The two probes made flybys of Jupiter and Saturn in the 1970s. Today they’re still doing science way out beyond our solar system.
Then last week, the team figured out what was wrong. Apparently, the attitude control system had suddenly started sending the telemetry data through the wrong computer, which was no longer working properly. They resolved the problem by routing the data back to the correct computer. “The spacecraft is healthy, it’s happy. It’s returning science data just beautifully,” Spilker says.
Even if Dodd, Spilker, and their colleagues can keep resolving these kinds of technical issues, however, the spacecraft have a more enduring problem: their power supplies. Their RTG systems provide power by converting heat from the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 into electricity. But after 45 years, the fuel is now generating 4 watts less per year.
Nevertheless, the Voyager probes might only have a few years, or perhaps a decade, left in them. Eventually, their dwindling power won’t be sufficient to run their instruments. “At that point, the Voyagers will become our silent ambassadors,” Spilker says. As they hurtle at 35,000 miles per hour into the unknown with their powered-down machines, they will still carry humanity’s message in a bottle. “The Golden Record, a piece of human civilization, a piece of technology with a 1970s stamp on it—that is going to persevere. It’s not degrading. It’s going to last for billions of years. It’s going to outlast the planet that it came from.
Bell speculates that it might not be aliens, but our own descendants, who ultimately spot the far-flung spacecraft. “My prediction is that the message really is going to be for us.going to be the ones who go find it—in the far future, when it becomes easy to travel and be tourists and see the Voyagers,” he says.
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