The two Voyager spacecraft have been traveling in space for close to 46 years. Their power levels have dropped by about 50%, various instruments have been selectively shut off, yet the spacecraft continue to keep going and going, sending back valuable science data from interstellar space.
Here are the locations and some vital stats on the two Voyager spacecraft, which were launched on Sept 5, 1977 and Aug 20, 1977 resp.
A few vital spacecraft parameters
These are from a diary we wrote last year to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the twin spacecraft. www.dailykos.com/...
PARAMETER |
VALUE |
Power |
3 radioisotope thermoelectric generators
470 W at launch time, about 50% of that now
About half of the instruments have been turned off
Will run out of power for instruments around 2030
|
Computers |
3 subsystems, each with a pair of processors
Custom 16-bit designs
|
RAM |
69.63 kilobytes, across all 6 computers. www.wired.com/…
(A smart phone has 1 to 2 Gigabytes of RAM)
|
Flight Data computer Processor speed |
81,000 instructions per second
(A smart phone does around a few billion instructions per second)
|
Communications link speed |
Downlink 160 bits per second
Uplink 16 bps
(A FIOS Internet connection runs somewhere between 25,000,000 and 500,000,000 bps)
|
Secondary storage |
Digital ½ inch 8-track tape :-)
Capacity = 67 million bytes
A smart phone has 64 - 256 billion bytes of secondary storage
|
See voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/… for some more fun facts about Voyager.
Here is a diagram of Voyager 1 and 2 and their instruments -
Voyager 1
Now let’s not forget Voyager 1, who brought us the portrait of the solar system and showed us the pale blue dot.
Voyager 1 captured this series of images from its unique vantage point, approximately 6.4 billion km away and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. The images, now known as the Portrait of the Solar System, were taken at 4:48 GMT on Feb. 14, 1990.
34 minutes later, Voyager 1 powered down its cameras forever to conserve power. The spacecraft is still traveling and operating in inter-stellar space, but can no longer take images.
Voyager 1 remains the first and only spacecraft that has attempted to photograph our solar system.
Carl Sagan on the Pale Blue Dot -
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
…
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
The Future
The Voyager probes will be unable to keep instruments powered on much beyond the early 2030s, although NASA engineers may find clever ways to keep comms up for longer. By 2035, power levels will drop by another 10%.
The graphic below shows the locations of the two spacecraft in 2017 and where they are headed.
The probes will keep traveling in space. In ~40K years, Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years of star Gliese 445; Voyager 2 will pass 1.7 light years from star Ross 248.
Epilogue
All in all, this is wonderful news. The entire Voyager program is a testament to human ingenuity and our ability to solve problems using math, science, logic and collaboration and to go where no human has gone before.
And let’s impress on a few more folks that the anti-science anti-truth Republican party wants to undo decades of scientific and social progress and take our country back to the dark ages. Our children and grandchildren deserve a better world. Vote Democrat!
It is not known yet whether the mispointing was caused by operator error, a software bug, hardware failure/hiccup or data corruption. We don’t think Voyager 2 took action on its own to to play hooky for a couple of weeks. What do you think?