Recorded chat instance 7TY6-4E5
Kapteyn University Intranet (on-planet comms only)
References:
mog (morgan.goldweather@starmoth-initiative)
jyp (jyothi.pradesh@kapteyn-univ)
tta (tali.talasea@astropostale)

mog: we need to talk about the josephine probe
mog: right away, I have an audit in five
jyp: what do u want to know?
mog: everything
mog: but mostly, why I haven't heard about the probe
jyp: i'm busy with a dig site, morgan
mog: it's important. I don't like being left in the dark
jyp: ok hang on
jyp: im pinging @tta we need a navigator here its always more serious when she talks
tta: It's way too early in the day to talk about extragalactic probes. And Kapteyn's budget, I suppose. Also, hello, Morgan. Hello Jyothi.
mog: long time no see, Tali.
jyp: sup

mog: ok so. I just discovered an old budget line in our joint starmoth initiative - kapteyn funding. points me to some very long-range interstellar probe named Josephine. what is this?
jyp: hang on a moment morgan
jyp: ur username is really funny
jyp: u wouldn't get it but it's really funny
mog: you're delaying
jyp: yea
tta: Jyothi, let's be serious for a moment. You have a miscommunication problem with the Starmoth Initiative, don't you think?
jyp: ooh shes using the big words
mog: jyothi you're three hundred fucking years old stop speaking like a teenager and answer me.
jyp: morgan out of all of us here i am the most entitled to speaking like this i was there when these words were still used and u were not
jyp: But Fine If You Want Me To Go All Pleiadian I Can
tta: Alright, girls, I don't have all afternoon, please. I'm typing with one hand and my connection's terrible, so I can't link to a Kapteyn wiki article, but the gist is that Josephine is an extragalactic probe launched by the university twenty years ago.
jyp: shes good with one hand (tehehe)
jyp: anyway
jyp: "how extragalactic" u are gonna ask
jyp: lets just say
jyp: shes in the large magellanic cloud
mog: the large magellanic cloud??? furthest we got from the milky way was about fifty thousand ly if memory serves
jyp: u are the head of the starmoth initiative and u don't know that?
tta: Fifty-seven kilolightyears, to be accurate, with the Ibn al-Haytam probe, which allowed us to get the first global snapshot of the Milky Way, thus confirming the two-arm structure, and producing a remarkable deep sky survey that contributes to galactic mapping to this day. I took part in the recovery expedition and it was a mess, frankly. Something in the navigation computer tripped during the return journey, and had it not been for the neutron highway, I don't think we'd have recovered the probe at all. Thankfully, it was programmed to aim for the closest pulsar to human space in case of navigation error, and we got it there. You have no idea what I would give for working faster-than-light coms.
mog: so Kapteyn saw that and went "hey let's survey the large magellanic cloud"?
jyp: I MEAN
jyp: so first that was my idea
jyp: second the quantitative difference between 50kly and 150kly is not that big
jyp: in both cases u have a big fuck-off expanse of space between you and the probe and its on full autopilot past a few dozen ly it just ceases to matter
tta: I'm with Jyothi on this one, the idea was not stupid at all. Long-range probes are rare because in the long run, crewed missions are always going to be more adaptable and a better use of resources, but fundamentally, if you commit to a 50kly probe, you can commit to a 150kly one. The core problem of an expedition to the Large Magellanic Cloud is that even with modern navigation computers, the outgoing trip alone would take about ten years. It's not really proportional to travel inside the Milky Way, because you're going through what is essentially empty space, you have very few reference points to work from, so your translation accuracy is going to be real bad. The Large Magellanic Cloud is also pretty fast, about two hundred kilometres per second in relative, if memory serves, but that's secondary. The real problem is mostly that you have to chain translations for years, or compute a handful of jumps across a good decade.
jyp: i love when shes talking navigator stuff
jyp: but yea when josephine was launched we had none of the fancy long-range computing we have now. so it was a bit of a hail mary. we packed as much reaction mass as we could inside the probe, gave it a geometry drive, a nav comp, a telescope and away she went.
tta: Josephine is powered by a radioisotope reactor, she has about a century of juice left. It's a really simple probe, closer to, say, one of the Voyagers than the Ibn-al-Haytham. Crucially, it's geared for maximal conservation of reaction mass, because we lost too many long-range probes to hasty velocity matches. So once it reaches the Magellanic Cloud, it's not supposed to slow down. It will travel through the galaxy at high relative velocity, and image everything it can. The mission is expected to take another thirty years to complete. It's poetic, in a sense. We're used to quick deep sky surveys, and with this one, we are back to waiting decades to get an image, like our ancestors did.
jyp: also we made sure it was dumb
jyp: like REALLY dumb
jyp: because can u imagine an AI emerging there
jyp: alone in the dark with no one answering your hails
jyp: i just realised i think there was a tv show about this i need to find it
jyp: but yeah gnarly stuff so Josephine is only equipped with a very basic computer
mog: ok. i think i get the gist of it. does Josephine have any specific mission orders, beyond doing a stellar survey of the LMC?
tta: The probe is carrying all the instruments you'd expect from a deep sky surveyor, so it can evaluate spectra, detect planets, life, civilisations if they exist. Algorab got a few sensors in, I think they wanted to assess the extent of Sequence presence in the LMC. The nav computer is programmed to do a close pass on systems it deems interesting, i.e that harbour complex life, artificial structures, traces of civilisation, or exceptional natural phenomena. Problem is, it can't brake, again, so these surveys will be quite basic. We've been studying the LMC for quite a long time, we are reasonably confident it doesn't harbour any large space empire. At least none that builds Dyson spheres and/or has near-light starships. But encounters with spacefaring societies are not impossible, after all, we are pretty sure there's an opening to the Pale Path in the LMC. Anyway, Josephine's protocol in case of encounter is to beam a welcome message and translate out.
jyp: can u imagine that
jyp: space fish having a nice trip out in the cloud and then BAM this weird archaic probe warps in, says HI HOPE YOU HAVE A GREAT DAY I COME FROM THE MILKY WAY and warps out. i'd flip out
jyp: i wish we could livestream that
mog: i don't. we have protocols for first contact. in fact, the Starmoth Initiative would have had a lot of things to say about this probe. we could have given you better instruments, we could have associated the probe with ongoing research projects. we could have helped.
jyp: u did
jyp: u gave us the reaction mass and the reactor
jyp: but like it was a long time ago morgan
jyp: extreme range drives were still new and we were testing out a lof of stuff it wasn't really thought through
jyp: as I said josephine was a hail mary
tta: Honestly the main issue here is that as far as extragalactic probes go, and indeed even long-range intragalactic ones, we don't have any other method. We can mitigate the risks, and modern navigation computers are quite resilient and capable, but at the end of the day, there is no other recipe than sending a probe out and hoping it comes back on its own. When I launch a mail probe only a lightyear out, it's the same problem.
jyp: yea
jyp: space is like, mean
tta: At this point there isn't much left to do about Josephine than wait and see. If everything goes fine, she will perform her final translation in twenty-one years from now, and enter a parking orbit around a variable star, fifty lightyears away from Elora. If something goes wrong, she'll be lost forever, unless the space fish scoop her out.
jyp: or she comes back as a space spirit
jyp: im joking
jyp: i hope
tta: If we were doing this today, I would advise for a much stronger design, and potentially a probe swarm, but a crewed expedition would be even better.
mog: I have a good two hundred billion stars left to survey in this galaxy alone...but yes, this would be ideal. When Elodie Sauveterre comes out of retirement, perhaps. ok. thanks for the talk. i have to go to that audit. good day.
tta: Good day, Morgan.
jyp: peace

*user mog disconnected*
*discussion migrated to private server*

jyp: next time i need a wiki i'll call u
jyp: u got a soothing voice
jyp: even on text
tta: Jyothi, you can drop the act.
jyp: Yeah, yeah. I wish Morgan would get the message that I don't want to talk to them when I'm in the middle of a dig. I'm suspended atop a monolith the size of Olympus Mons, I really do not have the leisure to talk about probes.
tta: You could have just told her to refer to me alone.
jyp: I hindsight, yes, I should have, but also, I need to keep good relations with the Starmoth Initative. If Josephine ever comes back, it will likely be aboard one of their ships.
tta: Do you think she's sad, all alone in the Cloud?
jyp: 100% guarantee she can't become sapient.
tta: I know. But I still think about it.
jyp: You are too romantic, Tal.
tta: I am a blue lady from space. It is in my nature.
jyp: Romantism is good. Keeps you alive. Deep down, that's why Josephine exists, and you know it.
tta: Indeed. Keep me posted about your monolith. I might pay you a visit later this week.
jyp: Will do. Ciao, Blue. And kiss Isa for me.
tta: :)

*user jyp disconnected*
*user tta disconnected*