. Come to think of it, the voyagers and ataris were made about the same time. Solid tech.
@Brandon Quist There's the usual Left-wing Left-wing naïvety. Profit is not evil.
@@owenshebbeare2999 they didn't say it was, they said profits are being put ahead of making a product that lasts ... only a nutjob makes everything political for no reason whatsoever
Well, except for the joysticks...
@@owenshebbeare2999 The LOVE of profit is, if it makes you forsake things like ingenuity, integrity, and honesty.
Reich-wing Trumpists always projecting their faults onto others.
Yeah before companies realized they could make more money off us by building crap that breaks so you have to buy another one.
This is my favorite episode of mega projects so far! Thank you
What's astonishing is that they kept track of the spacecraft's trajectory and orientation with enough accuracy to take photos of planets as they flew by. All this during the time when engineers had to use slide rules to do calculations. Astonishing!
by this time there were already the nascent age of the PC, and a decade after the apollo AGC
@@Agarwaen but development began years before the launch.
@@KienDLuu as did computers...
@@Agarwaen that's exactly what I mean. Wouldnt that mean what was launched was years behind the current state of tech at the time the spacecraft were in service?
@@KienDLuu year and that's always the case.
If it’s possible, please do a video on the Cassini Huygens mission. It’s one of NASA’s most successful missions, and showed us new views of Saturn like never before.
How about the story of Dounreay? From cutting edge research years ahead of it's time through the 'least polluting' nuclear power station ever to it's demise and closure due to farcical mismanagement and the nuclear waste pit explosion.
The biggest UK Megaproject that nobody knows about.
Best episode of Megaprojects yet.... Great job to the team over there!
V'Ger's older brother. also carries some of the most far-out music -in the world- made by humanity.
I see I'm not the only one thinking of V'Ger. Isnt one of the Voyager probes also eventually intercepted by the Borg?
Great video. Awe inspiring that a craft launched in 1977 (I was 9) is still going. Disappointed that Simon did not go into detail of how/when V2 will lose contact with Earth. That will be a sad day. We should have International Voyager 2 Day to commemorate the event. Got to give credit to NASA for the effort that went into the Golden Record
Can you do the history of The Thunderbirds?
The planes evolve, the history is decades long, tragic, and entertained millions.
I was waiting for you to show up again. I wonder if you do this on all his other channels rather than side and mega protects, cause that's alot of channels
Thunderbirds are GO!
@@cerdjee4918 I'm pretty sure he's talking about the air force equivalent of the blue angels
@@ilajoie3 FAB, Ivan!
I feel like Simon was saying Uranus as much as possible and I love the he held a straight face the whole time.
I'm 40 years old and still found Simon saying "...on January 24th 1986 Voyager 2 made its closest contact with Uranus..." amusing.
I came here to say that too.
Simon, dude, you are a god among history and science communicators. I'm sure Discovery channel could learn a thing or two about how to get back into the education game from you.
Little known fact: Voyager 1 could have been sent to Pluto, but the mission scientists deemed a closeup study of Titan to be of more scientific value. The close Titan flyby meant zero chance for the Pluto "keyhole" gravity assist. New Horizons would have been unnecessary had Voyager 1 visited Pluto instead...
So we don't need to send out Voyager at all since Pioneer 10 and 11 already visited Jupiter and Saturn.
Every probe visit is necessary to learn more about the planet and the solar system.
Titan IS more interesting than Pluto, at least with the instruments on V'ger. Pluto really needed New Horizons to do it justice.
Things have a way of working out.
Now we will never see a detailed photo of the planet Pluto.
I think it was the right call. Titan was a sure thing and it was right there and is at the very least of comparable scientific value. New Horizon is technologically more advanced, so was able to do much more at Pluto than Voyager would have been able to. So it was a win-win.
I love the way Simon breaks down those distance numbers using The Great Wall, Mississippi River, and other things.
I actually found that annoying, it would have made more sense to have used the distance from the earth to the moon
It's both cheesy and arbitrary, and tends to favour American objects which as irrelevant to most of the world.
Everyone knows the universal unit of measurement is the football field.
@@owenshebbeare2999 people like you are why I have no pity when I find out we've drone struck random foreigners.
Now we need a Megaprojects on Voyager 6, the probe that disappeared through a black hole.😏😉😂
"1st stop Uranus". The gags just write themselves. 😁😁
The spacecraft actually retains its mass of ~720 kg in space. This mass interacts with the gravitation fields of the sun and planets throughout its mission.
Voyagers 1 and 2 are a whole RUclips channel alone. Two of the most remarkable and unbelievable achievements of mankind
Last time I picked up a 30+ year old piece of technology and it worked? Define technology. I regularly use a 1950s Esterbrook fountain pen that has had nothing repaired or replaced since new, and still works well. Does that count? 😁
Got a 1960 Nikon F camera, was tested a few years ago, still within factory settings. The most advanced camera of its day, brought together many then-new technologies into a compact, reliable package, the first true professional SLR camera.
I couldn’t help myself but chuckle every time Simon said Uranus. I know Simon had a hard time not to laugh when he said: Time to explore Uranus.
The number of times Simon says "Uranus", e.g. "made contact with Uranus", "obtained a wealth of knowledge about Uranus", etc., without breaking character shows just what a professional he is.
(Of course we don't know how many takes he did.)
Don't forget "exploration of Uranus".
Giggity
It was quite an achievement of science that we were able to probe Uranus so thoroughly.
One of my favorite Megaprojects yet!!! Need to do one on New Horizons, and Juno now!!!
Megaprojects, you pointed at the wrong circle at 23:07, it's supposed to be the other circle inside a rectangle. The one you pointed at is the instructions on how to play the LP.
It's kind of crazy to think that there's a legitimate chance of Voyager II hurtling through interstellar space long after the human race has gone the way of the dodo.
More like guaranteed, I would think.
It is actually a near certainty.
They’ll be epitaphs for the human race.
The funny thing about theoretical space travel is the objects first sent out into space will eventually be overtaken by future, faster craft. One scenario is a generational ship is sent to a nearby habitable star system only to arrive and find the system already inhabited by humans. In the time it took the generational ship to travel there, their descendents on earth built faster, more capable craft that get there first.
I always think of this when I picture voyager drifting slowly through space, relatively speaking.
@@Benson_aka_devils_advocate_88 Certainly a possibility - especially if we ever manage FTL equivalent propulsion (either near-light speed, warping space, folding space or wormholes, etc - who knows what the future will dream up?). In fact its one possible way for a form of time travel, though only visual - overtaking light beams and then looking back with cameras so advanced that we can actually observe events in real time from hundreds or thousands of years ago (obviously from a bird's eye view and only things directly visible from that angle of space).
Whether or not its ever possible to travel that far and fast remains to be seen. But even the idea of it makes me realise just how insignificant our planet is in the grand scheme of space and time.
Amazing how voyager stories can be retold and still watched over and over
What an astronomical masterpiece!
On par with Voyager 1! 🤩👏👏👍
Longest megaprojects presentation I noticed
Simon's snarky smile on every Keeps package would sell millions lol
Oooo what if you add Keeps to Beard Blaze? You could call it ZZ Top Blaze! 😳
Scratch that... Wizard Blaze 🧙
Great video! Though just a quick correction (if one maybe so bold), Voyager 2 launched from LC-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, not from Kennedy.
One of the best of your always good stories.
I didn't expect a video on Voyager 2 to make me emotional, but here we are.
Why emotional?
@@sandybarnes887 It reminds me of how amazing we humans can be when we want to be. Plus, how amazing our universe is. Just thinking about the generations of engineers who have and will be on this project is really cool.
@@amandajones661 ahh. I understand. 😎
I told my girl fiend about the Voyager probes... aand she started crying... apparently NASA are very cruel and callus people for sending them in each their direction so they had to go out of the solar system all alone. I've since had to compromise on my view of the emotional life of unmanned space craft. They're now officially uncomfortable with being alone in the darkness of the ice cold space unimaginably far away from everything they know and love.....
@@andersjjensen 🤗💙
an episode on pioneer 10 and 11 would be fun, they have been mostly forgotten with voyager taking the spotlight for the last 30 years.
I remember this was the probe that came back in Star Trek.
Actually, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the probe that came back was Voyager 6. The O, Y, A and 6 were obscured by dust and it called itself V'Ger.
Amazing, another year on they are both still working. I had a car that was built in 1977..... it is fair to say that it didn't last almost 50 years like these excellent machines.
Funny enough, we may develop the technology to eventually travel and catch up to the voyagers.
Great work mate
'heliopause' is a cool word...
seriously though, I have always thought the Voyager missions to be among our greatest achievements so far. nice one Simon for covering this one!
Yeah... it's pretty damn amazing that you can yeet a thing out of the solar system... and it's even more impressive that you can make said thing visit 4 planets and 27 moons in the process. I mean, hurling shit stupidly fast is hard in it self. Doing it with this level of precision in the mid 70s is... bonkers to say the least.
Fun fact. The only antenna still able to communicate with Voyager 2 is DSS 43 at Tidbinbilla, just outside the Australian capital, Canberra.
that's the only antenna that can _send_ commands to Voyager. The other antennas at that location are routinely used for reception.
It's strange to think this might one day be all that is left of humanity.
I liken both to messages in bottles cast upon the sea, but on a vastly larger scale.
I’d never considered it like that. Perfectly apt though. I like it.
I'm not a native speaker of English but I distinctly remember learning that the plural of 'craft' (a ship, vehicle etc.) is 'craft'. Has this offficially changed? 'Crafts' sounds strange to me.
He says it with aircraft too. I love his vids but I can’t figure out why it’s scripted this way…
Just like cannon
Blame the ignorant American scriptwriters and editors, as scripts are read "sic erat scriptum"; precisely as the are written.
@@owenshebbeare2999 I just love it when someone makes a typo while they're taking a dig at the lack of intellectual prowess of others. Thanks for the laugh! :P
Somehow I missed this video what it was new. The opening sequence really gave me Bilbo's birthday speech vibes. I love it.
Yeah, my Voyager made close contact with Uranus.
Simon has awoken the part of me that never made it past age 15. :D
I enjoy and appreciate many of your videos. That said, I don't understand why so many videos state that Voyager has left the Solar System. Whenever I ask astronomers and space enthusiasts if the Ort Cloud is part of the Solar System, the answer is nearly always "yes". The Voyager spacecrafts have not even entered this vast region and will not leave the Ort Cloud for thousands of years. Therefore, I respectfully question the notion that "the Voyager spacecrafts have breached the limits of the Solar System" when they will still be gravitationally bound to the Solar System far into the future.
It's 'interstellar space' in the sense that the Sun is no longer the dominant factor in the local environment (plasma and charged particles).
Current definitions are a bit confusing. Like the reply earlier said, the area past the heliopause is called interstellar space. However, a star system is considered to include all bodies held to a star by attraction. Meaning gravity. The Oort cloud is still theoretical, but scientifically accepted as the extent of our solar system. The Voyager spacecraft still have tens of thousands of years before they leave the solar system.
@@kodiakjak1 Thanks. Yes, that has been my argument for the past couple of years. When the spacecraft do exit the Solar System, I wonder if there will be anyone around who knows of their existence. :)
regarding hair loss Captain Picard shows that there is no cure for baldness even in the 24th Century. Or To baldly go where no man has gone before.
Or, remembering your split infinitives, "To baldly go..."
@@owenshebbeare2999 sorry
I'd love for NASA to do another round of Voyager missions. Yes it would take longer without the planetary alignment but with our technology today we could make a few impressive spacecraft for fairly cheap. They don't need to be cutting edge, just enough to bring back valuable data and pictures.
Yes yes yes. My thoughts exactly!
After the Voyagers, we switched mostly to missions that orbit a planet for years. We've sent Galileo and Juno to Jupiter, and Cassini to Saturn, they spent years orbiting and gathering far more data than a flyby ever can. Missions to Uranus and Neptune are being discussed at the moment. The only recent flyby mission was New Horizons to Pluto.
Wow that was an amazing summary 👏
I keep trying to tell myself I am a mature adult, but then I keep giggling every time you mention Uranus.
I'm not gonna lie like a dog ... But I kept giggling
The golden record always fascinated me. I imagine if we ever found something similar from another advanced civilization and it being the ultimate riddle. I think the Arecibo dish sent out something similar and I've watched some videos on it and I'm like how would ANYONE every guess the message.
This just made me think of something weird:
Anyone ever seen beast wars transformers there was a a part in the series where the decepticons had 2 golden discs which held information about the planet they had crash landed on and gave insight as to the future events that would occur and about the species that would thrive there. I just realized that those discs are meant to be the ones we sent out via the voyager crafts. I swear cartoons are brilliant in their stories I got more information from them than most teachers in school
Voyagers like Apollo become more impressive as time goes on.
Apollo was quite impressive in the moment. Interest in Apollo dropped off dramatically after the first landing. But that first one practically everyone watched. I know I did. A quarter of the world's population watched the first landing live. Now a quarter of the population thinks Apollo was fake. Because they're stupid!
A perfect addition to your video on Voyager 1. Many thanks
Great video, as always, but I would disagree with one point. I'm pretty sure that those two man hole covers left our solar system before Voyger one or two.
If we wanted to send a similar message to those included with the Voyager spacecraft, the best choice would still have to be something similar. The advantage of an LP is that it encodes sound as a physical record of the vibrations originally received. All that's necessary to play it back is a needle running over the groove at the correct speed, and amplification. Nowadays the needle is part of a transducer that reads the sound as a varying electrical impulse, enabling electronic amplification. But the earliest record players such as the Gramophone picked up physical vibrations from the needle which were mechanically passed on to a diaphragm which vibrated to the same frequencies. Amplification was achieved by connecting the diaphragm to the large, characteristic horn, later by resonance chambers in the body of the machine.
To this day, such a system will work. If you play back a vinyl record with the amplifier turned off and listen very carefully in a quiet room with your ear close to the needle, you'll hear the music playing back.
So the basic mechanics of playback are relatively trivial, and any sufficiently advanced culture ought to be able to figure it out. There's no need to try and describe any kind of digital encoding system. If they hit upon the idea of the transducer, they'll get much more fidelity and dynamic range, and so may be able to decode the images, but low-fidelity sound can still be heard.
Of course, this assumes the alien race that finds it uses sound vibrations for communication, or at least has organs for detecting them. Otherwise, we may have a swing and a miss here.
Very interesting! To go where no man has gone before!
Absolutely fantastic video! Thanks so much, Simon & Team!
Simon's Keeps ads are the best. The right amount of professionalism mixed with contempt 🤣
Not only are the chances of aliens finding Voyager slim to none, I heard Slim just left town! (ba-DUM-chk)
Please do more videos on the universe.
A map back to earth so the aliens know exactly where to send their harvesting ships.
Appreciate all the videos. Thank you for continuing to be awesome.
Excellent work as always Simon (and crew). This (and Side Projects) are my favourite of your channels
Keeps: Be proud. You look cool with your hair on the opposite end of your head. 👍