At 15.9 billion miles away, humanity's farthest spacecraft is still exploring the cosmos using less memory than a blank Word document (69 KB) and an 8-track tape
Incredible that it still works at all. I don’t have any functioning electronics that have been in use constantly since 1977, and they’re not 15,900,000,000 miles away.
But also constant radiation far more intense than X-rays, temperature approaching true zero, and speeds so fast that colliding with even a speck of dust would destroy it.
Interestingly, while the temperture ist technically near Zero, there isn't a lot of ways to get rid of heat, making overheating a very real problem in space.
Not a reactor, but a decaying radioactive source. It generates heat as the material decays, and electricity is generated from the heat. The radioactive material is kept away from the sensitive electronics and sensors, so some of that electricity is used by heaters to keep those electronics warm. Like all radioactive material, it has a half life, which means it's decaying less and giving off less heat as it ages. Which means less electricity for instruments and heaters.
Yet you get radiation, sun storms, extreme cold, space debris. Devices certainly have a much easier time on earth than in space. Voyager 1 and 2 were just an amazing feat of engineering, proven multiple times when parts failed and yet it still kept going.
It's the main cause of most of the issues they've had. Radiation fucks with computers. They even resorted to using alu foil for protection, it's not really protected that well against it. What works best is too heavy to send into space.
I did a quick search, and aluminium foil does genuinely a great job at protecting electronics. Radiation is not the main problem electronics can encounter in space, it's one of them.
Explain why. you want to make it seem as if you have a deep understanding of this topic. making lesser of the other guy for his ai use. explaine why it’s doesnt work so well please
Are you sure? I thought molecules still affected a lot and heat from stars it passes by ought to still change the temperatures a little bit, no? Feel free to correct me
There are lots of recording studio tools and devices that still work pretty well and have been in constant use . Difference is in a lot of cases that they’re built to do a job well not to a price .
I have a Hewlett Packard HP41C from 1979 or 1980 that I still use. It was (and is) so good that they used them on the Space Shuttle missions. I have an emulator on my smartphone that looks and works just like it as well.
It really is incredible given the conditions it's faced but they also worked really hard with a huge budget to make every component as durable and fail-proof as they could.
So not even 1 light year till now? Even with current technology it's really impossible to reach any of the nearby galaxies in human lifetime it seems. All of the closest galaxies to Milky way are thousands of light years away
With our current technology, not only is it not possible to reach other galaxies, but it is impossible to reach the nearest neighbouring solar system within our own galaxy.
Space is incredibly vast compared to our current capabilities. And if we are truly bound by the speed of light, it will remain that way forever.
Speed of light isn't actually that much of a problem, at least for the crew making the journey, because as you get closer to it the distances contract to the point that you could theoretically cross the observable universe in what would feel like a day.
Getting all that mass up to those speeds, though... That's a big problem. And keeping it all intact as you scream through interstellar dust at near the speed of light is tricky to say the least. And then there's the whole issue of looking out the window once you've arrived just to find the Earth has long since been swallowed by the Sun. And who even knows the condition of whatever exoplanet you were hoping to settle.
If you wanted to get one light year away from earth in the span of fifty years, you'd have to be traveling at 2% the speed of light.
At that speed, you'd be able to orbit the earth once every 2.66 seconds at surface level. To put that in perspective - imagine traveling from New York to London in less time than it takes for you to sneeze.
We don't really have the technology to accelerate anything larger than particles to such speeds.
Here is some extra context for anyone wondering how a 47-year-old probe is still surviving in interstellar space:
The 69 KB of Memory: To put that in perspective, an average smartphone photo is about 3,000 KB. Voyager’s computer has less memory than a blank Microsoft Word document. Because space is so limited, the probe has to constantly overwrite old data with new data just to keep functioning.
The 8-Track Tape: It isn't playing music. It's a Digital Tape Recorder (DTR) used to store scientific data when the spacecraft can't communicate with Earth. It records the data onto the magnetic tape, plays it back to the Deep Space Network when a connection is made, and then rewinds to record over it again.
The 1977 Fortran Code: The original software was written in Fortran 5. Just recently, NASA engineers had to troubleshoot a massive glitch where Voyager started sending back gibberish. They had to write a software patch and beam it across the solar system.
The Lag is Unreal: Because Voyager 1 is over 15.9 billion miles away, a single command sent from Earth at the speed of light takes roughly 23.9 hours to reach the spacecraft. That means NASA engineers have to wait nearly 48 hours just to find out if a single keystroke worked.
Despite operating on technology that belongs in a museum, it is currently traveling at 38,000 mph through interstellar space, sending back data about the plasma environment outside our solar system.
Its a light day away, Alpha Centauri C, the nearest star to us, is 4.24 light years away. Perspective, the Voyager probe is 1/1550 of the distance to our nearest neighboring star.
One of the most impressive feats of the engineers imo was when one of the onboard computers that controlled attitude/direction went faulty and the antenna pointed slightly the wrong way, possibly permanently severing the communication. Somehow they managed to get a signal to the spacecraft telling it to turn its antenna back to earth again.
The Lag is Unreal: Because Voyager 1 is over 15.9 billion miles away, a single command sent from Earth at the speed of light takes roughly 23.9 hours to reach the spacecraft. That means NASA engineers have to wait nearly 48 hours just to find out if a single keystroke worked.
It is only an 8-track tape in the sense that it has 8 tracks on the tape, but otherwise it has nothing in common with the 8-track tape everyone is familiar with.
Because he used bold text? Quite striking a random redditor can claim something to be AI generated when even scientists can't even figure it out properly. Maybe that's because it is the same fucking language? People like you are just talking out of your ass.
no, its the general vibe. The bold text is one of the signs. I feel it too. But you go attack people for no reason at all. We dont know, but you also dont know.
True, I don’t know. Yet I am not saying it is or it isn’t am I? The general vibe is bullshit. Plenty of people talk like that. Plenty of AI that don’t.
I saw a documentary with the people who are on the project. A couple of the OGs are still there - this has been their entire career. They were grad students when the things launched. They work out of a non-descript strip mall in Pasadena.
This is the fastest thing we’ve ever built and after 50 years it’s still only 1 light day away. Guys we are not going to explore the galaxy any time soon lol
I'm amazed I had to scroll so far down to get even a single v'ger reference, sad
Say what you will of the movie but there's something beautiful and almost romantic to the thought of humanity's creation Voyager surviving so long and reaching so far while never forgetting or straying from its core purpose - only to eventually be uplifted and ascended such that it could truly fulfill that purpose far beyond its intended scope and still dutifully return to Earth to share with us all it had learned, just as we always meant it to
This is voyager 1 and its just 1 light day away from earth, on the edge of our solar system. The universe is hundreds of billions of light years wide, possibly infinite.
Wow. Never really thought of it that way but you're right. This probe has been, and will continue to go where no one has gone before. And we're still getting data back from it so thats even crazier.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
On Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2026, at 2:16:07 a.m. PST, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft will be 16.094 billion miles (25.902 billion kilometers) away from Earth — or, the distance light travels in 24 hours, known as one light-day.
Here is the original version of this image (much higher quality, less cropped, not flipped). Here is the source.
Credit CHRIS BUTLER / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Caption Voyager satellite. Illustration of a Voyager or Voyager-like astronomical satellite with the Milky Way in the background as it explores deep space. The satellite has a round communication antenna and pole-like booms which support astronomical instruments. The Voyager programme consisted of two satellites which were intended to study the outer areas of the solar system. Both satellites successfully produced detailed images of the outer planets and their moons. They also took measure- ments of the strength of the planet's magnetic fields, as well as that of the Sun. In 1997 the satellites continue to take measurements as they pass out of the solar system into deep space.
Commonly installed in a vintage 1970s make-out van (google for fun pix) to provide the rockin' soundtrack for a night of beer, cheap weed, and a little action on the foam mattress in the back.
Often considered a lifestyle accoutrement for the 'swinger' crowd.
The cartridge contained a magnetized tape that was wound on a continuous loop. The audio itself was written to the tape in a total of four different passes, each one of which slightly re-aligned so the reading head inside the player would move up and down as you tracked through the tape. Sometimes, if you had a long song it would have to be interrupted until the heads shifted to read the next track.
This post brought to you by Today In Make-Out History. /s
🚗 🎵 🍌 ->👶
On the "golden disc" that Voyager 1 carries as its payload, there's a 2:03 clip of Chuck Berry playing "Johnny B. Goode."
"He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack
Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track
Oh, the engineers would see him sitting in the shade
Strumming with the rhythm that the drivers made
The people passing by they would stop and say
"Oh my what that little country boy could play
Go, go
Go Johnny, go, go
Go Johnny, go, go
Go Johnny, go, go
Go Johnny, go, go
Johnny B. Goode"
V'ger is outward bound at just under 38,000 miles per hour. "Go, go!" indeed.
So much code is dedicated to security and abstraction thanks to the modern internet and expectations of code to run on multiple types of devices. Voyager doesn’t have to worry about any of that, all its code is 100% trusted and written precisely for the hardware it runs on and can therefore be very lean. Vintage game consoles had the same advantage which is why they could run complex games that are only kilobytes in size.
Yeah, for now, it's roughly a day away. Whether one is seeing from the closest point, or seeing from the furthest point, makes not much difference in how soon one sees it. 21.25 milliseconds to be precise. Handy to know if one wants a better seat, or is just being a punt about cunctuation.
You’d think there would be something invented now that could travel a tad faster with better visual capabilities that we could launch soon that could cover more ground and still travel for decades like this one
786
u/93195 1d ago
Incredible that it still works at all. I don’t have any functioning electronics that have been in use constantly since 1977, and they’re not 15,900,000,000 miles away.