Celebrate Voyager's 40th Anniversary By Beaming A Message Into Outer Space (nytimes.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader Noryungi writes: NASA will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the launch of the twin Voyager probes next month. So let us celebrate both the probes and the people who are still working on them, and nursing them in their final years.
The New York Times fondly profiles Voyager's nine aging flight-team engineers who "may be the last people left on the planet who can operate the spacecraft's onboard computers, which have 235,000 times less memory and 175,000 times less speed than a 16-gigabyte smartphone." NASA reports that now "Voyager 1 is in 'Interstellar space' and Voyager 2 is currently in the 'Heliosheath' -- the outermost layer of the heliosphere where the solar wind is slowed by the pressure of interstellar gas. " But the Times notes that the probes "are running out of fuel. (Decaying plutonium supplies their power.) By 2030 at the latest, they will not have enough juice left to run a single experiment."

NASA is now inviting the public to submit positive messages to be considered for beaming into space on September 5th -- the 40th anniversary of Voyager 1's launch. "Messages can have a maximum of 60 characters and be posted on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ or Tumblr using the hashtag #MessageToVoyager," until August 15th, after which humanity will vote on which message should be sent.

Comments

Re:So that the aliens can ignore my messages too?

[VAXcat]

The sunlight is mighty dim in that neighborhood. They get their power from RTGs - radiothermal generators. PU238 generates a lot of heat as it decays and semiconductor junctions turn it into electricity. But the PU238 decays, and the semiconductor junctions take a beating from the radiation sleeting through them, so the power package has a finite lifetime - which is just about done.

Re:Good Grief

[Waffle Iron]

68kB of memory? Don't you mean 64kB?

According to the Wikipedia article, the AC is right. Each probe has six computers; four with 4096 18-bit words each, and two with 8198 16-bit words each (not sure why its six over 2^13; maybe they're including CPU registers). That adds up to 557248 bits, or 68.02 KiB.

Re:So that the aliens can ignore my messages too?

[Opportunist]

First, the Voyagers did actually have a small amount of fuel for attitude adjustment and maneuvers around the planet. You know, the mission they were actually designed for. That fuel is pretty much gone now.

And no, solar power is useless where these probes operate. Solar panels would actually even have been useless as a power source in their actual mission, there is a reason that Juno is the first probe sent to Jupiter (the innermost of the "outer" planets, the gas giants) to use panels instead of RTGs, because only now we not only have managed to create solar panels that can output sensible amounts of energy at that distance to the sun, but we also managed to build electronic devices that can run on power requirements that are 3+ orders of magnitude smaller.

We are after all talking about probes that were launched four decades ago.

And finally, these probes were supposed to take a look at Jupiter and Saturn (and Uranus and Neptune in the case of Voyager2). And that's it. Anything past that is bonus. And these two probes have been handing out way, WAY more information than what could possibly be dreamed of.