Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.
One would think we should just ship it some upgraded parts on a door dash rocket, since we presumably have far better technology now.
No? No? Oh well I guess the USA is not that great then,
The problem is that you’re not just sending parts out there. You have to:
At that point we could just launch a whole new satellite with better hardware, going faster, and covering a completely different area of space. Which is what we have done. But we can still make use of the system we have out there. It’s still the furthest out, so it’s still worth using for as long as we can
That’s a fair point. And I hear the transmissions they send and receive are making even scientific appliances from the 90s onwards look like bitches. My math might be far off but isn’t a transmissions from the Voyager currently reaching us at a power about six orders of magnitude lower than a pin falling on the ground? And the dishes still catch them.
(“In space no one can hear you scream” my ass)
In space we can hear you scream, a long time later, and very very quietly.