Astronomers Get in Contact With 50-Year-Old Spacecraft

It was one of the most ambitious missions in the history of Space exploration. Voyager 2 was launched by NASA in 1977 and is still operating. Just imagine: over 40 years in space! Its initial mission was to study the outer Solar System - so what did it find? Let's see how contact with it was lost and restored back...


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[BRIGHTSIDEOFFICIAL]

Hey there! Where would you send the next "Voyager" to?🚀

[jimaanders]

For the radio signal to travel 12 billion miles takes about 18 hours, one-way!
( There's no joystick control 😃)
This space craft is incredible.
How many radios or computers on Earth are still working since 1977? [without maintenance]

[vaydaaa]

Voyager 2: I’m 12 billion miles away and can still communicate with earth😎

Me : I can’t even talk to my friend with my walkie talkie who is 200 meters away.

[bbrown]

Respect the camera man who followed voyager 2 until the interstellar travel.

[SaturnsRBX]

Can we all agree that when He uploads our days get better! 💖

[rodgermurphy]

Voyager was great but the James Webb space telescope launching Dec 18th will change our place in the universe!

[nikhilshivadasan]

Stay safe Voyager 2 we love u 💕..thank u so much ... ❤️ from India.

[Gtrellis]

I hope a string of these are sent with upgrades if they all keep in touch with each other there's no stopping.

[edwardmatos]

Finally some who pronounces Uranus correctly. Thank you

[dennissmith]

It’s crazy how small and insufficient we are in terms of the universe😞, I would love to be alive in another 2k years to see just how far we’ve traveled this universe?! 🤷🏽‍♂️

[aristotlekumpis]

It blows my mind that we can send and receive signals to something that far away. Incredible.

[CharlieRamos]

Need to work early but need to watch it before going to sleep.

[altaloma]

A couple minor corrections, if you please. First, the "antenna" mentioned early in the video is actually the 14 meter long magnetometer boom. There is one flux gate magnetometer on the outboard end, and another midway on the boom. These magnetometers can measure extremely tiny magnetic fields. The boom, and spacecraft, had to be built so that they didn't retain any residual magnetism, whether by magnetic materials, or by electromagnetism caused by electrical currents flowing through the wiring of the spacecraft. These could effectively "blind" the magnetometers. The communications antenna is the white dish at the center of the spacecraft.
A second critique is about the DSN. Voyager II can only be accessed by the Canberra station because that is the only station that can "see" it. It is below the horizon for both the Goldstone and Madrid stations. The Voyager I spacecraft is above the horizon for the northern hemisphere stations.

[Does_it_come_in_black]

I was born August of 1977 and taking a moment and thinking about my entire life I can not believe nasa can still get signals from Voyager 2 it literally blows the mind

[AguilaRBH]

Really hope we come across some
Amazing discoveries in our lifespan.

All these amazing technologies really make space exploration so interesting.

Once the James web telescope gets launched we should be able to have amazing discoveries.

[h.dejong]

A few corrections. 
0:40: the item you're highlighting is not the 12' wide antenna used to send data to Earth. The large dish is used for that. The highlighted item is the magnetometer boom. This is 12 m/40' long and contains 2 magnetometers (magnetic field sensors).
3:10: After the last planetary flyby and the Pale Blue Dot photo sequence, the camera platforms on both Voyagers were switched off. The remaining instruments were kept running at full power.
3:50 that's footage of a Saturn V and a Gemini launch, not the Voyager launches.
4:50 only the transmitter we use to send commands to Voyager 2 was switched off and replaced. During that time, we continued to receive data from Voyager 2 daily.
5:21 Yes! Finally some actual footage instead of off-topic stock video. This is DSS 43.
7:39 that's NOT the New Horizons onboard camera, but another animation.
8:00 it's not the distance that's the problem. Voyager 2 is below the horizon for the California and Madrid stations.
8:25 Voyager 1 did change its trajectory. During the Saturn flyby, NASA wanted to take a close look at Titan - the only moon we know that has an atmosphere. This meant Voyager 1 was sent upward out of the ecliptic plane.

[kingjulian]

Wonder what more surprises the Voyagers gives

[ethanpoole]

You listed Distance, Power, and Time as the most important variables in communicating with a distant satellite, yet missed the one variable that actually matters most: SNR, or Signal to Noise Ratio as well as the modulation scheme, symbol rate, and any forward error correction (which the satellites do utilize) that can potentially permit communication even when operating below the received noise floor. But for any given encoding scheme, barring actual interruption of the transmission, it is a deteriorating SNR and decoded error rate that eventually marks the point at which reception and successful signal decoding break down regardless of distance and power. Time is only really relevant in terms of predicting where to look (as in at the future position) for the satellite to transmit or receive and, at some point, precludes the practical use of backward error correction schemes (or retransmission of only the corrupted receive data), except when absolutely crucial (such as for satellite system software updates where no error whatsoever can be tolerated), and so strongly favors forward error correction coupled along with possible blind retransmission of the full data as the more practical solutions due to how great the round-trip time becomes (which I believe is around 40 hours at this point!).

[GenesysStone]

I remember Nasa saying that those casio digital watches kids wore in the 90s had more computing power than the voyager & apollo mission computers. But look, some of them are still getting the job done.

[darkwingduck]

Can we get a moment of silence for IO, for being pronounced eeh-ooh