Imagine you are a machine. Yes, I know. But imagine you’re a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals. Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information. I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I’m usually called on to perform. I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune’s orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface—but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon’s touch. My heart is warm, at least. A tiny nuclear fire burns in my thorax, leaves me indifferent to the cold outside. It won’t go out for a thousand years, barring some catastrophic accident; for a thousand years, I will listen for faint voices from Mission Control and do everything they tell me to. So far they have told me to study comets. Every instruction I have ever received has been a precise and unambiguous elaboration on that one overriding reason for my existence.
What a coincidence! I literally started another listen of the audiobook again today, highly recommend it to anyone wanting a cerebral, fascinating sci Fi book The narrator is great, too!
Didn’t the small amount of memory they had just completely stop working? I’d love to see or hear how they managed to reprogram this damn thing and make it work again. Amazing.
It did die- one specific chip carrying the code for packaging the data for transmittal died. They kind of described it in this article. So they are now partitioning out the memory left in other parts of the computer system and copying small portions of the packaging code into those other memory blocks so it can still be successfully run.
The fact that any electronic component on this probe still works is just freaking wild.
I’m curious as to what would make them stop working anyway. It’s in space; no air, no moisture, no bugs, no dirt… Unless it hit something/something hit it, I don’t understand how things would degrade in it unless it’s just the expansion and contraction of things as they heat and cool from the electricity running through it. But wouldn’t that take way, way longer? Is it just the components used at the time not being very good for longevity? It’s not using vacuum tubes or things of that nature is it?
Even in absolutely dark space, there are kinds of things around. A tiny spec of dust, a large fragmented rock, radiation…anything. this was a largely unshielded device as we know it today. It had some foil to reflect radiation from the sun, and I think that’s about it. Even in space, everything will degrade over time from one thing or another given enough time. This thing has had 45+ years.
I saw this documentary once where a spaceship picked up one of them and it was crazy nuts.
Semiconductors are subject to electron migration- in normal operation, silicon is doped to be either P (missing some electrons) or N (extra electrons). It can eventually break down the doping enough such that a semiconductor no longer “switches”.
Similarly, unshielded gamma radiation from the sun and space in general is pretty rough on solid state electronics. It is ionizing radiation so it can affect some semiconductors over time as well as actual mechanical changes in some metals.
Also consider that the Voyager probes rely on a RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator) for their electrical power, a device that uses nuclear decay heat to generate power. These sources also slowly lose output over time as the radioisotope is consumed and the thermoelectric couplers break down due to the radiation exposure. When Vpyager 1 launched, it produced 470 watts of electrical power for its sensor and computer systems- around 1998 they started turning systems off, and by now it’s down to around 200 watts, which is not much considering the power demands of the communication dish. When supply voltage starts to drop, previously OK electronics can begin to show errors where the defects exist.
All modern integrated circuits have a limited life expectancy to them because of the natural decay of the photolithographically created microstructures and doping of the silicon crystal. The main driver behind this progressive loss of functionality is electromigration. For larger feature sizes, which translates to older and less capable technology, electromigration is a negligible effect, but it is particularly bad for high performance modern CPUs, especially those smaller than the 200 nm node. While Voyager’s ICs are primitive, they are also old and it is very expected that they fail after several decades.
Well in a way Voyager 1 and 2 are bran new relative to the age of the universe.
But for us they are from 1977 which is 47 years old, bombarded by cosmic rays and what not. It’s crazy they still have power.
It’s amazing NASA has succeeded establishing contact again 24 billion kilometers away, they really have some crazy good people working there then and now.
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