Unlikely...
Posted on 12/02/2014 2:06:45 PM PST by Red Badger
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is set to awake on Dec. 6 from the last of its 18 hibernation periods and prepare for its initial approach towards Pluto, which will take place on Jan. 15. The spacecraft is scheduled to come as close as 6,200 miles from the surface of Pluto on July 14, 2015 -- the closest any man-made object has come to the dwarf planet. The mission marks the first visit outside Neptune's orbit to the Kuiper Belt, which consists of Pluto and thousands of objects that have not yet been identified, according to Spaceflight Now, a space news website.
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New Horizons is currently 2.9 billion miles from earth and was launched in January 2006 atop an Atlas V rocket. Pluto at the time was still considered a planet, with scientists later that year voting to demote its status to that of a dwarf planet.
The spacecraft has over the last nine years frequently gone into hibernation for various amounts of time ranging from 36 to 202 days, all of which adds up to five years in total, to help conserve power and allow scientists time to make plans for its exploration in space. It transmits a beep once a week to alert scientists that it is still functioning properly. Once awakened on Dec. 6, New Horizons will transmit radio signals that will reach the Mission's control center, located at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, in about four hours at 9 p.m. eastern time.
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Scientists are hoping that NASA will continue to fund and extend the mission to allow for further exploration.
"The hope is that it will encounter one other Kuiper Belt object," Buckley told ABC News.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
So if we can put people in hibernation for 1000 years, how will that effect them psychologically when they wake up and all their family and friends have been dead for 900+ years. Maybe earth society will have advance so much that people will see them as aliens. Maybe earth society will have advanced so much that their journey was merely scientific masturbation and blowing a lot of resources. What do people now remember from 1000 years ago?
Makes perfect sense. The bigger the ship and the more passengers the better.
Today we can only send tiny crews of very highly trained people. If you can send 50,000 people you could send your everyman as long as you make sure you have the skills needed among the whole population.
BTW looking forward to the Ascension miniseries coming up on Syfy.
That’s funny. THE FOREIGNER was considered the president until he was voted by his peers as a dwarf american.
I would assume you would know that goodbye is permanent if you were going into hibernation for 1000 years. Orphans might be a good source of crews especially if one generation of orphans adopt among the next and make up crews that way. Basically creating family to take along.
If we could achieve say 50% the speed of light we put a fair number of stars within a few decades trip. In that case I would go with hibernation in shifts of 6 months to a year.
In the movie Pandorum it was to be a 120 year trip with 5 teams doing two year duty rotations.
Unlikely...
It’s round, it’s in a stable orbit, it has moons, it, to me, is a planet, just smaller. They can call it a ‘planetoid’ or whatever they wish, but it is a planet..............
The nine years are up in a couple of days..........
Moore’s Law is still in effect, but that’s for computing power, not transportation power.
In order to get from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ where the distance is extremely huge, like in light years, there must be a way to circumvent the light speed limit.
Sci-Fi writers have imagined several ways of doing this in order to make their stories seem feasible, like worm holes, fold space, hyper-space, star-gates, etc. The least feasible would be the ‘warp-drive’ of Star Trek fame. Speed that is multiples of the speed of light would require more energy than is possible to create.
Maybe quantum physics will come up with a way to instantaneously transport matter from one point to another without the need for huge amounts of energy in the process. If you can do it with a photon, you can do it with a dump truck.....................
.....or they could be alien spaceships awaiting the trigger to awaken them after eons of time in suspended animation to meet the inhabitants of this solar system................
Pluto has five known moons: Charon (the largest, with a diameter just over half that of Pluto), Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx.[22] Pluto and Charon are sometimes described as a binary system because the barycenter of their orbits does not lie within either body.[23] The IAU has yet to formalise a definition for binary dwarf planets, and Charon is officially classified as a moon of Pluto.[24]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto
Yeah, planet or dwarf planet? It is still a planet.
It won’t take much for the usurper to tick Russia and China off. Tick, tock.
It must be part cat.
so true! Our government needs to be prepared!
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