The two Voyager spacecraft have been traveling in space for close to 46 years.
Their power levels have dropped by about 50%, various instruments have been selectively shut off, yet the spacecraft continue to keep on going and going, sending back valuable science data from interstellar space.

Here are the locations and some vital stats on the two Voyager spacecraft, which were launched on Sept 5, 1977 and Aug 20, 1977 resp.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-new-horizons-reaches-a-rare-space-milestone
#Voyager #Space
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Of course, this is not the first time the twin Voyager spacecraft have been out of contact with earth. There have been computer glitches and comm. outages before. But nothing NASA engrs. cannot fix.

The longest outage, ~11 months long, was experienced by Voyager 2 in 2020-2021, during upgrades to the 70-m antenna at the DSN site in Canberra, Aus. During this period, commands could not be sent, but data was still received using three 34-m antennas.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=121
#Voyager #Space
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Let's contemplate for a moment that the computing resources on the Voyager spacecraft are from the 1960s, with clock speeds measured in KHz and RAM in kbytes, running hand-crafted software, crammed into 4K of 18-bit wide plated-wire memory (similar to but better than core mem).

The custom-designed hardware and (upgraded) software (and most instruments) are still functioning after 46 years in space!

https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html
https://hackaday.com/2018/11/29/interstellar-8-track-the-low-tech-data-recorders-of-voyager/
#Voyager #Space #Science #Computers
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