Voyager Status, What is it? Options

[deedan06]

I guess they couldn't delay it any longer, but tbf, they managed to delay it for years. Who could have known that it would last this long

[stevesliva]

It's interesting that there are three sunward-facing sensors that would have given a direction of the wind away from the sun. But now those sensors don't see solar wind because it's outside the bubble.

Article mentioned there is a sensor that's orthogonal to the vector that V2 is on... maybe a sort of flux sensor, so 29 days a month that is measuring the same flux, but once a month the spacecraft rolls, and it would see the flux across the 360 degrees of the roll.

Who could have known that it would last this long

Perhaps by turning it off, the mean time before failure for this instrument goes from 25 years to infinity/2. So that means we should expect it to last forever.

[deedan06]

Voyage 1 is currently only reachable in S-band.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/10/28/a...h-mission-team/

[stevesliva]

Voyage 1 is currently only reachable in S-band.

That's the way it's phoning home. It's interesting that they're able to downlink the "lower power" S-band.

If I didn't think thruster sclerosis would be the end before RTG decay, the idea that it could conserve power with the S-band link would be an interesting one.

[deedan06]

Since they haven't used S-Band for 4 decades before that, I'd assume that it is far to faint to get any science data across. But yeah, the voyagers are starting to show their age on all fronts