JPL release on Voyagers operating continuously for 12,000 days!

Voyager 2 at 12,000 Days: The Super-Marathon Continues

And Astro0 strikes again with a sporty new forum banner! Sweeeeet.

I have a huge affection for these two spacecraft - I was ten years old when they launched.
It will be a sad day (or sad pair of days) when the hydrazine finally runs dry and their antennae drift off Earth-lock.
Voyager 2 is for me still the most accomplished planetary space mission ever (in a strong field), and it's testament to the engineers and planners that science is still being returned by this emissary at the edge of the solar system.
I sometimes wonder what they both look like now, up-close. Voyager 2 has had three decades of bombardment by cosmic rays, has traversed the asteroid belt, braved Jupiter's dangerous radiation environment, and dust hazards in the Saturnian, Uranian and Neptunian systems, not to mention the crippling near-absolute-zero temperatures at 14 billion kilometres from the sun. I wonder if it looks a bit battered?

<spacecraft-hugger-mode>

I love it at work when I can stand in front of our 70-metre antenna while we are 'receiving' telemetry from Voyager 2 and know that I am being showered in its radio transmissions. Weird, I know, but there's a feeling that you get standing there looking out into the void and knowing that there's a little piece of humanity's ingenuity heading into the vastness of the universe. Well done Voyager(s) and all that have sailed with you!

</spacecraft-hugger-mode>

Another great thing about Voyager 2 is that unlike her sibling, she can 'tweet' http://twitter.com/Voyager2

Incidentally, today is day # 2,500 for Spitzer and Voyager 1's 12K is just 15 days away.

Almost as amazing to me as the longevity of these spacecraft is that we can continue to detect their signals from so far away. A JPL press release from 1998 said,


And that was 12 years ago!

Those watts, at the current distance = what?

The drop off in power is relative to the distance squared - the good old inverse power law thing - which means that the drop off in power over is not as much as you might think. Since Voyager 1 (I found that article and the reference was to Voyager 1 not 2) is now about 17 billion km from the sun vs 10.4 billion km at the time of the press release the received power is now between 2.6 and 2.7 times lower depending on where the earth is in its orbit.

thanks helvick

It'd be fun to see a tracing of Voyager's radio signal. Would it have an arc due to the sun's gravity or 13 hours of earth's movement?

Is there a chance one of the Voyagers might encounter an Oort cloud object?

Chance << 1. (Or maybe <<<<<< 1.) And since the Oort cloud is ~50K AU away, the Voyagers' power supplies will be long dead, and we'll never know.

Average distance between Oort cloud objects is roughly 10 AU, so not very likely even if it still had power, unless you are referring Sedna type objects.

The complete Voyager mission story in scanned mission bulletins: http://planetary.org/explore/topics/voyager/msb.html

Does anyone know if Tom already found the N° 43 as I have one?

I have #43 now, so no worries, the set will be completed soon. I hope to post them in two more batches, one next week, one the following week.

Thanks for highlight, Lunik9...

Hey, I love this logo!Click to view attachment (from issue #32)