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 […]
  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
    51·
    13 hours ago

    That was back when bulbs lasted almost forever until they changed them so they’d break earlier so you’d have to spend money to buy more bulbs. Voyager is like the bulbs of old.

    • scibra122@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      10 hours ago

      Carrying water for incandescent bulbs on the basis of their reliability is wild. Yeah, several companies have taken advantage of the conception of lightbulbs as a disposable good to cheap out on LED bulb construction until they are also disposable, but they did that so successfully because changing incandescent bulbs was such a common occurrence, it was the template for a proto-meme joke. Not everything in the past was better than things today

      • Don_alForno@feddit.org
        2·
        5 hours ago

        Changing incandescent bulbs was common because they lasted to long in the past and were intentionally made less reliable to make more money. It’s a cascade of enshittification at this point.