Bon Voyage Voyager 1!

[little man]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Yep, both Voyager 1 and 2 are still transmitting and will continue to do so for ~10 years or so. The signal is so faint, at this point, that it is less powerful than a digital watch battery.



Yes. It is *amazing* what you can do with a 20 watt transmitter! We should continue to get signals back until its power fails around 2020 or so. At this point it is so far away that it takes hours for a transmission from Voyager to reach Earth. For purposes of comparison--light moves at ~182,282 miles per second in vacuum. At that speed it takes a signal to the Moon about 1.5 seconds to go one way. It takes light from the Sun 8 minutes to reach us. You get an idea how far away that is. It also gives you an idea of how huge our solar system is--when Voyager was passing Jupiter in 1998, it took nine *hours* for a signal to get to the Earth.



So cool that it is beyond words how groovy it is! This is pretty impressive stuff for a bunch of glorified chimpanzees to pull off.

cheers
Aj

thanks, Aj. do you have any idea what sorts of data are collected and transmitted? also, what sort of use can we put that info to?