Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.
NASA’s Voyager engineers are like the final evolution of your uncle that keeps his 1974 Chevy C/K running at 400,000 miles. It’s the same autism across an ocean of resources.
Actually basically yes. NASA has had decades of practice at minimum viable operation capability, making their spacecraft and rovers all but drag themselves along even when anything else would stop working.
What a badass little craft to have kept operating for so long. 🫡
RTGs are subject to the issue of half-life - this is a consequence of that type of power source. Though, let’s be honest: we do not have any other sort of power generation technology that would be viable for literal decades on an interstellar space probe. And we definitely didn’t have a better alternative when they were launched.
For roughly three milliseconds I thought to myself they shoulda used solar panels instead.
“Oh, wait…”
which would shut down components on its own to safeguard the probe, requiring recovery by the flight team — a lengthy process that carries its own risks.
Uhhh… how the fuck are you planning on recovering it?
When is the next conjunction of planets that enabled the Voyager missions happening and are we preparing for it?
would be great to have some solar that would power a beacon or something if it ever entered another star system.
Radiation and cold would have killed any electronics long before it would get to another system. And with the electronics dead, nothing would be able to tell the beacon to activate.
it would destroy them so when heated and energized they would not work?
Tick tock, unfortunately.
