Voyager 1 to hit 20 billion clicks

[COSMOPARADISE (Nick)]

Whilst waiting for the Leicester City v Crystal Palace match to start I decided to check in on what the Voyagers are up to. To my surprise I noticed the distance from earth is rapidly approaching 20,000,000,000 kms WOWW!!!!
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/index.html
(insert scale comparisons and calculated date/time of event below, i rekon 5.5 days to go, so Sunday morning-ish... (16,000,000 kms to go / 2000 kms p/min [stopwatch on 1,000 km's 30sec] = 8000 mins / 1440 mins per day = 5.5 days)....hope I got that right...)

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Pretty cool Nick

...and to think, even as two of the fastest travelling made made objects to date, each spacecraft will still take longer than all of recorded human history to make their closest (within 2 light years) approaches to nearby stars.

One would have to hope that mankind can pass them well before that...

Mike

[MattT]

Mind blowing. I was in Y12 when the first close up pics of Jupiter came in....

Matt

[rally]

Interesting point,

I wonder what is technologically feasible (and cost effective) these days - just how fast could we actually send something out ?

Is there an upper limit to using gravitational slingshots or could we just use raw rocket power to accelerate them faster ?

This could literally be the next Space Race ! - which country (or company) will send out a new interstellar spacecraft that can overtake the Voyagers !

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

Pretty cool Nick

One would have to hope that mankind can pass them well before that...

Mike

[pluto (Hugh)]

Originally Posted by rally

Interesting point,

I wonder what is technologically feasible (and cost effective) these days - just how fast could we actually send something out ?

Is there an upper limit to using gravitational slingshots or could we just use raw rocket power to accelerate them faster ?

An Ion thruster could theoretically accelerate a spacecraft to around 90km/s and I suppose you could add to this velocity by using gravitational slingshots, though I'm not sure how much. For comparison Voyager 1 reached a top speed of just over 17km/s.
Ion engines are both feasible and cost effective these days and are already used for propulsion on many missions, for example on the Dawn spacecraft currently orbiting Ceres.

[Ric]

That's an amazing distance to cover.

For a comparison in 37 years of riding motorbikes on the road with 5 different bikes, I've managed to get to almost 800,000km