It's Back! Voyager Is Making Sense Again After Months of Gibberish

[India Four Two]

https://www.sciencealert.com/its-back-voyager-is-making-sense-again-after-months-of-gibberish

[jolihokistix]

Just wow. How is it that one can feel both glad and sad over the fates of these craft?

[Tarq57]

I always had a nagging internal question about the wisdom of including a map of the solar system pointing to the origin of this craft.
Only a little niggle, since it seems more likely than not that any species with the intelligence/development to grab the craft and make intelligence of the recordings would probably not need anything so archaic as a map to discern its origin.

Still, I think we're a bit naive.

[skydiver69]

I always had a nagging internal question about the wisdom of including a map of the solar system pointing to the origin of this craft.
Only a little niggle, since it seems more likely than not that any species with the intelligence/development to grab the craft and make intelligence of the recordings would probably not need anything so archaic as a map to discern its origin.

Still, I think we're a bit naive.

Or.....


https://dn.truthorfiction.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/06135142/aliens-unsolicited-nudes-mixtape-1200x675.png

[B Fraser]

Only 2 genders, how 1970's :rolleyes:

[Rebus]

Only 2 genders, how 1970's :rolleyes:
And Pluto's still a planet.

[wiggy]

JPL Press Release (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth)

[treadigraph]

And Pluto's still a planet.
I thought he was a dog...

[DogTailRed2]

I always had a nagging internal question about the wisdom of including a map of the solar system pointing to the origin of this craft.
Only a little niggle, since it seems more likely than not that any species with the intelligence/development to grab the craft and make intelligence of the recordings would probably not need anything so archaic as a map to discern its origin.

Still, I think we're a bit naive.
Don't think I'll worry. As it's probably thousands of years until the craft is picked up, if it ever is picked up and therefore thousands of years for them to get here humanity will probably have ceased to exist (using current trends) anyway. Maybe the map will ensure aliens never come here.

[DogTailRed2]

https://www.sciencealert.com/its-back-voyager-is-making-sense-again-after-months-of-gibberish
Question. How is it possible to transmit a signal that distant and still maintain integrity, signal strength etc?
Is there a distance by which the radio signal will be so dispersed the space ship won't be able to read it? Or could a signal be beamed to infinity and still be read?

[DogTailRed2]

Second question. For an object that small could another race actually detect it as a non naturel thing? Wouldn't it just be mistaken for another small asteroid and ignored?

I wonder if in millions of years decedents of humans will find it and convince themselves there are other civilisations in the universe.

[Cat3508]

Wonder why it hasn't hit anything yet !

[Tarq57]

Wonder why it hasn't hit anything yet !
Space is big. Really big. You may think it's a long way down the road to the shops, but that's nothing compared to space.

[MechEngr]

Question. How is it possible to transmit a signal that distant and still maintain integrity, signal strength etc?
Is there a distance by which the radio signal will be so dispersed the space ship won't be able to read it? Or could a signal be beamed to infinity and still be read?

Well, a radio wave is electromagnetic which is how photons work and photons seem to do OK over very long distances. What becomes a problem is the ability to intercept enough energy as that falls off with the square of the distance. In the case of Voyager they use very large antennas to focus the energy in one direction and, I presume, fairly powerful transmitters. On the listening to Voyager side, similarly large antennas gather the energy.

It's going to be a very long time to double the current distance away from us. That would require transmitting 4X the power and gathering 4X the energy, both easily done by the ground stations if the money was in place and the spacecraft is still working.

I expect the radioisotope thermal generator (RTG) electrical power source output will fall below that which is required to operate the computers and that will be the end.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-will-do-more-science-with-new-power-strategy shows they are already cutting power use to match the decline.

45+ years on a 4 year mission? Not too shabby.

[wiggy]

Ref the RTG life, It appears they are now down to delivering about 50% of the power they were 45 years back..

https://rps.nasa.gov/news/63/nasa-celebrates-45-years-of-voyager-1-enabled-by-radioisotope-power/

[Expatrick]

Makes your average EV range look a bit feeble!

[tdracer]

Makes your average EV range look a bit feeble!
I suspect we could build EVs with much longer range if we were allowed to use a nuclear pile to power it :E
(why did my mind just picture a DeLorean when I wrote that? :})

[Uplinker]

Question. How is it possible to transmit a signal that distant and still maintain integrity, signal strength etc?
Is there a distance by which the radio signal will be so dispersed the space ship won't be able to read it? Or could a signal be beamed to infinity and still be read?

With difficulty ! The data rate and bandwidth used to send data to the spacecraft will now have to be low and files will take a long time to send. They will probably use protocols to send the same data multiple times in order to assemble an error-free file in the spacecraft.

Transmissions through space are subject to large losses and attenuations - as well as the spreading of the beam with distance, already mentioned. Even uplinking a television picture to a satellite in geo-stationary orbit just 40,000km above the Earth suffers significant losses. In the early days of analogue television; transmit powers of up to 1,200 Watts feeding a 2 or 3m dish were required for a broadcast quality signal. Nowadays with digital coding, much lower power can be used because many errors in the data stream can be detected and corrected and reconstructed by the receivers.

However the distances involved across space are so great that those hoping to detect alien transmissions are probably going to be disappointed. To transmit over light-year distances; one would need to modulate something that was a significant fraction of the size of a small star. Anything smaller would be lost in the noise before it travelled any real distance.

[ORAC]

:=:=:= Not a pile - Mr Fusion…

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/1120x2000/il_1588xn_5794696323_rseg_647611f3e1a0e408f0749e1c3af79028c0 0aa6f7.jpg

[ORAC]

Interstellar communications laser.

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2013/12/30/laser-communications-for-deep-space/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-deep-space-optical-comm-demo-sends-receives-first-data

[Expatrick]

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune.org-vbulletin/800x583/img_20240430_105939_54422153541db35acf08bec01914e369b9db13be .jpg

[meleagertoo]

The notion of 'giving ourselves away' to potentially hostile aliens by Voyager is whimsicalin the extreme to say the least.
Any civilsation capable of intercepting it would be able work out its origin via its trajectory in a trice and the notion that we are somehow hidden by the vastness of space is utterly unrealistic given the vast amounts of RF energy we've been spreading about the galaxy this last century and more - Voyager is currently only a few light hours distant but our detectable RF energy front is at least 60 light years away and extending spherically what? thousands of times faster than the infinitessinmaly small single point-in-space Voyager which is crawling along in a single direction. We're lit up in space like a vast radio beacon to any civilisation capable of detecting radio energy to a level only as advanced as ours is today, let alone one hundreds of years more advanced. Our RF output since the cold war is thought to remain detectable out to hundreds of light years (given time for it to actually get that distant)
We have certainly broadcast our existence and location to a readily detectable level over some 60 light years distance in all directions, internet figures for number of stars by range varly wildly but 600 seems about the consensus for within 60LY and anything from 13,000 to 60,000 within 100LY, and same again for 100-200.
We're lit up like a christmas tree for anyone inside our RF propagation sphere who cares to look.

[TURIN]

... Assuming someone is there to hear it.
But that's for another thread.

[42go]

... Assuming someone is there to hear it.

Ask God - she knows. :rolleyes:

[Brian Pern]

Space is big. Really big. You may think it's a long way down the road to the shops, but that's nothing compared to space.

Well at least it wasn't built by the Sirius Cybernetics Corp

[visibility3miles]

Voyager 2 probably started spouting gibberish because part of one of its chips was hit by a cosmic ray/particle of some sort. Mind you, integrated silicon chips were much bigger then, nothing as tiny as what’s available on microcircuits now, so if they had a modern chip with far more condensed into a smaller area, that single incident could have trashed everything not just a small part of the chip..

Newer is not always better, and that should be included in future plans. That and redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.

They recovered operations by slowly shifting the work load to other chips on board which are still functioning.

Earth’s magnetosphere/the van Allen belt protects life on earth by diverting most of these cosmic particles towards the poles, where they produce the aurora borealis.

If you hop on a spaceship to Mars, you leave much of this convenient protective layer behind, so will be subject to much more because Mars doesn’t have anything similar.

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/planets/mars/nasa-scientists-gear-up-for-solar-storms-at-mars/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_field_of_Mars