Comments by "H. de Jong" (@h.dejong2531) on "Voyager 1's Breathtaking Journey to Interstellar Space" video.

  1. Because the average distance between asteroids is millions of km, and the Voyagers didn't get close enough to any asteroids to take images where the asteroid was more than a single pixel.
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  2. The tape recorder has 560 Mb of storage space, not 69 kb.The images are 800x800 pixels at 1 byte/pixel, so 640 kb each, so there's room for quite a few images on the tape. Nasa isn't picking up Voyager's transmission with a satellite, it uses a giant dish antenna (70 m diameter) here on Earth, with a cryogenically cooled receiver. If you work out the link budget, you'll find this is more than enough to receive a signal. Transmission speed at this distance is low: 160 bits/s.
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  3. For the voyagers, they used Plutonium-238. Most Uranium isotopes have half-lives that are too long to be useful.
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  4. The cameras were switched off in 1990. The power supply on Voyager produces less power every year, so some instruments had to be switched off to allow the others to keep working.
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