General Chat

I do find this amazing.


Today, after nearly 50 years exploring the cosmic unknown and clocking up, incredibly and against all expectations, 15 billion miles, this little tin can — the size of a small car — is still going and communicating with ground control on Earth.
Unbelievable as it may seem today, the computers on the Voyager 1 spacecraft, considered state-of-the-art back in 1977 — the year Elvis left the building for the last time — have 240,000 times less memory than an iPhone.

The radio antenna, protruding from the central circular dish like the antenna on a robotic insect, is equally archaic, emitting as many watts as a refrigerator lightbulb.
As for the onboard tape recorder, which is constantly on, it differs little from the one in a typical 1970s car, like, say, a Ford Cortina.

Voyager, however, is starting to show signs of old age and, for now, has stopped transmitting effectively.
The usable data it sends back in binary code has carried no meaning since last year. Nasa engineers are optimistic they can fix this problem, though, which emanates from a single computer chip.

But even when Voyager's nuclear batteries (using electricity generated from heat produced by the decay of the lump of plutonium powering Voyager) die in the next few years, and the umbilical cord with Earth is cut for good, the spacecraft will continue to float through the universe in perpetuity, whatever fate befalls mankind.
Onboard is a record of what life was like on Earth: a gold-plated copper disc resembling a vinyl LP, complete with a stylus, intended for any alien civilisations Voyager might encounter during this odyssey into the future.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13311779/Voyager-1-losing-contact-stunning-images-eternity.html

As you say AnnG.....Amazing :-0 :-D

Let's hope the alien civilisations have invented the record player!