There's something inspiring about this robot we built careening on the edge of the solar system. We should be launching another one today, with even more ambitious exploration goals.
That would be great. However, we just spent a trillion dollars to destroy a few cities in some desert in the Middle East, killing some 100k people on the way. For some reason that seemed to be a better idea than exploring space. :(
>> in the next few years, leave the space dominated by the influence
>> of our Sun and enter the province between the stars - interstellar
>> space.
Space seemed so much closer when I was 5-10 yo (early 80s) than it does now. So much space fiction has been replaced by fantasies about wizardry and vampires in an Earth-setting, as though they're somehow more realistic for daydreamers.
I've posted this before but it's relevant again now and might interest those who missed it the first time. Please, no need for upvotes because I got them last time.
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I hear you. I actually managed to wrangle Voyager 1 into a brief nerd-out component of my wedding speech:
"Like me, the space probe Voyager 1 launched in 1977. Unlike me, it is one of the pinnacles of human achievement. It is currently the farthest man-made object from the Earth but it could not have achieved its speed and distance to date without gravity assists from Saturn and Jupiter. When space probes are launched, their path is often planned to get a gravitational slingshot from the most significant entities in our planetary family, to take them further than their launch alone might do. That boost is something invaluable, natural and efficient."
"I don't want to call my parents, (mother's name) and (father's name), giant balls of gas, but the boost, the impact they have had on my life, on my sister's life, my brother's life and now the lives of our partners, is huge."
[And then, later on] "Everybody, wish me luck that in our future together, there are only a few occasions where (bride's name) wishes I was the farthest made-made object from Earth."
The Earth is about 12% the luminosity from Voyager's perspective now as it was in 1990; that camera might still be able to image it, at least on its own.
But a bigger problem might be the Earth getting lost in the Sun. When the image was taken in 1990, the Earth was something like 1.4 degrees from the Sun at most, and that was close enough for the nearby Sun to cause the imaging artifact that shows up as the apparent sunbeam the pale blue dot is suspended in; at the same time, NASA said they couldn't image Mercury because it was too close to the Sun, when Mercury was about one half degree away from the Sun at most. The Earth is now about one half degree away from the Sun at most, at Voyager's current distance (assuming my back-of-the-envelope math is correct for all of the above).
Solar panels have only been practical out to missions to Mars or the asteroid belt at farthest. For any more distant mission, nuclear power has been the only feasible power source, in the form of RTGs at least. Spaceborne nuclear reactors have long been contemplated for providing much higher levels of power.
The mass of a Voyager RTG putting out 158W is about 38 kg (84lb). (It looks like Voyager used 3 of these RTGs.) Seems like they would be too heavy for your purpose.
It seems the Galileo RTGs were more powerful: 300 W in 56 kg (123 lb). This is still pretty heavy but maybe getting in there.
It's been a while since I worked the numbers, but I believe that humans regularly put out more power than that during daily activities. Assuming the exoskeleton was extremely efficient, it wouldn't really get you all that much advantage.
A cyclist working hard will put out 300ish watts, so, during daily activities, unless you are talking extremely short bursts like lifting/jumping, we put out much less. Store a good amount of power in some capacitor system and that would be enough to power an exoskeleton I bet.
