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Voyager 1 Please Call Home

What other pieces of electrical equipment have been working since the 1970s, without maintenance? Not much. That shows how wonderful this spacecraft is.
 
What other pieces of electrical equipment have been working since the 1970s, without maintenance? Not much. That shows how wonderful this spacecraft is.

Nah it's the crap one, Voyager 2 is the good one. NASA should return Voyager 1 and ask for their money back!
 
Nah it's the crap one, Voyager 2 is the good one. NASA should return Voyager 1 and ask for their money back!

I am sure if God returned either Voyager to Earth someone would pay many $millions for it.

But you are right in one way. Voyager 2 was launched 16 days before Voyager 1. Weird.
 
As an older guy who started programming computers in the mid to late 1970s, I think it is so cool that people can still be employed writing code for a fifty-year old computer!

I would love to work on a project like Voyager. I read a book not too long ago about space probes and found it interesting to learn that some were launched before the software was completed because they would have years to work on it as the probe travels to its first destination. In one case the software was finished but the developers figured out a way to make a camera return higher-resolution images through a software update sent while the probe was in transit. To a software nerd like me, this is all so incredibly interesting.
 
What other pieces of electrical equipment have been working since the 1970s, without maintenance? Not much. That shows how wonderful this spacecraft is.

https://www.centennialbulb.org/

Livermore California Fire Department.

Age: 117 years (as of June 2018)

Installed: First installed at the fire department hose cart house on L Street in 1901
 
What other pieces of electrical equipment have been working since the 1970s, without maintenance? Not much. That shows how wonderful this spacecraft is.

My wife has a calculator she was given in the mid-'70s. It's a Casio and it not only works, but the original Casio batteries in it are still powering it. If that's not a record for a pair of AA batteries it must be bloody close.
 
Now Voyager 2 is slowly running down:

NASA Turns Off Science Instrument to Save Voyager 2 Power

Mission engineers at NASA have turned off the plasma science instrument aboard the Voyager 2 spacecraft due to the probe’s gradually shrinking electrical power supply.

Traveling more than 12.8 billion miles (20.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, the spacecraft continues to use four science instruments to study the region outside our heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. The probe has enough power to continue exploring this region with at least one operational science instrument into the 2030s.

Another Six Years! :eye-poppi
 
Well, what would you call it when a spacecraft is taking measurements in an area of space where no spacecraft has ever been before?
 
Voyager 1 spacecraft phones home with transmitter that hasn't been used since 1981

After sending instructions to Voyager 1 on Oct. 16, the team expected to receive data back from the spacecraft within a couple of days; it normally takes about 23 hours for a command to travel more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) to reach the spacecraft in interstellar space, and then another 23 hours for the flight team on Earth to receive a signal back.

However, on Oct. 18, the team was unable to detect Voyager 1's signal on the X-band frequency that the DSN antennas were listening for. This was because, to use less power, the spacecraft's fault protection system lowered the rate at which its radio transmitter was sending back data. The flight team was able to locate a signal later that day – but then, on Oct. 19, communication with Voyager 1 stopped entirely when its X-band transmitter was turned off.

The spacecraft's fault protection system is believed to have been triggered twice more, ultimately causing it to switch to the S-band radio transmitter, which, prior to that date, hadn't been used since 1981. Given the spacecraft is located much farther away in interstellar space today than it was 43 years ago, the flight team was not sure a signal on the S-band frequency could be detected — especially because it transmits a significantly fainter signal while using less power.

The Energizer Bunny has nothing on this!

:wave1:
 
It must have been something that they anticipated. Its power source is nuclear but it doesn’t last forever. It has a half life. They knew that when they built it and they probably planned that eventually it would need to use a lower power means of communication.
 
It's hard to overstate how important the Voyager mission was to science. The planetary alignment that made it feasible is rare enough to make it a moral imperative to get it right. The Voyager spacecraft hit a sweet spot between simplicity and overengineering. In one sense they were composed of dirt-simple parts with proven long-term reliability—rugged and dependable. In another sense a tremendous amount of engineering effort was made to give each spacecraft as much smarts as possible, including multiple fallback failure modes. These spacecraft had to work. (That's why they launched two.) That was as much for political reasons as scientific: a lot of people sold their souls to the Reagan Administration to prevent the project from being cancelled.
 
Every time I read another thing about the design and operation of these machines (1 & 2) I am overwhelmed by the engineering and the foresight of the people that built them.
 
NASA says that Voyager 1 is 24.80 billion km from earth, and that the current strength of its signal is -160 dBm
(1.0 x 10-22 kW).

Edited to add that data rate is 40 bits/second.
 
Per: https://universemagazine.com/en/beyond-the-stars-five-of-the-most-distant-spacecraft/

Jupiter’s gravity accelerated Pioneer 10 to the third space velocity, allowing it to leave the Solar System forever. Thanks to the radioisotope power source, Pioneer 10 maintained communication with Earth until the beginning of the 21st century. The last telemetry from the spacecraft was received on April 27, 2002, and the last weak radio signal was received on January 23, 2003. And this is despite the fact that Pioneer 10 was designed for a nominal lifetime of only 21 months!

So it lasted a little bit longer.
 
One thing I know I often overlook when thinking and talking about the likes of Voyager is how astonishing it is that we can receive and understand such faint transmissions. Voyager's transmitter is 23 watts, to compare it to a modern day device our mobile phones peak at about 2 to 3 watts. I just went and searched and found that means the signal we are recieving from Voyager is a billonth of a billionth of a watt, that is apparently called an attowatt.
 
One thing I know I often overlook when thinking and talking about the likes of Voyager is how astonishing it is that we can receive and understand such faint transmissions. Voyager's transmitter is 23 watts, to compare it to a modern day device our mobile phones peak at about 2 to 3 watts. I just went and searched and found that means the signal we are recieving from Voyager is a billonth of a billionth of a watt, that is apparently called an attowatt.
To listen to Voyager you need a large radio telescope. The likes of you and me would have no chance of picking up the signal.
 
Heh, I looked it up. You all probably know this, but the first space or "cosmic" velocity gets you into orbit. The second gets you out of a body's gravity well, and the third gets you out of the solar system. I assume the fourth allows you to escape Deedle from planet Blarnac chasing you with a jimjim ray.
 
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