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"
 
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