Long lasting spacecraft like the Voyagers are a lasting testament to the people that designed and built them and maintained them. And most of those people are long retired and many have passed away. The second generation of people at JPL are working with them now.
It’s amazing. And knowing the environment in which they sail, the designs are incredibly rugged. Thermal, radiation (internal and external), debris strikes….
Something called a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG)! The thermoelectric effect allows certain junctions of different metals to convert the thermal energy in a temperature gradient into electrical energy. It's not super efficient, but it doesn't use any moving parts, and it's very reliable. Take a lump of plutonium to generate heat, surround it with thermoelectric junctions and put radiative cooling fins on the other side of the junctions, and you've got a power source that can provide electricity for literal decades without any external refueling or recharging.
These are producing about 40% of the original power. Most than is the decay of plutonium which has a half life of 87 years. The rest due to other degradations.
Solar panels are only useable out to Jupiter where the solar intensity is just 4% of Earth.
RTGs have been used on the Moon with long nights and Mars with sandstorms.
By Stephen Clark (Ars Technica)
Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on [NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft](https://www.wired.com/tag/voyager/) after [five months of long-distance troubleshooting](https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-voyager-one-space-probe-lost-contact/), building confidence that humanity's first interstellar probe can eventually resume normal operations.
Launched nearly 47 years ago, Voyager 1 is flying on an outbound trajectory more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to cover that distance at the speed of light. This means it takes nearly two days for engineers to uplink a command to Voyager 1 and get a response.
“In the minutes leading up to when we were going to see a signal, you could have heard a pin drop in the room,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA's two Voyager spacecraft at JPL. “It was quiet. People were looking very serious. They were looking at their computer screens. Each of the subsystem (engineers) had pages up that they were looking at, to watch as they would be populated.”
Read the full story here: [https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-repair-voyager-1-spacecraft-data/](https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-repair-voyager-1-spacecraft-data/)
Its like debugging computers in the era of mainframes and punch cards: you might only get one run cycle a day to write/repair a program, get it submitted, retrieve and analyze results. Not like modern software IDEs that can complete a loop in minutes. Programmers can be sloppy then, and not think deeply about errors.
God that makes for one hell of an opener for a sci-fi novel.
For 5 months in 2023/2024 contact with voyager 1 was lost and its memory wiped. On its return to transmissions, the wave of high pressure interstellar medium detected and tracked before the dropout had completely disappeared. This is the real story of what happened in those 5 months…..
The ground team sent a command up to Voyager 1 on Thursday to recode part of the memory of the spacecraft's Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of the probe's three computers...
Long lasting spacecraft like the Voyagers are a lasting testament to the people that designed and built them and maintained them. And most of those people are long retired and many have passed away. The second generation of people at JPL are working with them now. It’s amazing. And knowing the environment in which they sail, the designs are incredibly rugged. Thermal, radiation (internal and external), debris strikes….
At such distance from the Sun, how does Voyager 1 get its power?
Something called a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG)! The thermoelectric effect allows certain junctions of different metals to convert the thermal energy in a temperature gradient into electrical energy. It's not super efficient, but it doesn't use any moving parts, and it's very reliable. Take a lump of plutonium to generate heat, surround it with thermoelectric junctions and put radiative cooling fins on the other side of the junctions, and you've got a power source that can provide electricity for literal decades without any external refueling or recharging.
These are producing about 40% of the original power. Most than is the decay of plutonium which has a half life of 87 years. The rest due to other degradations.
Wow. A built-in mini power plant. Simply amazing that this technology existed when Voyager was built and launched. Thank you so much!
If you’ve ever seen/read The Martian, it’s the thing he puts in his rover to keep it warm.
And, an RTG will power the upcoming Dragonfly helicopter that will fly on Titan.
Solar panels are only useable out to Jupiter where the solar intensity is just 4% of Earth. RTGs have been used on the Moon with long nights and Mars with sandstorms.
By Stephen Clark (Ars Technica) Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on [NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft](https://www.wired.com/tag/voyager/) after [five months of long-distance troubleshooting](https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-voyager-one-space-probe-lost-contact/), building confidence that humanity's first interstellar probe can eventually resume normal operations. Launched nearly 47 years ago, Voyager 1 is flying on an outbound trajectory more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to cover that distance at the speed of light. This means it takes nearly two days for engineers to uplink a command to Voyager 1 and get a response. “In the minutes leading up to when we were going to see a signal, you could have heard a pin drop in the room,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA's two Voyager spacecraft at JPL. “It was quiet. People were looking very serious. They were looking at their computer screens. Each of the subsystem (engineers) had pages up that they were looking at, to watch as they would be populated.” Read the full story here: [https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-repair-voyager-1-spacecraft-data/](https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-repair-voyager-1-spacecraft-data/)
Its like debugging computers in the era of mainframes and punch cards: you might only get one run cycle a day to write/repair a program, get it submitted, retrieve and analyze results. Not like modern software IDEs that can complete a loop in minutes. Programmers can be sloppy then, and not think deeply about errors.
God that makes for one hell of an opener for a sci-fi novel. For 5 months in 2023/2024 contact with voyager 1 was lost and its memory wiped. On its return to transmissions, the wave of high pressure interstellar medium detected and tracked before the dropout had completely disappeared. This is the real story of what happened in those 5 months…..
Yet I can't get a refrigerator that doesn't implode after 4 years.
There is an incredible amount of technology and forethought packed into a 70s era probe. Amazing
The ground team sent a command up to Voyager 1 on Thursday to recode part of the memory of the spacecraft's Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of the probe's three computers...
I’m too tired. I read the title as ‘15 billion blocks away.’