Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/voyager-1-breaks-its-silence-with-nasa-via-a-radio-transmitter-not-used-since-1981-180985399/

by elsewhen • 2 years ago

509 306 2 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

31337Logic• 2 years ago

Truly amazing!!

iamgopal• 2 years ago

Can we send a voyager 3 with much advance battery and sensor, and at much faster speed so that it may reach farther than voyager 1 and 2, in let’s say just couple of years ?

HWR_14• 2 years ago

No, we cannot.

We could make a Voyager 3, but I don't think there is any way to expect it to catch up with currently feasible technology. And it could only be launched at specific times.

It certainly could have more advanced sensors and batteries. I don't know if the battery improvement would really matter on a decades long mission.

rlpb• 2 years ago

As far as I understand their speed mostly comes from gravity assists from Jupiter, so you'd have to wait for suitable orbital alignments and the basic technology for "much faster speed" doesn't exist.

dnh44• 2 years ago

I never actually knew that. My mental model for how this works was way off; I'll have to read more.

skissane4• 2 years ago

and the basic technology for "much faster speed" doesn't exist.

Various forms of nuclear propulsion have been investigated. None of them are anywhere near ready for missions, but that seems to be more due to lack of investment in their development (and environmental/legal/regulatory/geopolitical/etc concerns) than any scientific obstacle. If NASA/etc were really serious about it (as in willing to spend multiple billions a year on it), it could probably be made to work in only a few years.

FriedPickles• 2 years ago

the basic technology for "much faster speed" doesn't exist.

…but we’re very close. The next technique will be flying near the sun then deploying a solar sail for a huge speed boost. Voyager goes 3 AU/yr, solar sail boost with todays technology will enable 7-9 AU/yr.

Highly recommend watching Slava Turyshev discuss his work on an SGL telescope, which employs this technique.

https://www.youtube.com/live/lqzJewjZUkk?si=57VS4oqbaKEXmyOR

gruturo6• 2 years ago

Yes, but mostly no, also no, and, frankly, why would we.

Yes: we could lift off a much heavier spacecraft, give it plenty of fuel, and many of its parts would be lighter than their 1970s equivalent, giving us lots of room for modern sensors

No: the "battery" in the old ones is nuclear and it's going to be difficult to beat that (but not impossible: a nuclear stirling engine, either powered by fission or by decay, e.g. https://www.nasa.gov/technology/rps/stirling-convertor-sets-...)

Also no: the old Voyagers benefited from a lot of gravity assists from half the solar system, thanks to an alignment which won't happen again until 2151 (https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5075/when-is-the-n...), so unless you're not in a hurry, we won't have that.

Why would we: the _point_ of the Voyager crafts was to do close flybys and collect plenty of data from the outer planets, not to go as far away and as fast as possible. You want to be as slow as possible near them, so you have science time. You're rushing this part in order to get right away to the centuries of nothing which follow?

voytec• 2 years ago

the "battery" in the old ones is nuclear and it's going to be difficult to beat that

Newer atomic batteries can theoretically last centuries instead of decades.

V'ger 1 atomic battery is based on Plutonium-238 which has a halflife of ~88 years. It's down to ~210W output from initial 470W at launch time.

Americium-241 has a half-life of over 400 years.

Self-Perfection• 2 years ago

We probably do not need to wait for ideal planets position to outrun Voyagers. We have ion thruster now with much higher specific impulse!

Voyager-2 gained about 10 km/s at Jupiter, about 5 km/s at Saturn, about 2 km/s at Uranus, and lost about 2 km/s at Neptune. [1]

Dawn spacecraft gained 11.5 km/s from ion thrusters.

So just gravity assist maneuver just around Jupiter alone + massive tank for ion thrusters gas might give 20+ km/s

Though I agree that value of such a mission would be low.

[1] https://www.planetary.org/articles/20130926-gravity-assist

plorg• 2 years ago

Just a small aside, are Stirling engines used on other spacecraft? The Wikipedia article suggests development was largely abandoned a decade ago. My first glance concern would be that because it's reliant on moving parts it is liable to fail sooner than a purely thermoelectric RTG (due to part wear, lubricant leaks, fatigue, etc). This would seem to be quite important on the timeline of a probe that is going to take a long time to reach the subject of its investigation.

Which, to your point, only works against the idea of hypothetical Voyager 3.

hinkley• 2 years ago

Strictly speaking, the voyager missions already are the faster space craft that caught up with another spacecraft - Pioneer 10 and 11.

Looks like we lost contact with 10 and 11 in 1995 and 2006 respectively. They both ran out of power and shut down.

The voyager missions used a rare planetary alignment to get boosts. And a radioisotope thermal engine that has gotten pushback in later spacecraft designs, although they have ceramic versions now meant to address most of the issues.

That said, New Horizons, which gave us those lovely shots of Pluto, was launched in 2006. But it is traveling faster than the Pioneers but slower than Voyagers, so it’ll be the third farthest away at some point.

NikolaNovak• 2 years ago

My understanding is that

1. Our rocket / propulsion technology today may be cheaper (thx largely to SpaceX), but it doesn't really necessarily provide MUCH more delta V. Meanwhile

2. Voyager launches relied on a once-in-a-blue-moon (not quite once in two centuries) alignment of various planetary bodies to give a spectacular orbital slingshot boosts.

So my limited understanding is that we can't really overtake voyagers very easily. Whether our current technology coild be made more reliable in the long term is another good point of discussion :-)

vikingerik4• 2 years ago

The alignment isn't what matters for overtaking Voyager. Jupiter alone is enough, and New Horizons nearly did. Jupiter accounts for the vast majority of any gravity-assist plan. Saturn has 30% the mass and 2/3 of the orbital velocity, so it could only add 20% more over what you get from Jupiter alone, and the ice giants are smaller and slower yet.

pavon• 2 years ago

The alignment was important in that it allowed Voyager 2 to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus in a single mission using gravity assists. The final velocity of Voyager could be matched in other ways, but not exceeded by so much that a probe could catch up to the Voyagers any time soon.

jfengel2• 2 years ago

Even if we could there isn't much point. There just isn't very much out where the Voyagers are, and there won't be for a long time. We're shutting down sensors on Voyager because there just isn't much to see. It's just vacuum.

If we had something capable of getting to Voyager in a year that might be worthwhile, because it would stand a chance of getting somewhere interesting in a few decades. But we are absolutely nowhere near that level.

Denvercoder92• 2 years ago

We're shutting down sensors on Voyager because there just isn't much to see.

That's not why Voyager's sensors are being shut down, they're being shut down because the probes no longer have the power to run them.

downrightmike2• 2 years ago

Not in our lifetimes

vlovich123• 2 years ago

at much faster speed

As others have pointed out, the speeds for Voyager 1 were because of gravity assist of Jupiter and Saturn while Voyager 2 was a gravity assist of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Jupiter & Saturn line up relatively often enough so we could try to outdo Voyager 1 speeds a bit with a lighter air craft due to various advancements. But it's unclear we'd learn anything really new from having sensors that reached further out and our technology for propulsion really hasn't meaningfully advanced to outdo gravity assists from Jupiter + Saturn. There's some proposals to use nuclear explosions behind a probe to achieve speeds of ~10k km/s which would be substantially faster but there's numerous obstacles (cost + international treaties banning the use of nuclear in space).

grvbck• 2 years ago

let’s say just couple of years ?

Not a couple of years. The Voyagers have been doing around 38 000 mph since the late 1970's. That is rougly 17 km/s. The proposed Interstellar Probe mission aims to do 20 km/s or slightly more. It will take it decades to overtake any of them (no actual overtaking will probably take place though, as its trajectory most likely will be different).

heresie-dabord2• 2 years ago

scientists and engineers back on Earth have increasingly had to deal with age-related maintenance issues

There is perhaps unintended irony in that sentence, but it does evoke some Asimov stories in which human characters age while supporting technology.

mannykannot2• 2 years ago

I like this quote:

“We didn’t design them to last 30 years or 40 years, we designed them not to fail,” John Casani, Voyager project manager from 1975 to 1977, says in a NASA statement.

jfengel2• 2 years ago

That doesn't seem helpful. Nothing lasts forever, and if you don't figure out when it's going to fail, it's going to be sooner rather than later.

xpe2• 2 years ago

I would expect a mindful trade-off against total system mass and cost.

metalman2• 2 years ago

It's too bad this cant qualify as some sort of world record

that_lurker• 2 years ago

Could be the start of space records :-)

metalman2• 2 years ago

I was struggling trying to think up any other plausible scenario, where one unit in a continiously operating piece of electronic /hard/soft ware was rebooted after such a long time and Voyager most likely has no competition in this regard or in a number of others sure speaks volumes for how well the nasa crew ,knew there stuff, and got it right durring that era,on budget,on time, and now doing inter generational space research making the actual designs and blue prints of the space craft, very much worth re examinining

gruturo6• 2 years ago

We have to way to know it it's actually the fastest and farthest object: A 1957 nuclear test was conducted underground, but the scientists decided to cap the borehole with a sizable concrete and metal plug.

The nuclear explosion may or may not have caused said plug to reach space - the data from the cameras indicate it had at least 6 times the needed escape velocity, but it is difficult to estimate whether it would completely disintegrate or if enough of it would survive the atmosphere and whether it would "count"

https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html (look for Pascal-B)

ianburrell• 2 years ago

Calculations show that it was completely destroyed in the atmosphere. Which makes sense, cause meteorites of similar size don't make it to the ground.

It was also slower, 150,000 mph, than Parker Solar Probe, which reached 430,000 mph.

ThrowawayTestr• 2 years ago

If there was a will NASA could just buy one from Guinness. That's how they make their money now.

pupppet• 2 years ago

I didn’t realize the Voyagers relied on a once in a 175 year planetary alignment. What a lucky break technology had advanced to the point we could make use of it.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

And I remember the "crazies" saying the world will come to an end due to that alignment. That belief was reported in the main stream media.

When it did not happen, I think they moved on to 2012 :)

timthorn• 2 years ago

Ah, yes - The Jupiter Effect: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3400930-the-jupiter-effe...

akira2501• 2 years ago

I think fascination with apocalypse is the fear of our individual mortality combined with the fear of missing out.

grapesodaaaaa• 2 years ago

I’m trying to figure out why the alignment was so important.

Wouldn’t it be possible to get a gravity assist in any alignment - albeit just taking a little longer to ping-pong across the system?

ericbarrett• 2 years ago

The alignment greatly reduced the amount of energy/propellant/weight to launch the Voyager missions with all four of the outer planets on the menu. Alignments that allow you to reach a smaller set of the outer planets with the same budget are more common: years or decades.

(Edit) Another thought, since you mentioned time—numerical computing power and the math required to exercise it have advanced greatly since the 1970s, and it's likely that some of the trajectories and maneuvers feasible (again with the same fuel budget) today, even if they took 100+ years to complete, weren't even calculable back then.

vikingerik4• 2 years ago

The scenario where a gravity assist doesn't work is if turning sharply enough would require your minimum planetcentric approach distance to be less than the radius of the planet - you'd crash into it instead.

This is why Voyager 2 couldn't also do Pluto - it would have needed to change course by roughly 90º at Neptune, which would have required going closer to the center of Neptune than Neptune's own radius.

The most unusual gravity-assist alignment that we did was for Pioneer 11 going from Jupiter to Saturn. The encounters were separated by roughly 120º of heliocentric longitude. Pioneer 11 used Jupiter to bend its path "up" out of the ecliptic plane and encountered Saturn on the way back "down". Nowadays we wouldn't bother doing that (we'd wait for a more direct launch window instead), but the purpose of this was to get preliminary Jupiter and Saturn encounters done in time before Voyager's launch window for the grand tour alignment.

downrightmike2• 2 years ago

Speed run hacking

exmadscientist2• 2 years ago

The alignment was important because it allowed visiting four planets with one spacecraft. So you only had to launch one spacecraft. (We launched two anyway.)

If you are willing to launch four spacecrafts to visit four planets, the alignment restrictions are much relaxed. You do need to be careful about your launch window to get a nice boost, but it's measured in years between windows, not so much centuries.

Sharlin• 2 years ago

No, there's no pingponging. There's only so much momentum you can exchange with a planet, because there's only so close a flyby that you can make before it stops being a flyby and becomes a fly-into.

relistan• 2 years ago

Ignoring the feasibility of the physics, imagine trying to calculate all the resulting trajectories to point antennas at to talk to the probe. With computers and equipment of the 1970s.

kibwen2• 2 years ago

It wasn't just a lucky break, it was the result of furious efforts by scientists to lobby years in advance to take advantage of the alignment, as well as engineers who repurposed two Mariner probes to save money, as well as canny NASA bureaucrats who sneakily downplayed the possibility of a full Grand Tour in order to reduce estimated costs (with the full intent to underpromise and overdeliver, which Voyager 2 successfully did by "coincidentally" being on course to visit Neptune and Uranus after completing its primary mission to Jupiter and Saturn (to this day, Voyager 2 remains the only visitor to Uranus and Neptune)).

bigiain• 2 years ago

Still a huge amount of luck involved. If that planetary alignment had happened even 10 years earlier NASA probably wouldn't have had the capability to do anything with it. If it had been sometime recently, say after the Challenger disaster, I doubt it would have got funding...

dabluecaboose• 2 years ago

Famously, Carl Sagan, when pitching the Voyager missions to President Nixon, said

"The last time that {alignment} happened was when Thomas Jefferson was President, and he blew it."

https://www.planetary.org/articles/stories_murray

shagie• 2 years ago

The paper for it is readable - Fast Reconnaissance Missions to the Outer Solar System Derived from the Gravitational Field of Jupiter http://www.gravityassist.com/IAF3-2/Ref.%203-143.pdf (1966)

Also fun to play with is: https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/index.php (example query with multiple flybys of outer planets - https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NE... )

jonplackett2• 2 years ago

Were engineers 50 years ago just much smarter than we are now? It’s pretty unbelievable that these things still work. Or is there something systemic about how they were able to achieve so much so long ago with basically no computers to help.

arcbyte• 2 years ago

There was much less overall complexity (and capability). These engineers interacted directly with capacitors and circuits to accomplish their tasks. Integrated circuits enable a lot of modern society, but it also segregates engineering between fabrication time and everything afterwards.

jonplackett2• 2 years ago

I find that more analogue / mechanical type machines even more amazing in someways. Like how they say it ‘decided’ to switch to its backup radio. How are those decisions made on such basic hardware? I guess thinking mechanically is just a very foreign concept for me mostly making software

avereveard• 2 years ago

They had lot less resources and knowledge to estimate the right amount of resilience for achieving the mission goals and erred on the side of cautions.

You can see something similar happening in bridges, weight per meter load has come down considerably since the 60s because material understanding is much more advanced and they meed less margin for the same safety factor.

soulofmischief2• 2 years ago

Our understanding of physics has also gotten much better, for example our understanding of tensegrity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurilpa_Bridge

The Kurilpa Bridge is a multiple-mast, cable-stay structure based on principles of tensegrity producing a synergy between balanced tension and compression components to create a light structure which is incredibly strong.

kamma4434• 2 years ago

Golden NASA budgets might have helped…

kibwen2• 2 years ago

The Voyagers weren't exactly cheap, but by NASA standards they were made on a shoestring budget because all the money at the time was being diverted to development of the space shuttle.

jdthedisciple2• 2 years ago

They weren't affected by DEI nonsense yet.

emchammer• 2 years ago

It's not nonsense. Many of the radio receiver setups made use of diversity or dual-diversity configurations. Also, transmitter and receiver blocks from different manufacturers were wired in switchable primary/backup configurations.

ReptileMan• 2 years ago

Were engineers 50 years ago just much smarter than we are now?

Were the 2006 sony santa monica programmers smarter then us when they delivered God of War 2 for the PS2 on its tiny resources?

Usually the constraints force you to become inventive and smart. Put a hard limit of 128 mb per tab on web browsers and suddenly both the developers of the browsers and the web developers will become extremely smart.

The over abundance of resources has made the majority of software engineers lazy. If we once again live in scarcity times - suddenly people will start to ask why we need 8 abstraction layers to do something.

I would guess they were quite smart bunch, but no superhuman - just people tasked with extremely challenging task, trying to jury rig something on the edge of possibility. My guess is that they took their tasks more seriously and to heart.

Sebb7672• 2 years ago

The over abundance of resources has made the majority of software engineers lazy.

I don't think "lazy" is the right word, it's just that cheap hardware makes most optimizations not worthwhile. Why spend weeks optimizing an application, costing thousands of dollars and potentially introducing a lot of complexity bugs, when paying 50$ instead of 5$ for a server is also an option? Not to mention the importance of time to market and the time value of money (even if the server cost will armotize, spending the money later might be worth it).

There obviously is some laziness and useless complexity in our industry, but a lot of it simply is the rational choice. We all love the ingenuity of assembler-hacking the last few bits of performance out of the CPU, but for most usescases, this is simply wasted effort.

jccooper• 2 years ago

NASA missions still routinely overperform. Curiosity's been operational on Mars for a good 12 years now.

bargainbot3k3• 2 years ago

Most of our car engines run at a small fraction of their capability, even when going at highway speeds. Most servers have a 15-25% utilization to handle failover situations. If you have a beefy as fuck set up with extra wide tolerance margins, things can last for a very long time. Car engines with a chamber that’s essentially containing explosions still end up running for decades with very little maintenance. Well, some longer than others. This is also true for consumer electronics/appliances. You still have things going just fine from almost a century ago. Yes, some things fail faster than others and the designers were aware of limitations and trade offs, but most components continue working. What would be wise in this case is to look at how the voyager was designed for reliability to understand why it hasn’t completely gone off the rails. Meaning, what are the common anpproaches and why do they fail, and why doesn’t the voyager fail. What does it do that’s different than the usual method. Lots to be learned there but I don’t think the people were wizards, they probably dealt with very brittle things and had tight specs and knew how to design certain parts to very close to perfect. The manufacturing of parts plays a huge role in reliability. If you know you can achieve better manufacturing output but it is a matter of cost, then that’s easy - government can pay whatever. But if you don’t know, then that’s a harder situation to be in and that’s guess work. But if you have a capacitor that’s normally 20% off rating that you’d buy in a store, and you know you can get it to be down to 1% off or even less from rating, then you go for that with everything you’ve got. And all parts are made with as wide of tolerance as you can get so that as they degrade, things can still work. Easier said than done, but there it is. Things will eventually break and not work. But for now, Voyager has bought time, quite literally.

Tempest1981• 2 years ago

Worth a watch, imo:

It's Quieter in the Twilight

https://www.space.com/nasa-voyager-mission-engineers-documen...

Interesting trying to manage their declining power budget. And decipher docs written 40+ years ago.

gdubs3• 2 years ago

I'm reading Pale Blue Dot to my kids at night currently so this is really awesome. (The Voyager missions are described in excellent detail in ways that I never appreciated fully before.)

It blows my mind that these are machines from the 8-track era. And they have fallbacks and redundancies that were completely ahead of their time.

leobg2• 2 years ago

Cool! I do the same thing with books like Asimov’s Earth and Space (science) or Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (fictional history). What other books can you recommend?

gdubs3• 2 years ago

Good question but I have a fever at the moment so unfortunately my brain is not fully functioning :/

Salgat2• 2 years ago

NASA loves to downplay expectations in case something goes wrong, but people really underappreciate just how overengineered these things are, which makes sense when a bad mission can be political suicide for their future funding.

gdubs3• 2 years ago

It was also incredibly on budget. I think Sagan says in the book it cost the individual American taxpayers in the single digit dollars.

stevenwoo• 2 years ago

One feels a terrible disappointment Sagan didn't live to see the future mission projects he talks about in the book get finished and most of them succeeded IIRC. By happenstance the 2024 Solar System BBC series mostly uses animation but has some real photos and videos to document a lot of happened since the book was published.

isosphere• 2 years ago

The last time I read Cosmos I hit the part about the Cassini-Huygens mission where he wondered what we might find under the atmosphere of Titan, and was able to immediately just find out.

I imagine a lot of people who work on space missions do not outlive their work - which feels sad but also ... inspiring?

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

I think Carl Sagan would overall just kind of be deeply sad about how it is turning out.

“In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness. I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.”

wkat42422• 2 years ago

Yeah it's really amazing that these come from a time where normal people had never even heard of bits and bytes. And now they're the furthest man made objects and their data link still works.

ghoomketu• 2 years ago

It's fascinating how Voyager 1, despite my lack of space knowledge, utilizes a nuclear power source for 40+ years, offering steady and reliable power without any moving parts that could degrade over time.

In contrast, India's decision to rely on solar panels led vikram lander to be dead in just 14 days due to lack of sunlight (afaik).

I'm curious about the rationale behind this choice when nuclear power seems like a far superior option. Can someone shed light on this decision?

selectodude• 2 years ago

Using plutonium works great but there are two issues. 1) they don’t output that much power. Few hundred watts at most, and they decay at a fixed rate. 2) you need to get your hands on a decent amount of plutonium. Great for dirty bombs, hard to source.

floatrock• 2 years ago

Isn't it something like space-reactor plutonium is a waste product from nuclear weapons production, and since we don't really make nuclear weapons at scale anymore, we aren't really making (refining?) plutonium anymore. And NASA has some amount on reserve, but they're rationing it out carefully. So the Clipper probe had to go with a massive solar array (100ft, the length of a basketball court) because they would rather save their plutonium for some future rover mission.

TkTech• 2 years ago

Both Canada and the US have restarted production specifically to produce RTGs for NASA, but the process takes time to scale up and automate. It's gone up 4x in 4 years and continues to increase, so this is a problem that will eventually be "fixed".

krger• 2 years ago

I'm curious about the rationale behind this choice when nuclear power seems like a far superior option. Can someone shed light on this decision?

India’s plutonium has already been spoken for.

jordanb2• 2 years ago

A good reason is the lack of availability of the needed isotope (Pu238).

The Europa Clipper has a huge array of solar panels instead of an RTG due to the last of the available supply going into the New Horizons spacecraft.

Pu238 was a cast-off isotope from nuclear weapons development so it was more readily available during the cold war. We should be happy that it's scarce now.

Also solar panels have gotten a lot better than they were when Voyager was launched, but even today anything going out past Saturn is not going to be able to use solar energy.

wffurr• 2 years ago

There was just an article about a whole array of “nuclear batteries” using all sorts of decent chemistry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118306

Are any of those candidates or are they just too small or with too poor a mass ratio compared to plutonium RTGs?

YakBizzarro• 2 years ago

Availability :) a RTG requires Plutonium 238, which needs to ne created almost on purpose in a nucleare reactor. Not all nations have this ability or they are running such expensive programs. Also in the USA they are reserved for programs where there is very little light available

augusto-moura• 2 years ago

I don't know the exact reasons why Vikram didn't get a fission reactor. But I can assume from similar missions:

1. Solar is pretty good as far as Mars and it gets worse as it travel further from the Sun. This is why most probes that travel past Mars need a nuclear reactor (Voyager, Pioneer, Cassini, etc). Going closer to the sun they get even better

2. Sending radioactive materials on rockets presents a risk and it is avoided if possible, lunar probes are usually cheaper and can still benefit from solar, so no need for nuclear. Imagine throwing plutonium in the atmosphere in the case of an accident

3. Nuclear reactors in probes are small and rely on decay radiation, they _usually_ have pretty small powet output, solar has a lot

4. And last but not least, price, solar is much cheaper than nuclear

mmooss5• 2 years ago

fission reactor

Am I wrong that the plutonium in the Voyagers is not in a fission reactor but in an RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator), which converts the heat from the plutonium into electricity. ?

I suppose the heat is result of fission, but I don't think an RTG is what is meant by a fission reactor. ??

datameta• 2 years ago

Dead in 14 days? Was there a miscalculation that lead them to believe they could make one full night?

freeone3000• 2 years ago

Sure!

First, the nuclear power source is a giant hunk of plutonium. It is expensive to get, dangerous to use, and due to concerns about further refinement, is restricted internationally.

Second, it is toxic inherently — the source is continuously radioactive at a hazardous level to humans, plutonium itself has acute and long-term toxic effects aside from the radioactivity, and if a launch fails, the rtg will disintegrate and poison hundreds of miles (see Kosmos 954, which disintegrated over Canada)

Third, it is HEAVY. They produce 40W per kilogram. Solar panels produce three times that much on Mars, and can be folded compact for launch.

Voyager used an RTG because its planned mission took it far beyond where sunlight can generate power, and it could do so because it had the budget of NASA and plutonium from the Department of Energy.

Solar panels are way cheaper, lighter, easier to procure, easier to launch, and tend not to cause international incidents.

Salgat2• 2 years ago

I wonder if you could do a hybrid approach, where the nuclear device is very small, but able to charge the battery over a longer duration to the point where the solar panels can be repositioned and utilized again.

jojobas• 2 years ago

Kosmos-954 didn't poison hundreds of miles, square or otherwise.

They could only find a dozen of radioactive bits, each only dangerous within a very small area around it, and not really leaching anything due to its ceramic nature. Most of the fuel dispersed and became harmless by dilution, probably never even reached the surface.

pkaye• 2 years ago

RTGs need plutonium 238. I've read even US doesn't have a lot available. The Europa Clipper will be using solar panel for example. India could also use batteries and a standby mode during the 14 days without sunlight. But any extra weight would add to the launch cost. Maybe in future missions as they get confident with successful landing, they will have bigger lander that can survive the lunar night. Even the early Mars rovers from NASA were tiny and solar powered (ie Sojourner in 1997.)

elzbardico• 2 years ago

India is a nuclear armed-nation with some long-standing border tensions with some of their also nuclear-armed neighbors.

The military probably have priority on the decisions about the allocations of their plutonium stocks.

kvemkon• 2 years ago

Discussed earlier:

"NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause" (30.10.2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41992394

ck2• 2 years ago

Imagine 100 years from now they come up with a probe engine that can get to 10% the speed of light, it would only take a month to reach Voyager.

Even at only 1% it would take under a year, but lots of breakthroughs needed for even that.

WalterBright4• 2 years ago

Now that we've got SpaceX cheap launches, it's time to launch a fleet of solar system probes and space telescopes.

Why isn't this happening?

teruakohatu• 2 years ago

See Three Body Problem (the books)

tliltocatl• 2 years ago

AFAIK launch vehicle cost were never the problem for deep space probes. Launch windows still are - Voyager was extremely lucky in this regard. And then there is probe design and construction - SpaceX made launches cheaper, but that just shift most of the cost into the payload. And then there is no point in having such a fleet if you there isn't enough funding for scientists to process the results.

WalterBright4• 2 years ago

Most of the probes would be identical. Building two identical probes would cost only marginally more than 1, perhaps 10% more.

but that just shift most of the cost into the payload

It reduces the cost, not shift it.

And then there is no point in having such a fleet if you there isn't enough funding for scientists to process the results.

Plenty of funding would become available if the funding for junk science stops, such as:

"In 2021, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $549,000 to a Russian lab performing experiments on cats, including removing part of their brains and seeing if they could still walk on treadmills, according to the Washington Times." https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/us-news/where-elon-musk-can-st...

mmooss5• 2 years ago

Isn't most of the cost due to designing and building the probes? One launch has been routine for NASA (and others) since long before SpaceX.

neodymiumphish• 2 years ago

If there’s any chance that the Dark Forest theory is valid, I’d really rather we not!

tunnuz• 2 years ago

This stuff will never not blow my mind.

renegade-otter• 2 years ago

That thing just won't die!

bilsbie• 2 years ago

I’m not saying it’s true but I really feel like I see this article once or twice a year. I’m not sure what’s going on.

xanderlewis• 2 years ago

I think there’ve been at least two recent episodes of trouble, including this one. I feel like I’ve seen more than two articles about it though.

ethagknight• 2 years ago

Would there not be some kind of benefit to send a chaser after the probes in order to act as a relay as the signal gets further away? Or is the ground based array just as good as anything we could put in space at this time?

ta988• 2 years ago

Wouldn't it be difficult as one would need large antennas and excellent alignment?

Voyager to earth is "relatively" easy it "just" beams toward the sun. And earth can afford to get big antennas scanning.

wkat42422• 2 years ago

No, their RTGs are almost exhausted anyway so soon they won't have enough power to run anything.

TylerE• 2 years ago

The voyager probes were built in an incredible hurry to take advantage of a once-in-a-few hundred years optimal gravitational boosting path. Something launched later would never have been able to keep up, plus the antenna would be so, so much worse. The ground reptilian networks have effective antenna lengrhs of miles.

zelphirkalt3• 2 years ago

Whenever such an announcement is made, I keep asking myself something along the lines: "Just how much stuff did they put on board that thing, that there is always some way of using something differently or something different, to get back a working connection???" Incredible engineering.

aardvarkr• 2 years ago

I remember learning about Hubble telescope losing its gyroscopes in one axis so it couldn’t balance and was effectively dead until someone clever figured out you could use the pressure from the sun to act as a third axis of motion to keep the craft stable. Sometimes it’s not just the stuff onboard but the ingenuity of the engineers that saves the day

sdmike1• 2 years ago

Working in the government space sector, generally speaking, you're given a mission lifetime which is seen as a minimum. your payload/spacecraft/instrument needs to last at least this long. some things end up being limited by the physics of the system (See the RTG on the Voyager probes for a common example, or CEMs on plasma spectroscopy instruments for a more obscure example). However, in pretty much all cases where the physics doesn't put a hard cap on the thing you're building, nobody wants the thing building to be the first thing, or critical point of failure of the whole system.

jval43's quote puts it pretty well. It's not just that you're designing something to last, you're designing it not to fail. It also tends to help when you have a bunch of really smart folks from a number of disciplines working on the same problem.

With that said, you need to walk a fine line as far as the level of redundancy and fallbacks you put in place versus the overall SWaP (Space Weight and Power) of the system. I can go somewhat deeper into SWaP issues if you would like.

ad-astra• 2 years ago

Please do :)

johnklos• 2 years ago

I think the Voyager probes teach us lots about what's wrong with corporate America. Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, or that isn't built by committee where they just keep shipping requirements around from one department to another. Imagine if it weren't all proprietary and if it didn't have no public or even complete documentation.

Think of all the problems we have instead: Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. It's like we've ceded control of our ability to do things to "methods" that corporations insist upon, even though they've been proven worse.

Heck - if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running?

It's nice to see when science takes priority to everything else, and the hardware reflects that.

cmonreally1233• 2 years ago

What's wrong with the Boeing case on needing to be rebooted.

It doesn't seem much worse then memory leaks in missle guidance tracking systems that exceed flight time. We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm?

NL8072• 2 years ago

We have finite resources

So design systems that does not exceed those resources.

inportb• 2 years ago

Nothing, but I do find it amusing that we're comparing Boeing aircraft with guided missiles. How the mighty have fallen :)

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm?

That mentality at Boeing as, literally, costed many lives.

The harm is that nobody knows why there's a memory leak requiring a reboot (or if it's even a memory leak). What happens when that very same issue is combined with a rare case and causes the death of hundreds of people?

"Have you tried to turn it off and on again" may be fine for a $20 Internet-of-insecure-and-shitty-Thing bought on alibaba. Not so much when lives are at play.

bargainbot3k3• 2 years ago

I haven’t yet had a chance to work on aerospace (or beyond) equipment though I do work on medical grade things and some of the parts are aerospace certified, though they haven’t been put through the ringer. In particular, I work with high voltage/amperage, high liquid pressure and high temperature systems. Some of it has been running for close to 25-30 years with very few issues. Only recently have I had to open a power supply that degraded since it was first put into service (over 20 years ago). I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me. I want the person, if anyone, who comes after to see the work that’s of higher standard than what came out of the factory. No machine can continue working forever, but one can get much closer to having fewer failure points. As an aside, to get to here however was a struggle of obtaining all sorts of things I shouldn’t have access to because the manufacturer started locking access down heavily. Story for another time.

throwaway20377• 2 years ago

This is a great post. This part stands out to me:

    > I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me.

Depending upon your NDA/security level, can you share a specific example? Maybe you see a steel/aluminum chain between gears that you know will wear out in X years, but could be replaced with something that is tungsten/titanium that will last for 5X years.

Waterluvian2• 2 years ago

I have a hard time feeling complainy about stuff like this because if engineers are doing their jobs properly, they’re implementing the defined requirements. Requirements are guided by business decisions on what matters and what doesn’t matter for a project.

So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong.

I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system.

ok_dad• 2 years ago

The profit argument is not great for everything humans need, not everything can be driven by profit motives, look where that’s gotten us in medical care in America, social insurance, etc. Profit driven enterprise is efficient, but needs balance that doesn’t seem to be there today in order to limit the extremes.

eru12• 2 years ago

I have a hard time feeling complainy about stuff like this because if engineers are doing their jobs properly, they’re implementing the defined requirements. Requirements are guided by business decisions on what matters and what doesn’t matter for a project.

Well, it's a bit of back and forth between business and engineering.

So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong.

Generally yes, but sometimes it's hard because of double-sided network effects. The classic example being expensive but prestigious scientific journals:

All the scientists and funding agencies would benefit from moving to cheaper journals, but an individual scientist will try to publish their best work in the most prestigious journal they can get.

(And often the complainers mix in some good old paternalism, too: 'oh, those customers are ill-informed and the companies are exploiting them by tricking them into buying inferior products and getting trapped.' or some story like that.)

I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system.

The money was necessary, but not sufficient. Compare the great performance of the Voyagers with the disaster that was the Space Shuttle program or the ongoing farce that is the International Space Station.

EGreg• 2 years ago

Yes. As a left-libertarian, I criticize corporations and their profit motive all the time. I see the concentration of power being married to the inherent incentives of increasing share value for the shareholder class. The only way I see we can reform the system — and fix many of the problems — is to gradually replace shares with utility tokens, ie the accounting system inside an ecosystem that producers and consumers of a marketplace use, and gradully buy out the parasitic class of “investors” who just want to extract rents and enshittify everything. It is a bit like the efforts Europe undertook at peacefully buying out slaves from masters or serfs from feudal lords. Just get out gradually from an economic system that encouraged exploitation.

We have just been inculcated with this exploitation as a “natural” part of our capitalist system for so long, since childhood for most of us, that many have a knee-jerk reaction to shut down this line of criticism and not hear the simple solution. Many on HN have built a startup when they’re young, been part of the VC industry, akin to a music prodigy or young actor or model being “discovered” by “talent scout”, and sold a dream which only a few achieve. For every 1 person who makes it big, 1000 who do the same thing fail. But they keep licking the boots of the system hoping they’ll be among the lucky ones, so they better say nice things. If they see words like “utility tokens” they immediately think “grift”, when in fact the system they’re supporting has grift and exploitation built in. Having utility token holders buy out shareholders also may be an element in furthering SDG goals and “stakeholder capitalism”, and saving the planet. But hey, as soon as the words are uttered which may trigger pushback, the system starts to protect itself, in the form of downvotes or strawman attacks etc.

Yeah, planned obsolescence is one feature of corporate control and profit system. As is surveillance capitalism, or pollution, or pushing people to work long hours, or have a gig economy, neglect their kids, or having people in echo chambers be angry at each other online because anger and misunderstanding leads to more “engagement” etc. All the ways that represent gradual “enshittification” that Cory Doctorow coined, is not an accident. These are all negative externalities, which are all traced back to one main factor: the profit motive of shareholders as a core feature in the system, forever. The rents aren’t going to extract themselves.

II2II3• 2 years ago

While I agree that "corporate America" is problematic, the lessons from Voyager are not really applicable. For starters, it was designed to take advantage of something that predictably happens every couple of hundred years. Very few corporations last that long. Then there is the element of predictability. The solar system pretty much works like clockwork. You can predict simple things, like the orbits of major bodies, centuries in advance with a great degree of accuracy.

Compare that to the tech industry. IBM itself can trace it's origins back to a data processing company about 140 years ago. They probably had the most natural evolution into a modern tech company because of those origins. Yet noone at the original mechanical tabulator company could have predicted what IBM would be producing 70 years later, nevermind a century later. Nintendo is roughly the same ago and is more-or-less doing the same sort of thing (gaming) but has gone from low-tech to high-tech so their path was not predictable. Yet those are abnormalities. Almost anything that old is an institution of some form (e.g. government or education). Perhaps the closest thing we had to predictable was Moore's Law, but that wasn't a pure law in the physics sense. It was reliable enough to build an industry upon for many decades, but it could have failed much earlier than it did due to hurdles in technological developments.

The other thing about Voyager is that its intrinsic value grew with time. While we could develop a mission that could go as far as it did faster, and have better instruments to conduct research, it would take decades to build the probe and get there. It also makes sense to support it to get what little data it can return to us because it would help us develop better missions when we do decide to go that route.

goldfishgold2• 2 years ago

There are plenty of 100 year old companies doing basically what they did 100 years ago (Exxon, Coke, Hershey, Wells Fargo, etc.). They’re just not tech companies.

throwaway20377• 2 years ago

    > it was designed to take advantage of something that predictably happens every couple of hundred years.

Can you explain this more? Does it mean something like a gravity assist based upon the location of planets when the launches were done?

varjag• 2 years ago

Also numerous space probes did fail very early despite having design philosophy not very different from Voyagers.

eru12• 2 years ago

Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...]

You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

It's all about trade-offs, and many people have priorities that are different from 'last as long as possible'. Eg many computers from the 1980s are still perfectly usable today, but who would want to use them? I'm sure you can probably also still use your old rugged Nokia phone today, especially since they had easily replaceable batteries. But who would want to use a 25 year old dumb phone?

There are some enthusiasts which do use these old devices. And it's great that they can do so! Never say corporations don't deliver!

But by and large people have different priorities than wanting their obsolete tech to live forever.

bluGill2• 2 years ago

You can't use your 25 year old phone for more than a snake game. most 2g towers have been turned off to make room for 4g and 5g.

nyjah• 2 years ago

You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay

Not for everything. When I can do that I do, but it’s getting harder and harder to avoid subscription fees for everything these days.

iforgotpassword• 2 years ago

But that's stuff from 25 years ago. Try it, get a windows phone with version 8.1 from ebay now and see how far you get.

justinclift3• 2 years ago

You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

Adobe Creative Cloud (among many others) doesn't have that option.

InDubioProRubio3• 2 years ago

Do they though, or are they just powerless consumers with no real choice, besides the colour of the wrapping?

dns_snek2• 2 years ago

You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

Where do you buy long lasting stuff? This is a serious question, I'm looking for new appliances and I am willing to pay more, within reason.

Let's say I'd pay double of what an appliance with similar technical characteristics would normally cost, which I want to go towards higher quality materials, craftsmanship, and quality assurance. I expect such an appliance to work and and be economically repairable for at least 20 years.

As far as I can tell, this is nearly impossible. Many brands that used to produce higher quality products have downgraded the quality of their materials and craftsmanship in order to juice quarterly profits for investors. Their reputation seems to lag the quality of their products by about 10 years.

mppm2• 2 years ago

You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

Would that 'twere so simple. Most previously reliable premium manufacturers have jumped on the enshittification bandwagon. You can get better design and a more exclusive branding if you are willing to pay more, but where exactly would you turn if you are looking, for example, for a dish washer that will just work for the next ten years? Preferably one that doesn't come with cloud integration. There are still a very small number of ultra-premium brands that really care about their customers, but apart from being way too expensive for most people, they are increasingly hard to find. One of the side-effects of so many companies trading their reputations for "shareholder value" is that trust is eroded for everyone, including those that still deserve it.

tomcam2• 2 years ago

You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay.

Where do you recommend I buy long-lasting refrigerators, washers, and dryers?

cryptoegorophy• 2 years ago

Principal agent problem. Look at the final outcomes. Business exists to make money even if it means the most malicious ways (ex planned obsolescence), science project are not there to make money.

codexb• 2 years ago

I mean, the Voyager probes are completely proprietary. They’re completely custom, built for a unary purpose.

Building long lasting hardware makes a lot of sense when you expect to use that technology for a long time. I’m sure there was a time when people thought we’d be using steam power forever.

It makes less sense if the rate of technological innovations makes hardware or software obsolete every 5-10 years.

mikeweiss• 2 years ago

I'm not saying your wrong but it's also possible that technology whether created by public agencies or private companies is simply more complicated now and because of that .. more likely to fail over time.

bdcravens2• 2 years ago

It also helps to have $4.5B (in 2024 dollars) to spend on a project.

https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/voyager-spacec...

throwaway20377• 2 years ago

Not to mention that it has a chunk of highly radioactive plutonium that acts as a battery / power source. That whole thing is nuts that it got built, "shipped", and still works ~50 years later, approximately 1.21 jiga-kilometers away from Earth.

makmanalp• 2 years ago

It's not apples to apples of course but that's well within the ballpark of what spacex spends mostly just shooting stuff into orbit in a year: https://spacenews.com/spacex-and-the-categorical-imperative-...

Especially for a first time in all of humanity type of mission, half a century ago, which yielded brand new data on faraway objects we'd never had, and considering it's still going and reporting data, it's arguably a bargain basement price for such a thing.

suzzer99• 2 years ago

I'm 55 and still using my Onkyo receiver and Polk speakers from college.

onion2k• 2 years ago

Everything is designed to last between a few years and a decade, with the expectation that there's no point engineering for longer than that because something better will replace it by then. This feels bad but it's generally correct. Practically every aspect of technology is improving so fast there's little point trying to engineer things that last, because a stronger, cheaper, lighter, thinner thing will be available long before the thing has expired.

Agile is a response to this, not the cause.

Wurdan• 2 years ago

Planned obsolescence isn't only a thing with fast moving technology either. Engineers design bridges with a finite lifespan in mind as well, and it's not because they think there'll be a much better bridge in X years. It's just that the relationship between the expected lifespan of a thing and its cost to develop is exponential.

macspoofing3• 2 years ago

Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence

There is no such thing as "planned obsolescence". The trade-off is price vs quality. You can buy or source a hammer that will last you a lifetime, but will cost 10x the standard rate of hammer ... most people opt for the $20 option vs the $200 option, knowing full well, the $20 option may not last as long.

Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups.

Couple things here:

1) None of those are examples of 'planned obsolescence'.

2) You really do not want to have every software application built the same way you build software for NASA. It would make software development incredibly expensive and slow.

3) I think everyone agrees that Boeing has major quality problems when compared with Airbus. But again, not an example of 'planned obsolescence', and it is not necessary for Boeing to build software like NASA builds software for the space shuttle, in order to produce quality airplanes (with quality software).

if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell,

Huh? The software business is fully private. Most companies are not running on Novell because other businesses 'had their way' and competed.

InDubioProRubio3• 2 years ago

Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...]

We have that sort of- in open source by now. Basically the base implementation is free. But for more advanced extras you pay extra. Then the company providing the extras collapses and the extra becomes open source in one way or another.

0xEF• 2 years ago

Expanding a tiny bit on your point, from where I am sitting, it all be summed up with greedy, plain and simple...and extends further to Capitalism as a whole, not just corporate America. I work for a US-based manufacturing company that has customers around the world as the guy who fixes the things the engineers build when they inevitably break. I have encountered so many design flaws that could have been done far, far better but we're not, largely due to cost, that I have come to just expect it. This is admittedly sad.

Some other commenter mentioned we can have all these great long-lasting things if we "are willing to pay." We, the consumer my might be, but the manufacturer and distributer who makes the the product not only want to sell you something once, but want to sell it to you repeatedly while maximizing their profit margins. This would not be so bad if a good chunk of those yearly record profits reached the folks who were on the work floor actually making the product (thus allowing them to buy more expensive things) but instead, the money gets sucked up and stays up, while costs get passed on to the consumer who likely is not making enough to afford the longer-lasting version. Which, I guess is the point of Capitalism, in a nutshell.

8fingerlouie• 2 years ago

Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups.

I know of several ATMs that still run OS/2 2.1 or OS/2 Warp. They're a slow dying breed that is being replaced by Unix (Linux or similar), but they still exist. Chances are, if you're in Europe, and the ATM you're using is one of the "slow screen refresh rate" ones, it's still running OS/2.

h_tbob• 2 years ago

I really think competition is good in one sense.

But of you think logically from first principles, it makes no sense to have both an a320 and 737.

All this competition and “corporate greed” where we literally have two airplanes that are functionally identical rebuilt from the ground up is an huge, massive waste of human capital and enabled by the government through monopoly of copyright and patents.

While I think creators should get paid, I wonder if there is a better way to manage copyright that what we do.

I think the government granting this extreme of a monopoly on copyright is one of the weirdest things we tolerate.

There has to be a way where we can statutorily authorize copying at x% fee or something.

That way we don’t build two copies of the same thing!

reisse• 2 years ago

A320 and 737 are functionally similiar only in terms of "a flying machine moving you in the air at 900 kilometers per hour". Both Airbus and Boeing are exploring in a space of different design and engineering concepts, where there is no clear winner.

robertlagrant2• 2 years ago

if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running?

No, I doubt it. The businesses that make all the hardware and software that powers the internet are perfectly fine with it being an open protocol.

jwpapi• 2 years ago

Debugging must be fun

bargainbot3k3• 2 years ago

For the HN ultra-nerds: is there a book that details the voyager 1 construction including sensors, PCBs, materials compositions manufacturing processes and all that? I’m looking for something so dense I’ll need a therapist to find my way back to society afterwards. Truly curious thank you.

AlexDragusin• 2 years ago

This PDF (101 pages) should get you started: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19660011758/downloads/19...

dennis_jeeves2• 2 years ago

so dense I’ll need a therapist to find my way back to society afterwards

Well, at least you are self enlightened to recognize your flaw...

cryptozeus• 2 years ago

"So much universe and so little time" - Terry Pratchett

darwin11• 2 years ago

It's just amazing how little progress in space flight has been since then and since the Apollo missions. I was just looking at some newspapers from 1969 (saved by my mother-in-law) and it was all about the Moon mission, and what awaits us - they talked about settlements throughout the Solar system, flying cars and so on and so on. Given what happened since, it was a huge disappointment. And now ancient Voyager is our last best hope to explore the outer rim.

andyp-kw• 2 years ago

How much value are the Voyager's providing us at the moment, in terms of scientific data?

rebolek• 2 years ago

It's invaluable as we don't have any other probe at that distance.

peter_retief• 2 years ago

I still get a thrill everytime I hear that Voyager 1 is sending us messages.

I would rate it as the greatest experiment of modern times.

Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

Related Stories