this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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I believe there was a case made to chuck something out perpendicular-ish to the ecliptic to see what shape the heliopause and solar wind take out there, what gases are kicking around etc. Maybe check out one of the high inclination objects kicking around out there as they tend to be odd ones. Almost all exploration has been done in-plane for obvious reasons.
Commercial launch providers have made launching everything way cheaper, so I can see an agency doing this one someday even if it has to take a pile of gravity assists from the sun. As a bonus you also get a new Voyager traveling in a new direction.
I also can see a lot of people being confused as to why it couldn't take pictures of the solar system from up there that look like the textbooks... Possibly creating a whole new generation of flat-earth-esque conspiracies lol
I want them to actually chuck a handful of small spacecrafts as far as they possibly can in orthogonal directions, then have them take parallax images for the nearest pulsars we don't have direct distance measurements of. It would be nice to push back the sphere of distances we've measured that way.