In space no one can hear you scream, but Voyager 1 can hear A ROAR

Dealt it.

Dense cloud detected 19,093,090,914 km away?

Yeah sorry about that, it's dried fruit that does it.

Are we there yet?

"Will the Voyagers make it?"

Wrong question. They will make it, but will we be able to know when they get there?

Big deal

I'm from the early sixties, and I still operate. It's the self-repair stuff that does the trick.

Seems to me some of the 60's sci fi shows were pretty realistic in their predictions of what space would sound like!

I was made in 1977 and am still working... Granted, i'm not 17 light hours away, but I am 17 airplane hours away from Australia and was contacted from oz last week. I even respond to commands, although somewhat erratically.

And while I've not been showered by nasty radiation, I've certainly been showered by all sorts of unpleasant things ...

"That won't happen until it passes the last of the comets influenced by Sol's gravity. "

Umm.. Surely everything in the universe is influenced by Sol's gravity. It's in the nature of the beast. By that measure it'll never leave.

The stars are alive

With the sound of spaaaace!

AC, obviously...

Doesn't Voyager use a tape drive?

..for data storage? That the electronics and everything else can survive this long is remarkable, but a tape drive from 1977 that's still working is simply amazing!

Increase in fuel consumption

For AndrueC,

it looks like LECP and MAGROL expriments suck a load of fuel - presumably for orientation and stabilisation purposes. That's probably why they only do them intermittently.

The real question is whether the fuel is actually used to power the Bic biro auto-wind robot for the data tape ...

Riding the mobious strip of the space time continuum

How cool would it be if Voyager 1 was spotted approaching Earth from the other direction - that would put the big bang theory to ruin.

Bah!

Was I the only one who heard Captain Sulu say "Shields! SHIELDS!" as I read?

Escaping the Sun's gravity effects..

The Oort Cloud is generally accepted as being 'under the control of the Sun's gravity'. It goes out to 1 light-year. It will take tens of thousands of years for Voyager to get that far!

Not bad

For a small, pretty hairless, bipedal ape, not bad. First we covered Africa, then we ventured into the neighbouring contents, up rivers and along the ocean shores, crossed the Bering Strait and followed the new continents down to where the cold began again. We reached to north and south poles of our own world, our highest mountains, rose into the air, spread our eyes and ears beyond our planet, walked the moon, and now we drive our tools across Mars and hear the noise of interstellar space from our own creations. Not bad, homo sapiens, not bad.

"now 19,093,090,914km from Earth at the time of writing and moving further away at a rate of about 15km a second"

If that is true I am impressed with writers ability to time his typing the the nearest .07 of a second being the time that the craft takes to travel a km.

Partialy Deaf

I was thinking I couldn't manage a 17 hour car drive with my bratz. So 17 light hours is pretty good.

Then came all the 'Are we there yet?' comments :-D

Voyagers are impressive

The "ROAR" is only 0.0015 Hertz

I'm very happy to work to two significant figures (max.) for this little exercise. The data segment spans about 7 months and is compressed into 11 seconds, effectively speeding up time by a factor of about 1.7x10^6. So the story rightly says "sounds" for the reported Y-axis parameter showing about 2.5 kHz. The actual frequency is of course not even a subsonic rumble to any real microphone out at the heliopause, because 2.5 kHz slowed down by a factor of 1.7 million is only 0.0015Hz - one cycle every 11min 9sec.

My nit pick is that the Y-axis should have pitched the second louder sound at "0.0015 Hz", explaining that we hear it in the human audio range now only because the raw data signal has been sped up enormously. HTH ;-)