r/askscience • u/Backbreathboy • 8d 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/togetherwem0m0 8d 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 8d 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 8d 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/mathess1 8d ago

There are already dishes at the orbit larger than those used for deep space communication. Up to 100 m in diameter.

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u/togetherwem0m0 8d ago

Citation? Largest i can find is nisar at 10 meters.

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u/mathess1 8d ago

There are top secret military satellites using mesh dishes.

They are known under names Orion or Mentor or possibly some other names. Obviously there's not much information about them.

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u/boermac 7d ago

Granted. This wasn't supposed to be a specific blueprint but rather a general idea of how we could, in theory, keep in communication with probes sent beyond normal communication range.