They cannot be serious!

[shamrock_uk]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4338245.stm

Voyager probes in funding crisis Nasa's twin Voyager probes may have to close down in October to save money, the US space agency has said. Launched in 1977, Voyagers One and Two are now more than 14 billion and 11 billion km from Earth, respectively. They are on their final mission to locate the boundary between the Sun's domain and interstellar space. *snip*

[Lucern]

Anyone know how far these things could go before we can no longer get signals from them?

[shamrock_uk]

An interesting discussion that doesn't really answer your question properly.

The power of an electromagnetic wave decreases as it travels through space according to the inverse square law - if you could find how powerful the transmitter is, I guess you could work out how weak the beam would be after it reached Earth.

Or, by knowing the minimum strength of a signal that can be detected on Earth you could do the calculation backwards and calculate a maximum distance.

I guess the theoretical figures would be a bit generous considering the amount of EM crap floating around the solar system, but presumably if this mission was planned at the beginning, the designers must have planned to receive from the point the probes hit the interstellar boundary. And that's a long long way.

I want to see what happens when we properly leave the solar system! A big shock wave as they move across the boundary? Can't believe they'd turn them off now when we're so close!! I'd rather delay Bush's moon landings for a year to save the money for some results.

[Timber Loftis]

I'd rather sent 100 or 1000 less troops to Iraq. This project is certainly more important than anything going on here on earth at the moment.

[shamrock_uk]

Sarcasm TL? [img]tongue.gif[/img]

That's why I suggested taking it out of already allocated NASA funds...

[Seraph]

They are on their final mission to locate the boundary between the Sun's domain and interstellar space.

Which brings up the question: Why should I care where interstellar space begins? cIs it going to go somewhere so that 50 years from now when our technology is a few orders of magnitude more advanced that we won't be able to detect it?

Given the fact that these things were origionally only supposed to explore Jupiter and Saturn I would say that NASA has already gotten their money out of these things.