Voyager 1 (and Half Its Instruments) Are Back Online

Sky and Telescope ^ | May 31, 2024 | David Dickinson

[Chad C. Mulligan]

Engineers ROCK! Real engineers built and launched this thing before a lot of you were born. We were still using slide-rules. There was no Internet. Personal computers ran CP/M if you had one at all.

[cyclotic]

That’s cool. My son is an astronautical engineer. His first mission at NASA was scheduled to be a two year mission that launched the month he was born. 22 years later it was still active.

Actually it went dormant for a few years when a gyroscope failed. They managed to get it back active. It’s still operational.

[frank ballenger]

What about the reports a mysterious AAA space truck arrived and someone did some repairs and gave it a jolt with booster cables?
🛸👽🛰️⚡

[Blood of Tyrants]

Voyager’s plutonium power source is slowly dying, too.

[pburiak]

V’ger requires the information…

[crusty old prospector]

Way cool.

[Psalm 73]

That is 15,151,796,586 Miles from earth.

(I had to look it up- who he heck would know that?)

[ProtectOurFreedom]

That’s awesome! Congrats to your son.

My dad led the team at GE that built the power plant on both Voyager spacecraft. I remember him working on the project when I was in college and him showing me videos of the collision tests to verify the fuel casks would not split open if the launch failed and spew toxic plutonium all over the ocean.

Dad would have turned 100 this year.

[Roadrunner383]

Traveling at over 38,000 mph.

[Judge Bean]

Voyager 1 suddenly began sending a repeating gibberish, over and over again: The Voyager kept saying “My God, it’s full of stars”...

[airborne]

"Without the ability to replace the chip..."

I literally 'L'aughed 'O'ut 'L'oud at this line'!'(LOL!)

Go V'ger!!!

[Ronaldus Magnus III]

Almost every other day I access Robert Zimmerman at https://www.behindtheblack.com.

He is a right-thinking space aficionado. Most of the articles and reports are about space, with timely opinions about wokeness and blacklisting of real scientists.

For instance, he mentions that the two Voyager spacecrafts are the longest continually running computers in history. There is much, much more on his website, including podcasts with John Batchelor.

[Repeal The 17th]

[HYPOCRACY]

Thanks for that. He’s also a pretty good songwriter...

[Chad C. Mulligan]

Just capturing the measly 20 watt signal it sends from 15 trillion miles away is a feat.

[dfwgator]

But he can’t sing.

[Big Red Badger]

15 Billion——??
.
That’s Mars correct?
.
Tough little vehicle!

[Chad C. Mulligan]

Zimmerman is an writer/editor for Sky and Telescope. Have read his articles pretty often there.

[plain talk]

The Voyager I engineering was quite good.

I was wondering how close it will ever get to any star systems. This depiction from wikipedia is a bit hard to read but sort of gets at that question. It will remain in interstellar space for a long, long time. Not sure any alien probes (if they exist at all) would detect it for a long time but who knows?

[Tell It Right]

Amazing! You have reason to be proud of your father.