- A total of 11,000 workyears was devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the great pyramid at Giza to King Cheops.
- A total of five trillion bits of scientific data had been returned to Earth by both Voyager spacecraft at the completion of the Neptune encounter. This represents enough bits to fill more than seven thousand music CDs.
- Each Voyager spacecraft comprises 65,000 individual parts. Many of these parts have a large number of “equivalent” smaller parts such as transistors. One computer memory alone contains over one million equivalent electronic parts, with each spacecraft containing some five million equivalent parts. Since a color TV set contains about 2500 equivalent parts, each Voyager has the equivalent electronic circuit complexity of some 2000 color TV sets.
- Both Voyagers were specifically designed and protected to withstand the large radiation dosage during the Jupiter swing-by. This was accomplished by selecting radiation-hardened parts and by shielding very sensitive parts. An unprotected human passenger riding aboard Voyager 1 during its Jupiter encounter would have received a radiation dose equal to one thousand times the lethal level.
- A set of small thrusters provides Voyager with the capability for attitude control and trajectory correction. Each of these tiny assemblies has a thrust of only three ounces. In the absence of friction, on a level road, it would take nearly six hours to accelerate a large car up to a speed of 48 km/h (30 mph) using one of the thrusters.
- Voyager’s fuel efficiency (in terms of mpg) is quite impressive. Even though most of the launch vehicle’s 700 ton weight is due to rocket fuel, Voyager 2’s great travel distance of 7.1 billion km (4.4 billion mi) from launch to Neptune resulted in a fuel economy of about 13,000 km per liter (30,000 mi per gallon).
- Barring any serious spacecraft subsystem failures, the Voyagers may survive until the early twenty-first century (~ 2025), when diminishing power and hydrazine levels will prevent further operation. Were it not for these dwindling consumables and the possibility of losing lock on the faint Sun, our tracking antennas could continue to “talk” with the Voyagers for another century or two!
More insane shit like this needs to be built.that’s a plane^ with NASA painted on the wing.
Listen up kiddies. The SR71 Blackbird is quite possibly the most scrotum-clenchingly cool plane ever built. It is capable of travelling over 3 times the speed of sound, so fast that they had to build it almost entirely out of titanium in order to keep it from melting under the stress. The canopy reached nearly 600 degrees Fahrenheit on landing and its airframe expanded to such a degree under full burn that it leaked fuel while sitting on the runway. Its engines only limit to power was the temperature reached by ramming air into its inlet at 2,100 mph.
The best part? It was built in 1966.
I fucking love planes.
I do wonder about the validity of the jet fuel leaking quote i see EVERYWHERE with this plane.
The current planes like the F-22 and JSF are almost just as amazing IMO based on their dog fight capabilities and maneuverability. Top speed no longer is the end goal so therefore the current planes are not built for such crazy speed(although they do have even better cruising performance). But just like the SR-71 they have all almost made themselves obsolete due to their performance.
Getting excited for the 500!
1982 Eagle Aircraft Special by Ken Hamilton ( Chevy V8 ) - Indy 500
Probably one of the craziest racing car !
A secure seedbank located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near the town of Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, about 1,300 kilometres (810 mi) from the North Pole. The facility preserves a wide variety of plant seeds in an underground cavern. The seeds are duplicate samples, or “spare” copies, of seeds held in gene banks worldwide. The seed vault is an attempt to provide insurance against the loss of seeds in genebanks, as well as a refuge for seeds in the case of large-scale regional or global crises. The seed vault is managed under terms spelled out in a tripartite agreement between the Norwegian government, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen).
