What a badass little craft to have kept operating for so long. 🫡
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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NASA's Voyager engineers are like the final evolution of your uncle that keeps his 1974 Chevy C/K running at 400,000 miles. It's the same autism across an ocean of resources.
Actually basically yes. NASA has had decades of practice at minimum viable operation capability, making their spacecraft and rovers all but drag themselves along even when anything else would stop working.
It is amazing they can detect and communicate to something with such a weak signal so far away.
RTGs are subject to the issue of half-life - this is a consequence of that type of power source. Though, let’s be honest: we do not have any other sort of power generation technology that would be viable for literal decades on an interstellar space probe. And we definitely didn’t have a better alternative when they were launched.
Just use two of them!
For roughly three milliseconds I thought to myself they shoulda used solar panels instead.
"Oh, wait...."
Well they could power a lamp that shines on the solar panels.
When is the next conjunction of planets that enabled the Voyager missions happening and are we preparing for it?
The Voyager mission launched in 1977. If I recall correctly, it takes roughly 80 years for the planets to realign for that purpose. If I didn't misremember, we're about halfway through waiting.
which would shut down components on its own to safeguard the probe, requiring recovery by the flight team — a lengthy process that carries its own risks.
Uhhh... how the fuck are you planning on recovering it?
would be great to have some solar that would power a beacon or something if it ever entered another star system.
Radiation and cold would have killed any electronics long before it would get to another system. And with the electronics dead, nothing would be able to tell the beacon to activate.
it would destroy them so when heated and energized they would not work?
Tick tock, unfortunately.
Only delusion separates us from the same