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The mission was notable for one of its promotional activities, "Send Your Name To A Comet!". Visitors to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's website were invited to submit their name between May 2003 and January 2004, and the names gathered—some 625,000 in all—were then burnt onto a mini-CD, which was attached to the impactor. Dr. Don Yeomans, a member of the spacecraft's scientific team, stated "this is an opportunity to become part of an extraordinary space mission ... when the craft is launched in December 2004, yours and the names of your loved-ones can hitch along for the ride and be part of what may be the best space fireworks show in history."[48] The idea was credited with driving interest in the mission.
If a long defunct alien "probe" made a flyby past Jupiter, I doubt we would ever see it and probably never know its significance. We might not even recognize it if it crashed into the Earth or Moon.
.....indistinguishable from magic.
Quote from: lean bean on 14/09/2013 17:57:54.....indistinguishable from magic. Which is all slight of hand and mirrors.......
The Voyager-1 spacecraft has become the first manmade object to leave the Solar System.
The question may be whether we will have any huge technological leaps, or if future technology will be improving and honing what we already have.
I'm not convinced that we'll ever have a starship even remotely resembling the Star Trek Enterprise, capable of having artificial gravity, and reaching truly unbelievable speeds instantaneously without any sensation of acceleration.
We have a lot of troubles seeing space junk left on the moon, and could easily miss it if we didn't know where to look.
Voyager has been invisible to telescopes essentially since it was launched despite improvements in telescope technology, and having active broadcasting which could be used to triangulate the position. The Hubble has never been able to see it even in 1990 when theHubble was launched. What about the "warm spot"? Eventually it will go silent & cold, and if not broadcasting and generating its own heat, it would be extremely difficult to find.
My hope is that we will eventually colonize the moon, and then start installing enormous telescopes in some of the lunar craters.
Perhaps the future will bring better remote materials identification which might help identify stuff that isn't just ice and rock in space.
Anyway, I guess I don't need to sign my name to stuff that I haven't had a substantial contribution to its creation.