Came across this the other dat
Interesting I thought, haven’t finished reading it yet.
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/08/how-is-voyager-still-talking-after-all-these-years/
Cymek said:
Came across this the other dat
Interesting I thought, haven’t finished reading it yet.https://hackaday.com/2022/06/08/how-is-voyager-still-talking-after-all-these-years/
> some of us looked at this event as an opportunity to marvel at the fact that the two Voyager spacecraft, now in excess of 40 years old, are still in constant contact with those of us back on Earth, and this despite having covered around 20 billion kilometers in one of the most hostile environments imaginable.
> As it turns out, there’s nothing magical about Voyager’s radio — just solid engineering seasoned with a healthy dash of redundancy, and a fair bit of good luck over the years.
A bit more than that. Compare the Voyager and Pioneer probes. Pioneer was stripped down to minimum cost, did a good job at Jupiter. Voyager on the other hand cost, I forget now but something like, four times as much as Pioneer. Due to multiple levels of redundancy in every system and an expensive RTG power supply and big high gain antenna. Despite the low cost, Pioneer 10 did still manage to keep sending us signals all the way from 1972 to 2003, a healthy 31 years.
I don’t think that the article mentions that part of the lifetime extension of Voyager is due to bigger receiving antennas being built on Earth. These have proved necessary for receiving the signals as they get fainter. The loss of signal strength is due both to distance and to radioactive decay of the power source.
In the “comments” section, this one is worth reprinting here.
Pat said:
June 9, 2022 at 8:49 amOh, God no, we’re way past what the Voyager designers envisioned! The RTGs were 470W at launch – they’re basically at 50% of their original power output currently.
The two spacecraft are in terrible shape overall. Both Voyagers are on their backup TWTA, as the article noted, and the backup TWTAs have way exceeded any life expectancy. V1 and V2’s star trackers are both degrading rapidly and V1 “might or might not” have a backup (other components in the same subsystem failed). The clocking system on V1 acts weird and has to be reset frequently. V2’s power command decoder acts weird and occasionally just shuts stuff off or on. Both V1 and V2 are on backup thrusters and system memory on both V1 and V2 have failures.
The only reason I think there’s a chance that they could get into the 2030s is because I think the scientists and engineers currently operating it are pulling a Montgomery Scott and intentionally overstating/overestimating the rate at which the power’s dropping – all research papers tend to report “minimum powers” as originating from “private communication.”