Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles from Earth

D

drhowarddrfine

Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles from Earth, running on less memory than a single photo in your camera roll.
69 KB. That's the whole brain.
Its data gets saved to an eight-track tape. The software is Fortran code from 1977, back when "the cloud" just meant weather.
And it's still out there doing its job. Every command NASA sends crawls across the dark for almost a full day before it lands, and the old thing answers.
Meanwhile your brand new laptop froze because you opened too many tabs.
They really don't build them like that anymore.

From a post on stupid Facebook.
 
Apart from the spacecraft itself, the other part of this that seems incredible to me is that we can still talk to it, and it can still talk back to us, at that distance. Even if it's only 110 baud, or whatever the low data rate is. It's a long, long way away from here...
 
And the comms link https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/ne...ary-celebration-long-distance-communications/

"Thirty-eight hours ago, a 20 kW signal was transmitted from Earth towards the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Nineteen hours ago, the signal was received by Voyager 1 and returned by a 20 Watt transponder. And, as I write this article, a station in Madrid, Spain is receiving that return signal at a power level of 9×10−23kW=9×10−8pW (-160.48 dBm.) For reference, a very good FM radio receiver can pick up signals at 9×10−5pW, the signal received from Voyager is 1000 times weaker."

I bet that dish in Madrid has a good LNA...
 
Imagine it approaches the earth again from the other side. CERN: "the universe is repetitive digitally generated to decrease memory content redundancy"
 
MG said:
Imagine it approaches the earth again from the other side. CERN: "the universe is repetitive digitally generated to decrease memory content redundancy"
Click to expand...
In that case you will hear the RAMBUS lawyers sharpening their pencils.
 
Interestingly, the board computers of Voyager 1/2 are the only ones which are tamper proof, according to our professor from university.
Because, you would need to get your hands on them first.
 
Voyagers Bordcomputer, in german, but you may be interested in the links at the page's bottom, where I also found this:
Voyager and Fortran 5: Programming Voyager's Onboard Computers
I quote: "5. So What Language was Used? Assembly Language(s)!"

This is also nice: (NASA does nice things, though)
Mission Updates

(I was capable to find that with classic ddg search without asking AI chatbots. 😜)
(Still waiting for some paranoid cowboy's comment, that the golden record will attract aliens to attack us. 😂)

Recently on HN, also this: Space Now

Enjoy! :beer:
 
CraigW said:
Thought I read somewhere this week, It was finally 1 light day away.
Click to expand...
According to Wikipedia Voyager 1 is app. 25.72 billion km from Sun (Oct. 8th, 2026), which was 15.99 billion miles. Substracting Earth Sun distance would make Voyager 1 app. ~15.98 billion miles from Earth, when Sun, Earth and Voyager 1 are in one line.
(I used the english landmile for conversion, since I don't know [and frankly don't care] who measures what when in which mile: english, London, (US) american (west or east coast), prussian, roman,... land-, sea-, nautic-, survey-, statute- or whatever 💩 mile. We are in 2026. It's SI, it's THE meter: The distance light travels in vacuum during 1/299792458 second, and not the length of some horse racing track somewhere in England in 1780.)

Also according to Wikipedia a lightyear is 9.46 trillion km (you do the conversion in mile, fathom, feet, hand, finger, cable, pace, yard, chain, shackle, league, span, ell, rod, furlong, shaftment, ... whatever you prefer yourself.)
Let's do the "math":
d_(V1-Earth)/ly =
27,720,000,000 m / 9,460,730,472,580,800 m = 0.00000293
That's kind of a bit less than 1 ly.
Or: To reach its first lightyear Voyager 1 needs to travel 34k times the distance it has already travelled again. I guess nobody here will witness that.

You may question the source of what you read, sometimes look things up, and sometimes use a calculator (the thing directly in front of you is a pretty good one 😁) before you believe something. 🤓:cool::beer:
 
CraigW said:
Thought I read somewhere this week, It was finally 1 light day away.
Click to expand...
and that they use kermit to talk to it.
Maturin said:
According to Wikipedia Voyager 1 is app. 25.72 billion km from Sun (Oct. 8th, 2026), which was 15.99 billion miles. Substracting Earth Sun distance would make Voyager 1 app. ~15.98 billion miles from Earth, when Sun, Earth and Voyager 1 are in one line.
(I used the english landmile for conversion, since I don't know [and frankly don't care] who measures what when in which mile: english, London, (US) american (west or east coast), prussian, roman,... land-, sea-, nautic-, survey-, statute- or whatever 💩 mile. We are in 2026. It's SI, it's THE meter: The distance light travels in vacuum during 1/299792458 second, and not the length of some horse racing track somewhere in England in 1780.)

Also according to Wikipedia a lightyear is 9.46 trillion km (you do the conversion in mile, fathom, feet, hand, finger, cable, pace, yard, chain, shackle, league, span, ell, rod, furlong, shaftment, ... whatever you prefer yourself.)
Let's do the "math":
d_(V1-Earth)/ly =
27,720,000,000 m / 9,460,730,472,580,800 m = 0.00000293
That's kind of a bit less than 1 ly.
Or: To reach its first lightyear Voyager 1 needs to travel 34k times the distance it has already travelled again. I guess nobody here will witness that.

You may question the source of what you read, sometimes look things up, and sometimes use a calculator (the thing directly in front of you is a pretty good one 😁) before you believe something. 🤓:cool::beer:
Click to expand...
I said one light DAY.
 
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