Voyager 1 is still transmitting from beyond the heliosphere on 22 watts — less power than the bulb in your hallway — and the engineers who built it in the 1970s never expected we'd still be listening half a century later.
spacedaily.com
On 17 April 2026, mission engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California sent commands to switch off the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment aboard Voyager 1. The instrument had been operating, almost without interruption, since the spacecraft left Cape Canaveral in September 1977. The shutdown was not a fault. It was the latest in a […]
    • Dionysus@leminal.space
      8·
      1 day ago

      The person who wrote this was also as old as the engineers who built Voyager and assume everyone still uses incandescent bulbs.

      Didn’t the Mango Mussolini go on a rant once about LED bulbs?

      • kalpol@lemmy.ca
        1·
        8 hours ago

        Its actually lower than a lot of LED bulbs. The heaters are what’s using most of the power.

    • Dave.@aussie.zone
      19·
      24 hours ago

      The beamwidth of Voyager 1’s antenna is about 0.5 degrees. In practical terms, that’s very narrow, about an 8 metre wide beam at a kilometre distance.

      At its current distance, by the time the beam reaches Earth it is 224 million kilometres wide, 1.5x the distance from the Earth to the sun.

      Now imagine the light from a car’s taillights lighting up the back wall of a garage as it reverses in. Then spread that same amount of light out over that 224 million km wide beamwidth. That’s what Voyager is putting out and what the Deep Space Network dishes have to listen for.

    • i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca
      23·
      2 days ago

      The bulb was probably designed and manufactured by people who weren’t even born when Voyager launched. It’s wild how long and how far it’s been calling home.

    • A_norny_mousse@piefed.zipEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      Very interesting. So they both manouvred (slingshot) using planets’ gravity wells? Not everything in SciFi is fiction I guess.

      And V1 has traveled further from our solar system than the solar system’s diameter. Wow.

      Extremely high bitrate on the video due to starry background, btw. My old lappy got wheezy.

      • ruuster13@lemmy.zip
        21·
        2 days ago

        In the scientific fiction genre, everything is scientifically possible. That’s the entire premise. Time tells us what they get right and what becomes fantasy.

            • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
              1·
              1 hour ago

              It’s absolutely fantasy. No debate. So is Star Trek.

              Actual science fiction is like the recent Hail Mary. Everything is based on literal real science, with maybe one “what if” kind of stretch.

              • RicoBerto@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                2·
                2 hours ago

                I don’t know that i’d go that far. There is certainly debate on what constutes hard or soft sci-fi, but I’d say as long as the technology is either the focus, or is the main facilitator of the story then it’s more sci-fi. In star wars there is not much technology that is necessarily required, all of it could have been replaced with fantasy elements and it’s the same. It’s not a focus, whereas the expanse for instance relies upon the limitations of the technology to drive the plot.

                I don’t know could be talking out my ass, purely vibes based genre definition.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
    61·
    1 day ago

    That was back when bulbs lasted almost forever until they changed them so they’d break earlier so you’d have to spend money to buy more bulbs. Voyager is like the bulbs of old.

    • scibra122@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Carrying water for incandescent bulbs on the basis of their reliability is wild. Yeah, several companies have taken advantage of the conception of lightbulbs as a disposable good to cheap out on LED bulb construction until they are also disposable, but they did that so successfully because changing incandescent bulbs was such a common occurrence, it was the template for a proto-meme joke. Not everything in the past was better than things today

      • Don_alForno@feddit.org
        3·
        6 hours ago

        Changing incandescent bulbs was common because they lasted too long in the past and were intentionally made less reliable to make more money. It’s a cascade of enshittification at this point.