NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause

So you&#x27;re troubleshooting a 47 year old spacecraft that is 15 billion miles away.<p>The round trip time is 45 hours.<p>That is some kind of latency!

&gt; [The S-band] uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but [it turned out to work]<p>This is the most fascinating part to me. Isn&#x27;t it well-established how sensitive a signal we can hear? Did they implement something like a new signal analysis method that enabled it?<p>And it says this wasn&#x27;t used or even tried since the 80s anymore, I guess it grew too faint. Looking up the frequencies, X is 8–12 GHz and S is 2–4. Doesn&#x27;t that mean X gets more data across at the same redundancy level? Why have this slower transmitter at all for only the first years, power conservation despite the fresh RTG?

If you would like a visualization of Voyager 1&#x27;s current location, relative to our solar system, a quick google search yielded,<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theskylive.com&#x2F;voyager1-info#orbitdiagramcontainer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theskylive.com&#x2F;voyager1-info#orbitdiagramcontainer</a><p>It&#x27;s absolutely impressive, yet at the same time somewhat underwhelming when compared to the vastness of our galaxy.

There&#x27;s a good documentary about the quirky team of NASA engineers that keep in contact with the Voyager probes...<p>It&#x27;s slightly melancholic, the engineers are aging, the mission&#x27;s heyday is long past... but there&#x27;s something gripping about it...<p>&quot;It&#x27;s Quieter in the Twilight&quot; (2022)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt17658964&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt17658964&#x2F;</a>

Hey smart people, if we were to launch a similar probe today using the most advanced technology available, how long would it take a probe to reach the same distance as Voyager 1?

For a very engaging documentary about the remaining team of Voyager 1 scientists, watch &quot;It&#x27;s Quieter in the Twilight&quot;. The ending kind of tails off, mostly due to the Covid pandemic, but it&#x27;s a great look into how a group of aging scientists and engineers (the last to really understand how Voyager 1 works) are keeping it alive.

Wow: Triggering the protection system a second time turned off the regular radio:<p>&quot;While the S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it.&quot;<p>Heros, both those who made the S-band radio and those who managed to retrieve the signal.

Can&#x27;t wait for them to open source the code once it finally dies. Right now they probably can&#x27;t do that because of security concerns.

Cool related link (from the same site) on the expected lifetime of the golden records - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;predicting-voyager-golden-records-distant-future" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;predicting-voyager-golden-records-dist...</a><p>20,000 years until V1 transits the Oort Cloud. Twenty thousand years.

It’s beyond my average brain how it’s possible at all for a machine that far away to get data to us.

What&#x27;s exactly stops adversary from taking over Voyager as I&#x27;m pretty sure they didn&#x27;t had E2EE at the time of its craft

FTA: &quot;Voyagers 1 and 2 have been flying for more than 47 years...&quot;<p>That should be written on a poster that is put on each desk of each employee of each car&#x2F;washing machine&#x2F;fridge&#x2F;television manufacturer.

I’m constantly marveled at the reliability of an extremely complex machine, with hundreds of moving parts, that was built more than 50 years ago, in operation for 47 years, and built to operate for only 5 years.

Those 47 year old caps in the radio still work. Kudos to the engineers.

Finally, a “breaks one’s silence” headline that’s not a celebrity posting something on social media.

Nobody is thinking of the original Star Trek?

&gt; If that happens, the spacecraft will turn off all non-essential systems to conserve power and remain in flight.<p>Uhhhhhh...<p>I guess they mean &quot;in operation&quot;? Not sure how it could do anything but remain in flight.

This thing has been flying since 1977.<p>Meanwhile a javascript app of mine from 2022 does not build now because I can’t get it to install the dependencies for some reason.<p>BTW, that transmitter apparently can not transmit back to earth at this point because it is too far away. But looks like it can receive (we can transmit with much higher powers here?) and they managed to send a command to restart the primary transmitter. Now debugging.<p>Debugging on a 2 day feedback loop. Fuck that.

Will we ever achieve near-light speed travel and catch up to these guys? Or do we first reach the point where we can upload our consciousnesses into machines (bio or silicon) such that speed no longer matters as much?<p>Off topic a little, but I feel that Heinlein-esque generation ships or frozen embryo payloads carrying biology and all that bio requires are not the future of human expansion. I think it’s long-lived mechs carrying encodings of human neural pathways, with maybe just enough biology to generate randomness. (Could we make hearty fungi function as synapses?)

For some reason I find a number of comments in this thread quite weird, like they are written by AIs. I&#x27;m guessing there definitely are people who are creating bot accounts with AI at this point...

Maybe this has been laid out elsewhere, but exactly what &quot;science&quot; is Voyager 1 doing at this point? It&#x27;s taking &quot;readings&quot; of things that may simply help us to get some picture of where we live... but what value does it truly have?

&gt; Voyagers 1 and 2 have been flying for more than 47 years and are the only two spacecraft to operate in interstellar space.

(thinking aloud&#x2F;voice in my head) If &#x27;those things&#x27; are recharged by sunlight, I wonder how will they get the energy to continue transmitting (assuming they have whatever source AND solar panels - for when the fuel runs out and they can&#x27;t catch any sunlight?)<p>my dialogue with ChatGPT:<p><pre><code> Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are powered by \*Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs)\*. These RTGs use the natural decay of \*plutonium-238\* to generate heat, which is then converted into electricity using thermoelectric materials. Here’s how the process works: 1. \*Radioactive Decay\*: Plutonium-238, a radioactive isotope, decays over time, releasing a consistent amount of heat. 2. \*Thermoelectric Conversion\*: Thermocouples in the RTGs convert this heat directly into electricity. 3. \*Power Supply\*: This generated electricity powers the instruments, computers, and communication systems on each spacecraft. Each year, the power output of the RTGs decreases slightly as the plutonium decays, so the Voyager missions have had to shut down non-essential systems over time to conserve power. Despite this, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have enough energy to continue transmitting until at least the late 2020s, when their power levels will likely drop below the minimum required for communication.</code></pre>