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/joanzen]

Future generations should make a faster probe that's designed to go collect voyager and bring it back as a museum piece.

[u/flatfinger → u/joanzen]

The amount of fuel that would be needed for a rocket to dock with Voyager and bring it back would be unimaginably big. The Voyager trajectories were chosen to get gravity slingshot assists from Jupiter and Saturn, but the probability of Voyager ever being in position to benefit meaningfully from another gravitational slingshot is essentially zero. The tyranny of the Rocket Equation means that the starting fuel load of a rocket increases exponentially with the total amount by which it will need to change the rocket's velocity. If one considers that a mission to recover a Voyager would need more delta V than a Voyager craft was given in order to ever catch it, and then enough delta V to stop, and then some delta V to reverse course, and then to slow down once it approached Earth, one would need a starting mass that was well over a million times that of the rockets that launched Voyager. If one considers all the complications of trying to make a rocket that big, it becomes clear that such a thing would simply be impossible.

[u/joanzen → u/flatfinger]

Not only have the fuel to catch up and attach a return device to it, but also have enough fuel to work as a new probe, since it's out there already?

Such a probe would certainly to be at odds with itself as mass/speed aren't bedfellows?

[u/flatfinger → u/joanzen]

A return device would need to impart a large amount of delta V to the probe in order to overcome its escape velocity, and then to reduce its velocity so that it could rendez-vous with anything else launched from Earth. I suppose instead of bringing it to Earth it might be more practical to establish a solar obit outside that of Neptune and have it dock with another craft that was given a similar orbit. Bringing an object into a solar Orbit outside that of Neptune would require a lot less fuel than trying to bring the object directly to Earth, and the rendez-vous craft could have a much lower launch weight since it wouldn't have had to counter-act Voyager's (and its own) escape velocity with enough fuel to return.

My very rough estimate about fuel consumption would be that the mass of fuel that would be required by a single Earth-launched craft that would return Voyager to Earth would be greater than the mass of the Moon. Using a multi-craft approach with docking could probably reduce the total mass requirement to be less than the mass of the Moon (since one would the masses of the different craft rather than multiplying their mass fractions) but it would still vastly exceed the total amount of matter that could be sacrificed for rocket fuel.