40 years ago

[highup]

Fun facts about Voyager 1. Amazing this thing is still tickin', let alone still accepting commands and sending back info.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/did-you-know/

The sensitivity of our deep-space tracking antennas located around the world is truly amazing. The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level.

A set of small thrusters provides Voyager with the capability for attitude control and trajectory correction. Each of these tiny assemblies has a thrust of only three ounces. In the absence of friction, on a level road, it would take nearly six hours to accelerate a large car up to a speed of 48 km/h (30 mph) using one of the thrusters.

The tape recorder aboard each Voyager has been designed to record and playback a great deal of scientific data. The tape head should not begin to wear out until the tape has been moved back and forth through a distance comparable to that across the United States. Imagine playing a two-hour video cassette on your home VCR once a day for the next 33 years, without a failure.

Tape recorder..... what's tape recorder?

Barring any serious spacecraft subsystem failures, the Voyagers may survive until the early twenty-first century (~ 2025), when diminishing power and hydrazine levels will prevent further operation. Were it not for these dwindling consumables and the possibility of losing lock on the faint Sun, our tracking antennas could continue to "talk" with the Voyagers for another century or two!

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/voyager-interstellar-space/538881/

The Voyagers transmit data to Earth every day. The spacecraft collect information about their surrounding environment in real time and then send it back through radio signals. Voyager 1 data takes about 19 hours to reach Earth

So if they mess up telling the spacecraft to turn a wee bit to the left, it's 36 hours before they get a message back telling how it responded to the manuver. ....oops