Here’s a story to keep you sane when your toaster quits, or the car breaks down, or your Apple product hits that magic number and dies a quiet death when you’re not looking. America once was a technological behemoth. From Scientific American:
The venerable spacecraft launched in 1977 and passed into interstellar space in 2012, becoming the first human-made object to accomplish that feat. Today Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are NASA’s longest-running missions. But the title has been challenging to hold on to for spacecraft that were designed to operate for just four years. The aging probes are stuck in the deep cold of outer space, their nuclear power sources are producing ever less juice, and glitches are becoming increasingly common.
Most recently, Voyager 1 faced a communications issue that began in November 2023. “We’d gone from having a conversation with Voyager, with the 1’s and 0’s containing science data, to just a dial tone,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), of the spacecraft’s troubles in an interview with Scientific American in March. After more than six months of long-distance troubleshooting—Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles from Earth, and any signal takes more than 22.5 hours to travel from our planet to the spacecraft—mission personnel have finally coaxed Voyager 1 to gather and send home data with all its remaining science instruments, according to a NASA statement.
That tough little cluster of gadgets is out there, 15 billion miles away from its launch point, and soldiering on relying on software that’s 47 years old. It’s been 45 years since it flew past Jupiter, and 42 years since it encountered Saturn. It’s been in interstellar space since 2013. It’s still carrying the famous golden record, designed by the late Carl Sagan and containing greetings in 55 different languages, including Akkadian, which was spoken on Earth 6,000 years ago, as well as the sounds of crickets and frogs and “Johnny B. Goode.” The Riff goes interstellar. In 300 years, it will enter the Oort cloud, and it will take 30,000 years to pass through it. But for now, it’s sending back data again, doing some science, puttering away, staying in touch with all of us. Keep on keeping on, ya bucket o’bolts.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.
