Voyager 2 Speaking In Tongues

dangle sends in an update from the borderland of Sol. "Voyager 2's flight data system, which formats information before beaming it back to Earth, has experienced a hiccup that has altered the pattern in which it sends updates home, preventing mission managers from decoding the science data beamed to Earth from Voyager 2. The spacecraft, which is currently 8.6 billion miles (13.8 billion km) from Earth, is apparently still in overall good health, according to the latest engineering data received on May 1. 'Voyager 2's initial mission was a four-year journey to Saturn, but it is still returning data 33 years later,' said Voyager project scientist Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. 'It has already given us remarkable views of Uranus and Neptune, planets we had never seen close-up before. We will know soon what it will take for it to continue its epic journey of discovery.' The space probe and its twin Voyager 1 are flying through the bubble-like heliosphere, created by the sun, which surrounds our solar system."

Comments

Tried to find some more info

[Anonymous Coward]

All the news articles report pretty much the same, digested, not particularly informative stuff. The mission page hasn't been updated in a while, the NASA news item isn't any more detailed, and the last operations report was from March 12. But I did learn this from the operations report: they're running the whole mission on less than 275 Watts of power from the RTG units. Wow.

Re:Tried to find some more info

[dtmos]

Reading that operations report I was most impressed by these two lines:

There were 97.9 hours of DSN scheduled support for Voyager 1 of which 61.3 hours were large aperture coverage.

and

There were 62.3 hours of DSN scheduled support for Voyager 2 of which 39.3 hours were large aperture coverage.

Wow -- that's an incredible amount of Deep Space Network time in a week -- and, looking at earlier reports, it seems to be representative of the time used in a typical week. I had no idea that the Voyagers were consuming that much DSN time. I assume "large aperture coverage" means use of the 70m dishes -- also an impressive number.

That much DSN time must be very expensive.

What year is it for Voyager 1 & 2?

[antirelic]

Being that I am not a physicist (though I am a big fan), I am asking any physicists out there if they have figured out how much time has passed for the Voyager satellites according to the laws of relativity compared to Earth. From what I understand, they are traveling around 17km/s. How does that work out over a span of 30-50 years from earthling perspective.

Thanx in advance.