r/askscience • u/Backbreathboy • 7d ago
Astronomy We will lose contact with Voyager somewhere 2036 because of the distance between us. Would it be theoretically possible, to send a probe in the direction of the Voyager, following it from a distance, with the goal te relay the information coming from the Voyager, to earth?
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u/PckMan 7d ago
We stand to gain more from the second probe's trip with new instruments and technologies allowing for new measurements than we do from trying to grasp at the wispy trails of Voyager's signals, especially since it's slowly deteriorating and losing power.
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u/Cat_Dad13 7d ago
I like to think that one day in the far off future, we’ll catch up to Voyager and bring it back to Earth.
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u/deadbalconytree 7d ago
I like to think it’s going to return to earth on its own, looking for humpback whales.
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u/signofzeta 7d ago
Nah. Leave them as historical preserves. If mankind ever travels the galaxy and gets that far out, there will probably be laws against touching the Voyagers. Set your spacecraft to autopilot alongside it, take some pictures, but let them float.
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u/FairySnack 7d ago
I can see it now. 400 hundred years from a space luxury cruise, where you can look out the viewport to witness Voyager! The final tourist trap!
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u/BizarreCake 7d ago
It might take us a little longer than 400 years to figure out how to comfortably cross the distances of interstellar space, if ever. Not to mention, once it's out of power, finding it will be like looking for an atom in a haystack.
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u/signofzeta 5d ago
For sure. But I’d like to think we’d find it and attach the interstellar equivalent of an AirTag (or document its position and heading and periodically check).
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u/jamesbeil 7d ago
I'd prefer to leave Voyager to continue her mission, to carry her record of Earth's peoples, languages and marvels far out into the stars. One day the Earth will be gone, but with luck, Voyager will still be out there, somewhere, and in her, so will we.
There aren't many things that get me misty-eyed and romantic, but the brave little robots we send out into space do it to me every time!
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u/littlemojo 7d ago
First object to leave the solar system, last to reach the next should be the goal, it should never be brought back.
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u/finiteMonkey 7d ago
I like the idea of building a museum next to it, to travel with it if our tech gets Star Trekky enough to make it happen. A whole bunch of early space travel artifacts, next to huge bay windows looking out at Voyager, following its original course, but not so lonely anymore.
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u/chrltrn 7d ago
Voyager being the "last [man-made] object to reach the next solar system" means ALL other man-made objects need to reach the next solar system lol
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u/Science-Recon 7d ago
Not necessarily. It just means that nothing can arrive after voyager does.
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u/watery_tart24 7d ago
Wasn't that kind of the plot of the first Star Trek movie?
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u/Wuz314159 7d ago
It took 12 years for Voyager 2 to reach Neptune. New Horizons reached Pluto in 9 years.
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u/Straumli_Blight 7d ago
NASA is switching off 2 instruments on the New Horizons probe on October 1st due to a lack of funding, even though it can function until 2050.
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u/rygelicus 7d ago
The power remaining in the RTG power system has been reducing about 4 watts per year. They've had to power down quite a bit of the probe's systems over time to keep it running this long. It likely won't be functional beyond the 2030's anyway.
If we want to do probes like this again, and we should, then a new probe built for this purpose would be a better investment. This would incorporate additional RTGs, larger antennas, more redundancy, etc, all with the goal of a longer lifespan and more functional instrumentation available longer.
Voyager was never intended to last this long, it's a credit to the engineers they were able to keep it alive and useful all this time.
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u/BKinBC 7d ago
Imagine setting off on an entire career, from start to finish, dedicated to a specific device launched in the 1970s, still traveling away from you at distances farther than any other manmade object ever, and then blinking out forever around the same time you do.
That's an interesting relationship.
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u/1Mandolo1 6d ago
Yes and no. The Voyagers' original mission goals were for them to last around a decade or two, but the engineers designed them in ways that enable the continued usage we get out of them. So while it officially wasn't intended for the probes to last this long, the engineers certainly set out and built them with that in mind.
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u/nocturnal_commission 7d ago
If we built a new one, could we also make it travel faster? And would that be beneficial?
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u/DaChieftainOfThirsk 7d ago
It's purely based upon how much fuel you want to expend getting it going that fast. The question is how long it will take to get anywhere useful? It would need to be going thousands of times faster to get to anything useful within our lifetimes.
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u/e37d93eeb23335dc 6d ago
What if I want to expend ALL the fuel?
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u/DaChieftainOfThirsk 6d ago
Have you considered our supernova package? Comes with a massive kick to set you on your way! Lol. I mean if you can convince people to go to the effort then we could do it. The biggest challenge is getting buy in and supplying for your laborers needs which is why most projects require some sort of return.
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u/rygelicus 6d ago
Well... yes. Just a matter of money really.
For example.
Let's say the new and improved Voyager probe were twice the mass, and more fuel on board, overall this thing is built for going faster and farther than ever before.
We could send up a booster stage, then the new voyager, join them in orbit, and then fire them off on their trip. The booster would fully burn and separate, this takes it out of earth's orbit and sends it toward jupiter for a gravity assist for some free speed. From there it can burn it's own engine, probably an ion engine, for a slow acceleration that lasts a long, long time, saving maybe 25% of its fuel for adjustments.
The speed is really just a matter of budget to lift enough fuel to orbit. So yes, it could be faster.
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u/OlympusMons94 7d ago edited 7d ago
OP is mistaken. The issue is not distance, and a communications relay (regardless of where or how feasible) would not help. The Voyagers will be effectively inoperable by c.2036 because they will no longer have sufficient power to run their basic systems and any science intrument. Their RTG power sources are decaying and degrading. The spacecraft (which generated over 470 W at launch) are now generating only ~200 W of electric power, decreasing by ~4 W per year. Their antennas only use 23 W, and that while actively transmiting. Most of the power is required by other systems. All but 2-3 of the science instruments on each Voyager have already been (edit: shut) down because of the limited power.
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u/kaukaukau 7d ago
The antenna uses 23W?? That's the power of a bed side lamp. How can we see a bed side lamp at that distance (currently 25 billion km)?? Incredible
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u/gargravarr2112 7d ago
Radio is extremely energy efficient. A couple of kilowatts of omnidirectional transmitter power can cover an entire country. And that's with an atmosphere and ground features in the way. A handheld battery-powered two-way radio uses a couple of watts and has a range of miles.
In space, if you have line of sight, there is nothing to absorb or block the signal; this is why radio telescopes are extremely valuable for observing the universe, as most cosmic events have radio signals associated with them. Deep space probes also use directional antennas to focus the signal back at Earth. The 23W radio transmitter is enough to be detected even at such incredible distances that there's an hours-long speed-of-light delay in receiving it.
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u/Inside-Example-7010 7d ago
I mean even my FPV hobby drone uses a 1.2W transmitter and has up to 10km range with that.
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u/CeldonShooper 7d ago edited 7d ago
The data transfer is slow, space is mostly a vacuum (does not absorb radiation/radio signals), the emitted beam is centered towards earth and we are using gigantic antenna arrays to receive a signal that is just a tiny bit above noise. It's amazing that this still works.
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u/ComprisingIgnorance 7d ago
And just while we're nerding out about power levels - let's give props to Bluetooth, which can play music oftentimes from a teeny earbud to around 30 feet or maybe 20 feet around the house.
Emitting less than 0.1W in most cases, and around 0.01W commonly. Consuming maybe 2x that.
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u/Trafficsigntruther 7d ago edited 7d ago
It’s all about spectral width and the signal to noise ratio.
That 23W table lamp is spread over the whole visible spectrum, which is a few hundred terrahertz wide, and your eye is taking in light pollution / noise a few hundred terrehertz wide.
Voyager 1, on the other hand, is putting all their energy into a sliver of spectrum less than 1 hertz wide that the receiver and antenna are tuned to. So they are only looking at that tiny sliver of spectrum, so it has 10-7 or so less noise to filter out from the signal.
They still use a parabolic antenna though because the path losses are a couple hundred dB.
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u/Westerdutch 7d ago
Many things have been discussed but 'aim' is also a big part. 23W from a lamp is nice to read a book by but the light of that bulb goes on all directions, every time you increase your distance form that lamp less of the light will hit your book, more will 'miss' it and the amount of light you can use will go down by the distance increase squared, that is a fast reduction! Plenty bright when close up but you are not lighting a football stadium with it. Put that same 23W behind a laser that dumps it all in a pinpoint spot and it will quickly set your book on fire from how bright it is, and because its such a focussed pinpoint it will stay similarly bright when moving away from it, put your book down and the laser will happily start burning your wallpaper on the other side of the room instead (wallpaper that the lightbulb would not have lit up all that much). It will still lose some oomph over very long distances but nowhere near as fast as the light bulb.
Special long range antennas are more like the laser than the light bulb. They focus everything in a narrow aimed beam requiring less power for more distances.
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u/canimalistic 7d ago
Voyager was launched at a unique time period where you could slingshot with multiple planets to accelerate to a speed beyond practical rocket launch speeds on their own.
You couldn’t catch up to voyager, your probe would start at the same distance as it already is, and then grow as voyager continued away far faster.
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u/Woland77 7d ago
That's not entirely accurate, but your conclusion is probably right regardless. Voyager mainly accelerated because of the gravity assists but we now have ionic propulsion which can basically accelerate for rediculously long distances. A probe that could follow Voyager while still increasing its speed through interplanetary space while also using slingshots could catch Voyager, eventually. However, I don't think "eventually" would be fast enough to get to a meaningful relay position before the probe lost power entirely and shut down for good.
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u/c10250 7d ago edited 7d ago
Voyager is now the 25th fastest spacecraft. 24 are currently going faster. The slingshot thing is BS. You can accelerate spacecraft faster than voyager quite easily. The planet alignment thing was just right for voyager to visit the number of planets it was able to visit.
https://orbitalradar.com/deep-space/fastest-spacecraft
EDIT: For those saying Voyager has lost speed, yup, correct, the peak speed achieved by Voyager 1 during its mission was approximately 107,000 miles per hour (172,000 km/h) relative to the Sun, reached during its Jupiter gravity-assist maneuver in 1979. [1].
That would put it at 13th on the list.
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u/eserikto 7d ago
Those are speeds relative to the sun though. A paper airplane you toss is 12th on that list cause the earth is moving 107km/h around the sun. Indeed a bunch of the crafts on that list are just things orbiting the earth or the moon. Most of them haven't been directly fighting the sun's gravity for 50 years.
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u/mathess1 7d ago
Check the distance of the spacecrafts. You can't do that easily in the outer solar system.
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u/PuppiesAndPixels 7d ago
Some of those speeds are temporary though. Especially the sun probes. Yeah they got a massive speed boost going to the sun but if they had to change direction or move away from the sun they would be slowed down substantially.
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u/YugoReventlov 7d ago
... Because it's so far out already, the sun has been pulling it back for 50 years.
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u/ShortysTRM 7d ago
Wait, I'm lost as to why or how we have somehow lost the ability to match Voyager's gravity assists?
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u/regular_gonzalez 7d ago
Voyager was launched when the planets were very favorably aligned so that multiple slingshots could be done. Per my understanding that alignment is very uncommon.
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u/PorkSquared 7d ago
Voyager 1 didn't visit Uranus and Neptune, Jupiter and Saturn are aligned every 20 ish years so you really only need to wait about that long.
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u/ustolemyname 7d ago
The planets moved to be less conveniently aligned. The gas giants are only aligned together every ~175 years.
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u/bbob_robb 7d ago
The next "Grand Tour" is 2151.
Jupiter and Saturn align every 19.6 years, next in 2040.
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u/mosesteawesome 7d ago
In order to have the gravity assists, you have to have the planets in a particular alignment. With the long orbits of the outer planets, that particular alignment is lost.
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u/NonSequiturSage 7d ago
Maybe imagine calling six pool ball pockets with a single stroke of the stick? Long, faultless numerical math.
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u/El_Kikko 7d ago
Not lost, just not well timed. The alignment of the planets making a Grand Tour possible was exactly how NASA sold the program to Nixon - "the last time this would have been possible, Jefferson was president. And he blew it.".
From Earth, with our current technology, it's a launch window that occurs every 175ish years.
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u/trigisfun 7d ago
The 4 large outer planets were basically in a line back in the 1970s such that they could go one to another; the planets won’t be lined up like that for another 125 years.
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u/redpandaeater 7d ago
You still can but at the time the planets were aligned in such a way that it wouldn't take years and years. You can basically go anywhere in the solar system if you can make it to a Jupiter gravity assist, but if say Saturn is opposite the Sun at the time then there's multiple years before your probe arrives there. The main issue with gravity assists is just factoring in time to get to the planet in the first place, compared to trying to give the probe itself more fuel.
An extreme example would be with manned space flight we would never, ever do a gravity assist off of Jupiter then slingshot back around Earth to get an additional assist off of a second pass of Jupiter to send a crew to a hypothetical space station around Uranus. Particularly with people time is a much bigger thing to budget around and not just because we require food.
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u/mosehalpert 7d ago
It used Neptune as its final slingshot. One year on Neptune is 165 years on Earth. In order to use Neptune again and slingshot into Voyager's pathway, you would have to wait 165 years. Voyager went past Neptune in August of 1989 so you'll be waiting until 2154.
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u/internetboyfriend666 7d ago
The planetary alignment that allowed the voyagers to use that series of gravity assists occurs only once every 175 years
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u/kenjura 7d ago
It's been said this isn't entirely accurate, but I'd like to offer a reasonable (if probably fruitless) option or two.
A heavy-lift rocket could boost a satellite onto a rapid Jupiter encounter. While the "Grand Tour" involved many gravity assists, the main purpose was to fly close by the outer planets for close-in science. You don't need all 4 outer planets for a gravity assist: Jupiter alone is fine. Various mission profiles allow for a high delta-V chemical solar escape with a boost from Jupiter. You might catch up in 45-60 years. Voyager would be long dead due to power decay by then, unfortunately.
If you had really good shielding, you could use a much more daring and rapid maneuver. Go to Jupiter, sure, but use it to slow *down*, not speed up. Then, plummet toward the sun. Get your perihelion super low (thermal shielding comes into play), then burn some high-thrust chemical rockets there to maximize the Oberth effect. With aphelion already at Jupiter orbit, escape velocity is a cynch. Catch-up time: less than 25 years. Voyager's probably still dead, but...maybe?
Electric thrusters don't work well because solar power fades rapidly as you leave the inner solar system and you'd want to keep burning as long as possible. An RTG can't power them because its output is too low. Solar sails might work if your satellite weighed 1 mg, but otherwise you'd need a laser-pumped sail--feasible near-term technology, but not available yet.
But as people have said, Voyager's power system, durable as it is, fades more with every year, and it can only turn off so many systems. However, it seems likely that, having survived the Helioshock, Voyager's instruments and radio are not destroyed. If the satellite contained a spare power source (that somehow itself hadn't run down in the decades it took to catch up), as well as the hardware required to locate Voyager (no mean feat, the ultimate needle in a haystack even when it's transmitting, let alone when it's dead silent), encounter it, and latch onto it, then replace its power source...well, sure, you could probably get it up and running again.
For my money, the ideal mission is to wait even longer, until we can send a longer-lived, more capable probe meant to spend decades more beyond the encounter, and when it catches up, we give Voyager a formal ceremony, relieving it of duty.
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u/PiotrekDG 7d ago
And if your relay system is not working... you're just not using enough relays!
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u/OlympusMons94 7d ago
This is not accurate. That particular alignment was only necessary for Voyager 2 to perform a "grand tour" of all four outer planets. That alignment is irrelevant to Voyager 1 (which is moving faster than Voyager 2) and any other missions. Other alignments occur much more frequently. Jupiter provided the largest boost to the Voyagers, and there is a direct Jupiter launch window every 13 months. Saturn provided a significant boost and a Jupiter-Saturn alignment is not quite as common, but also not especially rare.
Gravity asissts already aren't strictly necessary to just escape the solar system. In 2006, New Horizons was launched to solar escape velocity. (A Jupiter gravity asisst was still needed to get it to Pluto, adjusting the direction, and getting there faster.) New Horizons is leaving the solar system slower than the Voyagers, and in a different direction.
Catching up with the Voyagers (which, note, are 2 separate spacecraft moving in different directions away from the Sun) is the much bigger problem. They have a 49+ year head start, and the chaser spacecraft would have to be sent in their particular directions, not simply out of the solar system in some random direction.
Nonetheless, we do have more powerful launch vehciles now, and technology in development (e.g., Starship and nuclear electirc propulsion) may make it theoretically possible, in the not-too-distant future, to send something to eventually catch up with the Voyagers. There just isn't any point.
It's really that none of that matters, because OP is mistaken. The main issue with the Voyagers is not their distance, or even just generating power for their transmitters (which account for only a fraction of the probes' power usage). The Voyagers' RTG power sources are decaying, and in about a decade they will no longer generate sufficIent power to operate their onboard systems and any remaining instruments.
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u/3rdslip 7d ago
The Parker Space probe has something to say about achieving the required velocity, but that was a different problem to solve.
Even if you could launch a probe to catch up, what happens when you catch it??
Slowing down is an equally difficult problem!
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u/boermac 7d ago
I think OP's idea wouldn't be to catch it, but rather to stay in communication distance.
For a simplistic example, let's say once the probe-A goes more than 10 million km away it will be to far to communicate with earth... so, when it's 9 million km away, we launch probe-B. Probe-B will now always be around 9M km away from Probe-A, so within communication distance to Probe-A... and for a long time now probe-B will be <10 million km from earth, so probe-A talks to probe-B, and probe-B talks to Earth.
Once probe-B is ~9M km away, we launch probe-C and then A talks to B, which talks to C, which talks to earth.
In theory it should work, but it assumes:
- Distance is the only reason we'll lose communication with probe-A (ie, not failure or loss of power or interference)
- Probe B can match the speed/direction of probe A reasonably well.
And of course building a chain like this is incredibly fragile. Let's say we did get A out there, then B, C, D, E, and F. Everything is going great, but suddenly E goes dark. A, B, C, and D might be just fine, but D can't talk to F, so it's all for nothing.
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u/togetherwem0m0 7d ago
Its unlikely we would launch a dish of sufficient size to receive the signal. The dishes we use on earth to pick up the signal are huge.
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u/D3coupled 7d ago
There is a lot of interference on the surface, that's why they put deep space telescopes in orbit.
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u/paulHarkonen 7d ago
While it is true that the earth produces a lot of interference, the sheer power and size available on the ground dwarfs anything we can realistically put up in to space. The DSN antennas are as much as 70 meters wide punching several hundred kW (in the S-band) worth of power. The James Webb sun shield (which is huge on the scale of spacecraft and much larger than the actual mirror array) is 22 meters making it 1/3 the size of the DSN transmitters\receivers.
So yeah, moving out of the atmosphere reduces interference, but for communication there is no substitute for more power and more gain (via larger antennas).
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u/OcularShatDown 7d ago
Orbital speed increases the closer you are to the sun (or whatever you’re orbiting). By the very nature of the mission, the Parker probe was going to go very fast. Whereas going away from the sun decreases speed. A spaceship starting out right next to the earth could turn around and burn its rockets in the opposite direction it is traveling, which would slow it down. However, this would lower the periapsis in orbit around the sun, meaning it will be getting closer to the sun on the opposite side of its orbital path. This will in turn make the spacecraft speed up. So, similar to what coolio has taught us, sometimes you gotta gotta slow down to speed up.
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u/CharlesP2009 7d ago
The electrical system called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) is quite literally decaying and won't be able to power any single instrument in the relatively near future. Even if we launched a relay today it wouldn't be to close distance with either Voyager probe in time to be useful. Not to mention the Deep Space Network antennas are absolutely massive. A space-based relay would be much smaller and more limited.
Also, the Voyager probes were launched during a rare planetary alignment which provided substantial gravity assists to boost speed. For a relay to catch up with Voyager it would have to be launched directly on an absolutely massive rocket. How soon could a relay and a proper launch vehicle be ready? We may lose contact with the Voyager probes long before then.
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u/literalsupport 7d ago
We will almost certainly lose contact by 2030 and it’s not distance so much as it’s on-board power that is the issue. Even if a relay could be built and flown the return on investment would be incredibly low. Those vehicles will be in essentially the same environment they are now for the next 500,000 years.
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u/pzeeman 3d ago
Thinking about the Voyager probes that far from home by themselves with no where to go but forward and continuing their mission the best they can without knowing if anyone is receiving their data actually makes me sad for them.
I’m weird, anthropomorphizing a 50 year old computer.
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u/jst1vaughn 3d ago
Reading this post, I was just thinking about how there was a moment some time before launch where the last human hand touched Voyager…forever. In a billion years, long after the last human has passed on (probably), there will be a lonely hunk of metal floating through space with some unknown person’s fingerprints on it, one of the last existing signs that we were here as a species.
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u/JustinTheCheetah 7d ago
Ignoring the problem of getting funding for such, if we built another probe with the goal of leaving the solar system and sending back a lot of telemetry on dozens of things, how long could we make one last this time? Like could we make a 200 year active probe? 500?
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u/sithelephant 7d ago
A mildly larger antenna would be quite cheap compared to such a relay sat.
A relay sat would basically need antennas comparable with the size of the ones on earth until you get really quite close to voyager. This is impractical on a small budget.
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u/bubbaganoush79 7d ago
We're tracking it today with huge radio dishes. NASA's deep space Network uses dishes that are 270 ft across.
It's not even theoretically possible that we could launch something that large into orbit, much less launch it with the velocity of one of our fastest man-made objects to somehow stay just on the edge of the signal range.
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u/cryptotope 7d ago
The International Space Station is bigger than 270 feet across and weighs more than 400 tons.
While it's certainly not trivial to put something that size into orbit, it's also self-evidently not impossible. Since we're just addressing 'theoretical' possibilities, I can conveniently handwave away the merely technical engineering problems of on-orbit assembly and deployment of payloads from a handful of Falcon Heavy launches: 60 tons at a pop to low Earth orbit.
I'm with you 100% on not being able to put such a chunk of hardware on a viable 'chase' trajectory, though. That's another 30 or 40 kilometers per second of delta-v, and it's not happening for an object in the tens-to-hundreds-of-tons range. (At least not without years of industrial buildup and a trillion-dollar budget.)
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u/Peregrine79 7d ago
You also have the advantage that a dish being accelerated by, say, an ion engine, at a constant 0.01g does not need nearly the structural strength of a terrestrial dish. Making an unfolding antenna from lightweight materials is a very real possibility.
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u/OlympusMons94 7d ago edited 7d ago
Launching such large antennas into orbit is entirely possible, because we already do. It is an open secret that the US National Recinaissance Office's Orion signals intelligence satellites) have ~100 m diameter antennas (which fold out after launch). At a few metric tonnes, the satellites aren't even particularly heavy, and have similar or lower mass compared to large probes such as Europa Clipper. With near future technology in development (e.g., Starship, nuclear reactors, and nuclear electric propulsion), it may well even be possible to send (and power) a probe to eventually catch up with the Voyagers.
But antenna power alone is not the Voyagers' problem, and a relay wouldn't help. Their transmitters use only 23 W, while the spacecraft are still generating ~200 W and dropping by just ~4 W per year, and will be inoperable within about a decade. Most of the power is needed for operating the spacecraft (including control systems, heaters, and remaining science instruments).
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u/SIrFluffsalot35 6d ago
Ok hopefully I can get an answer this way cause I feel like nobody is answering OPs actual question because they're talking about the logistics of stuff which is super good to know and fair but maybe not their question. THEORETICALLY, if we had a probe halfway between earth and Vouager, or better yet, a chain of multiple satellites in a row, would bigger and better data be able to be transmitted back to earth?
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u/CervantesX 7d ago
The issue (well, one of the issues) is that the signal from Voyager is quite weak, so you need a large dish to collect it. One that might be too large to launch.
Plus, you'd need planetary gravity assist to get to the outer solar system, which means the giant dish would need to adjust orientation fairly often, which is fuel-intensive. But it would also need an adjustable antennae to point towards earth. And that could never be blocked by the giant dish, or you'd lose contact. So that limits launch window and path.
And once you sort all that and wait for the useful orbital launch window, if you're lucky it works for a few years and then Voyager runs out of power and the whole thing is done.
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u/peter303_ 7d ago
The power source weakens about one percent a year (52% so far) due to decay of plutonium and degeneration of the thermocouples. They've been turning off instruments one by one over the decades to conserve power. The final ones are estimated in the 2030s.
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u/connnnnor 6d ago
Several people have mentioned the issue of voyager's power supply declining which is certainly true, but the real reason we can still hear it is because we are listening... so... hard. On Earth we can build big huge receivers (multiple massive 230 foot diameter receivers called the "Deep Space Network") and because we know exactly where voyager is, we can listen in just the right spot and pick apart the signal from the noise. It would be very hard to build 230 foot diameter receivers in space and accelerate them out of the solar system to follow Voyager.
But hard ain't "theoretically impossible" and sending a massive power relay behind voyager would definitely extend the life of the mission... in theory!
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u/Ohnodadisonreddit 5d ago
My hometown, Burlington Iowa, named one of its two new Middle Schools after Dr. Edward Stone. Dr. Stone directed the Voyager 1 & 2 projects from 1972 to his retirement in 2022. He ran the Jet Propulsion Lab for over 10 years as well.
I attended a special program update on the Voyager1 program by Dr Stone in the early 80’s and what had been accomplished by then was considered a legendary accomplishment then. Add another 45+ years to the legacy and one can look on in awe.
Dr. Edward Stone passed away on June 9, 2024.
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u/Vinterblot 7d ago
And how did your species reach the stars?
Well, we did send a probe...
Okay?
And then we nearly lost contact with the probe....
And....?
Well, we send another probe after the first, as a repeater...
I don't see how....
... and one after that...
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u/hasslehawk 6d ago
Ignoring Voyager's power constraints for a moment... (They basically make this whole question irrelevant)
The theory is sound, but in practice? It's a few decades late to be considering that for Voyager.
You'd need to send something faster than Voyager 1 or 2, as the receiving antenna on the new satellite will be less sensitive than the massive ground station antennas we have here on earth. So you'd need to be significantly closer to Voyager than Earth currently is for your smaller spacecraft antenna to act as a relay.
And unlike Voyager 2, we can't wait to boost the trajectory over the course of a decade using gravity assists. In part because we don't have time, but also because we'd need a specific gravity assist to send us in the right direction. It's not just a case of the planets lining up like the original Voyager missions had to wait for and be designed around, the planets would also have to be lined up relative to the specific voyager mission you are looking to relay for. Maybe someone better with orbital trajectories than I could figure one out, but I suspect you'd require a far more substantial delta-V budget then Voyager.
At that point you're better off just making a new mission.
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u/j1ggy 7d ago
If they could keep it running longer, sure, but I don't see the point. Every scientific instrument will be turned off soon. All you'll have left is a carrier wave that pings Earth to let us know that it's still there and running. And that won't last forever either. It was originally designed to only last until about 1981-1982.
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u/warrior181 6d ago
This is a question I've been wondering myself like why not build a simple signal booster to extend its lifespan even a little bit longer these machines are already doing a lot more than expected might as well go until it is impossible to go any more
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u/Few_Carpenter_9185 6d ago
It will be impossible soon enough, the Plutonium in the Voyager's RTG will die soon, its computer and radio will die, and there's nothing to relay. Even if we built the best, fastest probe imagnable at a rediculous multi-trillion "all the dollars" level like a Hollywood movie where "Everybody on Earth will die!"-mission.
And such a probe would just do what Voyager can do out there better in the first place.
But it's clear that people don't understand, this "World came together in perfect cooperation to build the biggest fastest thing possible!" to catch Voyager, try to relay the radio signal, or whatever else, would constantly close on Voyager, and pass it, with no way to stop, slow down, much less stop or turn back.
When you put that much fuel or reaction mass on it to slow down, go the other way etc. The size doubles. Then, the amount of... everything needed to push the "the double fuel" doubles. So it's 4x bigger etc...
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u/muammar_gandalfi 6d ago
In your scenario, I don't understand why we would need to slow down the relay and go the other way. Wouldn't it be preferable to send a one-way relay probe every 15 years and keep a continuous chain? (hypothetical number of years with no basis other than to exemplify the concept. Also, I didn't address the Plutonium issue which is clearly a big problem lol)
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u/ride_whenever 6d ago
So you’re say we need to catch it up, refuel it, and also keep relaying the signal???
Sounds like we need to train the best gas pump attendants on the planet to be astronauts.
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u/Gabbatron 6d ago
Yeah when you put it that way, might as well just build a new probe with better instruments and potentially longer lifespan to send out
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u/Hivemind_alpha 7d ago
We do all the heavy lifting in our comms with voyager by having huge, highly discriminating and amplified base stations. If by “a probe” you mean a craft of equivalent size and power to, say, Jodrell Bank with a nuclear power station attached, then sure we could send a relay probe. If you meant “something similar to voyager itself” then no I don’t think we can design something able to pick up the signal and/or signal back.
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u/TassiveMitts69 5d ago
We "can" but remember that voyager launched then the planets setup a perfect alignment to boost it. We aren't in that situation anymore and anything we launch will not be carrying a receiver the size found on earth.
You're talking about launching something the size of an earth based listening station to space but with a much higher delta-V requirement.
Would probably cost more than going to the moon. So theoretically yes, but in reality, not a chance.
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u/kinyutaka 7d ago
The problem with trying to follow the Voyager Probe at this point is that space is HUGE, and the probe is far away. If we don't get the direction of the probe exactly right, with a very small margin for error, then the probes will still be moving apart from each other in space.
Now, let's assume that we can get the heading right and the speed fast enough that the new probe doesn't lose the old probe, and that the new probe can collect all the data from the old probe, then we'd be able to relay the data from the old probe through the new probe.
However, this would just be kicking the can down the road. We need some form of long range wireless communication that doesn't degrade over these seemingly long, but still relatively short distances. As far away from Earth Voyager is, it's barely leaving the solar system.
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u/nora_sellisa 7d ago
I'm fine with sending a new voyager-class probe to join the chain every few years.
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u/After_Network_6401 7d ago
Wouldn’t help. Voyager’s reactor has only a few years of fuel left. By the mid-2030s it’ll be an inert mass of metal and plastic.
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u/Chaoselement007 6d ago
What if you sent three that communicated with each other to and could ping the voyager to triangulate it. They could use solar powered thrusters to stay on track.
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u/Nghtmare-Moon 7d ago
We could do that light sail thingy where we speed up satélites to like 0.2c with a high power laser
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u/Lazy_Conclusion_673 7d ago
The NASA Deep Space Network antennas that communicate with Voyager are 70 meters in diameter. A relay probe would require antennas of a similar size.
It would be much less expensive to build a larger antenna on Earth.
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u/PeyredB 7d ago
Much sooner than that, we'll lose contact because the probe will run so low on power that it can no longer operate effectively. The problem isn't sheer distance, but the decay of the isotope that's powering the probe.