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.
 
rjh01 said:
What other pieces of electrical equipment have been working since the 1970s, without maintenance? Not much. That shows how wonderful this spacecraft is.
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Nah it's the crap one, Voyager 2 is the good one. NASA should return Voyager 1 and ask for their money back!
 
Darat said:
Nah it's the crap one, Voyager 2 is the good one. NASA should return Voyager 1 and ask for their money back!
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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.
 
rjh01 said:
What other pieces of electrical equipment have been working since the 1970s, without maintenance? Not much. That shows how wonderful this spacecraft is.
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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
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rjh01 said:
What other pieces of electrical equipment have been working since the 1970s, without maintenance? Not much. That shows how wonderful this spacecraft is.
Click to expand...

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.
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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.
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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.
 
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