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Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response. I’m guessing “hotfix” commits don’t exist in this domain
How is it possible to still be able to get a signal from a spacecraft that's so far away? How can the antenna be directional enough while still being pointed right at the Earth? How do we remove the noise?
Signal processing algorithms can pull out a signal from well below the noise floor these days. Even the small and nondirectional antennas on your phone are good enough to receive GPS signals even all the way down at -125 dBm, which is WAY less than your phone receives in interference from random radio stations and faulty LED bulbs nearby. The tech used to receive Voyager signals is not really different, just more sen…
But I have always been inspired by the ingenuity of the engineers in first designing spacecraft that have lasted so long and gone so far beyond their original mission parameters, and secondly keeping these two machines operational across so much time and distance in such a hostile environment.
Thank you Voyager team present and past; you’ve helped inspire so many young people to STEM careers, and you’ve done so with a project that shows the very best of the curious and inventive side of humanity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> farthest man-made object that we know about and actively track
The manhole cover from Operation Plumbob? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
But this doesn't account for the earth's orbit at 30 km/s. So depending on the launch orientation to orbit, the manhole cover could either still be in orbit around the sun, or have a velocity of up to 43 km/s at escape. So it's possible, if it didn't get vaporized, that is.
A less alarmist and clickbait article can be found here: https://www.popsci.com/science/voyager-computer-issue/ NASA press release here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-... TL;DR - Voyager is sending back bad data, they're working on it.
Popsci can be kinda clickbaity too, but CNN's title is just shameless.
How is it possible to still be able to get a signal from a spacecraft that's so far away? How can the antenna be directional enough while still being pointed right at the Earth? How do we remove the noise?
Voyager 1 has a large 12-foot diameter directional radio antenna that it keeps pointed at Earth. If you look at photos of Voyager, the antenna (the big dish) basically is most of what you see: it's bigger than everything else on craft. There are radio antennas across the Earth listening to its very weak signal. More details: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calcu...
This is an absolutely terrible headline. Voyager is communicating with Earth, full stop. The data from it's scientific instruments is coming back in a fixed, repeating pattern, meaning we aren't getting anything meaningful from it, but it is absolutely still communicating with Earth.
Communication means an exchange of information. Receiving a signal does not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Signal processing algorithms can pull out a signal from well below the noise floor these days. Even the small and nondirectional antennas on your phone are good enough to receive GPS signals even all the way down at -125 dBm, which is WAY less than your phone receives in interference from random radio stations and faulty LED bulbs nearby. The tech used to receive Voyager signals is not really different, just more sen…
Slightly larger antennas, too.