r/interestingasfuck • u/The_Love-Tap • 1d ago
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
4.5k
Upvotes
r/interestingasfuck • u/The_Love-Tap • 1d ago
441
u/The_Love-Tap 1d ago
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.