Vocal Voices

NASA is preparing to power down Voyager 1 and 2 now that they are in interstellar space.

They are now into year 44 of what was originally a five year mission and their plutonium "batteries" are running out so things need to be switched off over the next few years.

I know they are only bits of metal and plastic but it would be a touching tribute if a link could be kept going till 2027 in order to wish them a Happy Golden Jubilee and to leave them to "boldly go" where no spacecraft has gone before.

They don't build 'em like that anymore.

https://news.sky.com/story/nasa-prepare ... s-12635485

They weren't supposed to build them like that then either. They put forward a huge program to Congress based on the planetary alignment which would give them enough gravity assist to do what they needed to do. It was pared down to Voyager.

Apparently they took parts of a much higher spec and longer life so long as they did not exceed 25% over budget. The satellite computers sported 64k of ram, unheard of outside of large computer systems at the time. They used 8 track stereo to store the images before transmitting, line by line, the images back to earth.

Even more interesting to me was that instead of trying to use colour cameras, very new and expensive at the time, they used 3 cameras with a different one of RGB filters on then used computer software to make colour images.

As I understood it they were powering down unnecessary stuff in order to keep comms open for many years to come.