Voyager 1 is still transmitting from beyond the heliosphere on 22 watts — less power than the bulb in your hallway — and the engineers who built it in the 1970s never expected we'd still be listening half a century later.
spacedaily.com
On 17 April 2026, mission engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California sent commands to switch off the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment aboard Voyager 1. The instrument had been operating, almost without interruption, since the spacecraft left Cape Canaveral in September 1977. The shutdown was not a fault. It was the latest in a […]
    • Dave.@aussie.zone
      17·
      4 hours ago

      The beamwidth of Voyager 1’s antenna is about 0.5 degrees. In practical terms, that’s very narrow, about an 8 metre wide beam at a kilometre distance.

      At its current distance, by the time the beam reaches Earth it is 224 million kilometres wide, 1.5x the distance from the Earth to the sun.

      Now imagine the light from a car’s taillights lighting up the back wall of a garage as it reverses in. Then spread that same amount of light out over that 224 million km wide beamwidth. That’s what Voyager is putting out and what the Deep Space Network dishes have to listen for.

    • i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca
      22·
      19 hours ago

      The bulb was probably designed and manufactured by people who weren’t even born when Voyager launched. It’s wild how long and how far it’s been calling home.