[AR] Re: It still works.
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2017 16:41:02 -0500 (EST)
On Tue, 5 Dec 2017, Monroe L. King Jr. wrote:
Just WOW! Hard to believe they can still contact it. It will be sad day
when it's out of reach.
Despite the title of the piece, in fact the Voyagers are still in active
operation and their ops teams (small, but still in existence) talk to them
and collect data from them quite regularly. The notable thing this time
was not contact with the spacecraft, but the successful test of the
long-unused TCM thrusters.
There was originally some thought that the Voyagers' working lives might
be limited by communications range, but upgrades to DSN have more than
kept pace with the growing distances.
Barring late surprises, the real limit is the steady decline of their
RTGs' power output (mostly due to accumulating radiation damage in their
thermoelectric converters, not decay of the Pu-238 that heats them). If I
recall correctly, sometime around 2025 there will no longer be enough
power to run the spacecraft subsystems and the handful of instruments that
are still operating; another year or two can be eked out by running only
one instrument at a time. When there's no longer enough power for the
spacecraft subsystems, the Voyagers will fall silent, as Pioneers 10 and
11 did around the turn of the century.
Henry
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