Happy 25th Birthday!

[gridlore]

To Voyager 1, still ticking after all these years. She and Voyager 2 are still sending back detectable signals.

Comments

[twfarlan.livejournal.com]

Geez. I can remember being the only kid in my elementary school who was actually interested in the fact that Voyager was leaving the Solar System, passing the outermost planet (Neptune, at the time).
Still ticking, eh? What're they sending back these days? I seem to remember hearing that their cameras were both dead but that they were still transmitting other data they'd picked up.

[isomeme.livejournal.com]

The cameras were powered down long ago, as there's really nothing useful to be done with them. They are optimized for taking pictures of relatively bright, large objects (the planets at which the probes were originally aimed), so out in the Big Cold Dark they're a waste of power and bandwidth.

The instruments which are still on are "particles and fields" sensors, which measure things like energetic particle collisions, magnetic field strength, and the like. (One such instrument is also still active on Pioneer 11, believe it or not.) The instruments are being used to search for the "heliopause", the point at which the solar wind decelerates and merges into interstellar gas environment. If the solar system has an "edge", this is it. Our calculations indicate that one or more of the distant probes should encounter it soon, but of course our theories have been wrong before -- that's why we send probes. This trio of spacecraft have already shown that some low-ball estimates of the heliopause distance are incorrect.