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.
It’s quite a feat of engineering to have something run this long - and without having physical access to it.
Only 49 years!
Enshitification.
Doesn’t even run Outlook, let alone two. Pathetic.
What a badass little craft to have kept operating for so long. 🫡
Check out AMSAT-OSCAR 7 – Closer to home, but launched in 1974, and still waking up when there’s sun to operate. It’s the oldest “operational” satellite still up there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMSAT-OSCAR_7
AMSAT = Amateur Satellite! Holy shit. Amateur, my ass.
It’s a satellite for amateur radio, it’s not implying it’s an amateur satellite.
Oh.
A truly beautiful piece of engineering
Why can’t we be as forward thinking as the people who created the voyager probes?
Now please show an inflation adjusted graph or better one that shows in percentage how much each fraction owns of the wealth pie.
There is no way that disparity is that close.
The chart is at about 1.5% of displaying a billionaire, with Muskrat being 800,000 higher than the top of this chart. The 1% are not the problem, the practically unbounded wealth of those above this chart is our problem, the world’s problem.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 - just before the Reagan era. Coincidence?
Also, and I’m still just guessing here, it’s probably the culmination of the space race to the moon minus the pressure to be there before the Russians.
In other words, NASA’s Golden Age.
not enough engineers use LSD anymore because they’ll lose their entire career over it and be blacklisted from government contracts forever.
the McCarthys won.
It is amazing they can detect and communicate to something with such a weak signal so far away.
So far away that it takes an entire day to get the signal to it. The earth to the sun is 8 minutes.
And somehow we can still talk to it. It’s amazing.
NASA’s Voyager engineers are like the final evolution of your uncle that keeps his 1974 Chevy C/K running at 400,000 miles. It’s the same autism across an ocean of resources.
RTGs are subject to the issue of half-life - this is a consequence of that type of power source. Though, let’s be honest: we do not have any other sort of power generation technology that would be viable for literal decades on an interstellar space probe. And we definitely didn’t have a better alternative when they were launched.
For roughly three milliseconds I thought to myself they shoulda used solar panels instead.
“Oh, wait…”
Well they could power a lamp that shines on the solar panels.
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:
- get the upgrade rocket going fast enough to actually catch up with something going very fast with a 20 year head start
- slow down once you get to it.
- make the upgrades while floating in space on a piece of hardware that was designed not to be upgraded and built on earth (hope you don’t need gravity for disassembly) that you control on a 30 minute delay.
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.
This is so fuking cool
I am filled with pride that we collectively made something that will likely out live our sun, and we continue to find ingenious ways to keep it going and going
What a cool time to be alive
I remember when both Voyagers were making their fly bys. We’d get a bunch of images in magazines and stuff, and then wait several more years for the next planet. Between that and the Space Shuttle flights it was awesome.
I wasn’t around for the moon landings so Skylab and Voyager were the highlights of my days.
