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 […]
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.
The bulb in my hallway is 3.2w. Still impressive though.
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.
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.
Kinda puts the huge distances into a bit of perspective. How difficult is it to pick up that kind of signal? I struggle to get WiFi in the garden.
https://www.nasa.gov/communicating-with-missions/dsn/
The Deep Space Network is very impressive.
You guys have a hallway ?