Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire NASA brings Voyager 2 back online over 11 billion miles from earth

Lol

lol, yes, we also used to say "We can put a man on the moon and bring him back, but we can't get a college basketball scoreboard to work for a full 1/2 of a game"

My newest amazement; we can put LED lights on a pickup truck that are guaranteed to last 25 years, but show me 3 new GM vehicles in a row that have all of them actually working!!!.

The best available at the time...



Radio Shack, of course!

The Voyager probes do not rely on solar power - they are old-fashioned nuclear-powered probes!

They are each powered by three MHW-RTGs, with heat from nine RHUs (Radioisotope Heater Units).

The Multihundred-Watt radioisotope thermoelectric generators (MHW RTG) is a type of US radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) developed for the Voyager spacecrafts, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.
Each RTG had a total weight of 37.7 kg including about 4.5 kg of Pu-238. It uses 24 pressed plutonium-238 oxide spheres and provides enough heat to generate approximately 157 watts of electrical power initially - halving every 87.7 years.
Collectively, the RTGs supplied each Voyager spacecraft with 470 watts at launch.
An RHU contains a Pu-238 fuel pellet about the size of a pencil eraser and outputs about 1 Watt of heat. (The entire RHU is about the size of a C-cell battery.)

Absolutely correct, Blackbat. Thanks.

One reason why the Voyager missions will last only a few more years is available power from the RTGs. The other is pure distance. Voyager transmits at only 25 watts, about the power of a refrigerator lightbulb. At two billion miles plus the signal at our end is incredibly weak. It takes huge dish antennas to even detect it, and today's computer power to "read" the signal. Not long from now, the signal will be too weak to detect. Voyager is moving away from us at 46,000 miles per hour, and its distance from us also varies with where around the sun the Earth happens to be.

What a name. In school you just know he was called Piss-ant Rabies.

BayouRover and Joken2: Thank you both for the clarification/answers. They were much appreciated.
And now I know - I just couldn't remember or imagine radio waves attaining that speed - however that happens.
Thanks again.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

So...you have Consumer Cellular also.

Even better.. Sprint

I wonder if they can even use a solar panel that far out. How can a 40 year old battery still be working, and if they are, why can't I get one for my truck?

Because the type of battery they use in space probes would be lethal to be anywhere near for any significant length of time, unless it were encased in lead. It would be like constantly getting an X-Ray, otherwise.

Interstellar warming. That's our fault too.

Osky

I'd risk it if it lasted more than 5 years.

Aliens probably gonna exterminate us all ...

Being forced to watch TV westerns from the 50,s and 60,s and Gilligans Island reruns 24/7 for decades....

And now The View and Masked Singer are heading their way also.....

That was once an argument for the position that we were likely the only intelligent life in our galaxy. The premise was that, if there was intelligent life somewhere out there, they would have picked up all our TV and radio signals, and responded back by now. But it turns out that's not a good argument, because apparently those signals corrupt so quickly that, before reaching even the nearest star, they'd be indistinguishable from background noise.

If you’ll bother to read just 6 posts back (I know that’s a whole lot to ask) but a member named Blackbat (and it’s even on the same page as you)
He explains the use of “Multihundred-Watt radioisotope thermoelectric generators (MHW RTG)” type system.

He goes on further in detail.

So thorough, he even educated the guy on here from NASA.

Pretty hard to smack the side of the cabinet from that distance. Amazing that communication is even possible over such a span.

I still want one. I keep getting lousy batteries these days. :^)


PS it was more like 15 posts back.......take you shoes off to count next time. It wasn't any trouble at all, I just didn't see it.

If I had those batteries they still corrode the inside of my maglite after 30 days.

So much for being prepared.

Yet the first space launches were ran with computers less powerful than a modern iPhone.