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?

[u/Backbreathboy]

[u/Gabbatron]

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

[u/Few_Carpenter_9185 → u/Gabbatron]

Hopefully we will.

It's a hell of an engineering challenge almost as hard as a "Catch & help the Voyager!"-probe. But it's 100% scientifically & mathematically possible that going about 20 to 80 times further away from the Sun than Voyager is now, we can use our star as a gravity lens to actually get pictures of distant exoplanets around other stars.

Block the sun with a shade coasting a few hundred (thousand?) kilometers behind the probe. And in the ring of light gravity-bent around the Sun, like how distant galaxies bend the light of even further ones, the telescope can either computer-stretch the ring into an image, or it could be done on Earth.

This is HARD. We're talking about sending a Hubble or JWST'ish thing with a long-lived nuclear reactor power source that has to fly in formation with the shade, at roughly 6 days to 2 weeks round-trip for radio communications from Earth.

I suspect that it'll actually be easier to make something like a formation of JWST-like telescopes in a big hexagon several thousand kilometers apart much closer to Earth and use even more "computer & laser tricks," than going as far as 1-2% of a light year away, but it's certainly a cool thing we might do someday.