About 50 years ago some engineers at JPL were building a space vehicle with the Star Trek-like 5 year mission to go to unvisited places and seek out new knowledge. That vehicle was, of course, Voyager 1 and the unvisited places were Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons.
But so much more happened. Instead of a five year mission, Voyager 1 is still operating, has left the solar system, and is sending back data from 15 billion miles away. No other man made object has traveled so far from Earth.
Tech Fixated has a nice story about Voyager 1 and its mission. The first thing to remember is that it was built with 1970s technology. It has an extraordinarily small working memory of 69 KB and uses an 8 track tape recorder as it’s backup store.
That “8 track recorder” was not what you’re probably thinking. It was a specially built machine with 1,076 feet of tape specially designed to withstand the rigors of space. It was so well built that it didn’t have a single failure during its lifetime. In 2007 it was shutdown to save power because of the dwindling power coming from Voyager’s radioisotope thermal generators.
Its radio transmitter uses about the same power as a refrigerator light bulb but is still managing to send data from 15 billion miles away. The one-way trip takes 23 hours. That came into play when the thrusters that keep Voyager’s antenna pointing at Earth went off line. The engineers figured out a possible fix. If they were wrong, Voyager would be destroyed but they sent the command anyway. Once sent, it would take almost 2 days to learn if it worked. It did work and Voyager continues sending priceless data that is available nowhere else.
Tech Fixated’s article has a lot more details. If you’re a nerd, you really should read it. It describes an amazing piece of engineering