I feel this is one of those moments when the technical term "whew" is appropriate.<p>I was born in the early 70's and the Voyager's have been travelling most of my life. In some ways they're like a touch-stone, something I always click on when I see an article.<p>One day, like me, they'll finally die, but until then may they travel onwards and outwards.<p>A tip of the hat to folks at NASA and JPL that built this marvel, with 70's tech, that still continues to amaze and delight us.
I love the engineering behind Voyager 2. Is there a good book or documentary that folks here on HN recommend to go deep on the various engineering pieces behind Voyager ?
I just a have a thought that in the very very distant future humanity will be able to do interstellar travels and they might detect and capture still travelling voyger 1 or 2 and learn what we was like back then tell to their kids the story about us. According to NASA - "It will take at least 40,000 years before either spacecraft approaches another star".
Anyone know what the effective angle of Voyagers transmitter is?<p>The centre of the signal was something like 69 million KM off to the side of earth. 20% of of earths orbital diameter.<p>I suppose the difference is the effective receive angle, and by turning up the power they could get it to respond.
So can we build things like this anymore? I am lucky if my cell phone lasts more than a year. I have a feeling that even if today's hardware manages to last 50 years, all knowledge of how to talk to it will be long lost. I am sure some of the code/firmware will be proprietary and then contractor will go out of business and that is that.
Imagining Blind Willie Johnson's Dark was the Night playing in background while Voyager drifting through the infinite interstellar void, reaching further humanity has ever reached, still gives me goosebumps to this day.
Does anybody know the bit rates, bandwidth, spreading, coding, and packet sizes of the messages they send? It must take several hours to send a message. I also wonder what the minimum number of bits they need to send to recover control is.
It is slightly amusing how the text says multiple times that the spacecraft "remains on its expected trajectory". Were they anticipating autonomous course changes?
This answers a question I had when they first announced the problem: how did they know it was 2 degrees off? Answer: because it was their mistake that threw it off, so they knew precisely where it was pointing.