I'm sure the warranties have long since expired. The probes launched 45 years ago have pushed the boundaries of space exploration going beyond their initial mission. Nasa had previously said that the Voyagers ‘were destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way’. But the radioactive plutonium-powered probes are losing energy by about 4 watts a year. ... initial projections had expected the Voyager mission to last just four years. ‘We’ve done 10 times the warranty on the darn things,’ Ralph McNutt, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told Scientific American. After 2030, Voyager will likely lose contact with Earth but both probes carry a 12-inch, gold-plated record that carries information from Earth. This includes 115 images, greetings in 55 different languages, sounds of the wind, rain, the human heartbeat and 90 minutes of music. In another 20,000 years, the probes will pass the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, with this time capsule of human life.
Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth Let's just hope that Lt. Ilia doesn't show up if and when communication with Voyager 1 is re-established.
Just the fact that both of the Voyager probes are still working, and sending data back is amazing. And that NASA had to call people out of retirement to assist in getting Voyager 1 is pretty wild. Voyager's signal strength, by the time it reaches earth is one billionth of one billionth of a watt. And that Voyager can receive signals, and can read the signal to allow engineers from NASA changes to it's computer is simply amazing.
Nice interview with one of the scientists working on the program about the repair effort. And as a reminder, the rocket James Burke points to in this famous shot: Voyager (actually Voyager 2, but still). Oh, and I think that it would be cool as fuck, if from now on, when NASA launched an interstellar probe it had one feature. This would be a yellow light on the left side of the probe that would come on once the probe could no longer do science, or had lost the ability to communicate with Earth.
Voyager 1 sends back science data from more than 15 billion miles away after NASA fix. The fix itself is pretty amazing, in short the programming for Voyager is stored partly on a single chip, the chip isn't working properly. So the fix was to divide the programming into separate areas on the fight data system. Amazing that this was done 15 billion miles away on a piece of technology that was built nearly 50 years ago.
Keeping Voyager Alive: NASA’s Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as the Iconic Mission Nears Its End
