Comments by "H. de Jong" (@h.dejong2531) on "How far can Voyager 1 go before we lose contact?" video.

  1. The current estimate is that the 2 Voyagers will no longer produce enough power to run a single instrument by ~2025. The team wants to try and keep the mission going to the 50-year mark, with the spacecraft just sending telemetry after 2025. If the Voyagers had more power, our current Deep Space Network setup could keep in contact with them until 2057, with a bit rate of 40 bits/s.
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  2. It was the only possible move. The camera system uses a lot of power, power the Voyagers no longer have available. In addition, the camera system was made for photographing bright planets, and is useless for the interstellar mission.
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  3. None of those documents say that Earth is flat. In physics, it is common to simplify a problem by removing variables. This is what the "flat, nonrotating Earth" assumption does. Those same documents will also assume that the airplane is rigid and has a constant mass. Real airplanes are not rigid: their control surfaces move, the wings flex. They don't have a constant mass: the mass changes because fuel is consumed.
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  4. No. The Voyagers are too small for JWST to see.
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  5. it depends on where in their orbits Earth and Mars are. When they're closest to each other, signals take 3 min. When they're on opposite sides of the sun, it takes 22. 15 min was during one of the recent Mars rover landings.
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  6. About 8.4 GHz, IDK which modulation is used.
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  7. 8 GHz and 2 GHz.
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  8. Doing that will not extend the Voyager mission. The mission will end because the power supply does not have enough power to run one instrument. Our current systems could contact the Voyager for the next 30 years, if those had power available.
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  9. Yes.
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  10. No, it's too small to be resolved.
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  11. That won't help. The Voyager mission will end when it no longer has enough power to run one science instrument, which is in about 5 years. Our radio systems are good enough to communicate with the Voyagers until 2057.
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  12. Yes. But the Voyagers will run out of power to run a single instrument long before the S/N ratio drops below the threshold. The DSN could keep in contact with the Voyagers until 2057 if the Voyagers had enough power to operate by then. If necessary, we could use the VLA to stay in contact even longer.
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  13. In 1989, Voyager 1 made photos of all the planets of the solar system.
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  14. New Horizons will never pass the Voyagers. It's flying slower than the Voyagers.
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  15. no, there's no longer enough power available to run the cameras.
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  16. No. It's not even 1/10 of the way to the Oort cloud.
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  17. Yes, solar panels get less efficient. When the distance to the sun doubles, the same amount of light gets spread over an area 4 times larger. So the amount of power reduces with the square of the distance. If you want to operate a spacecraft in the outer solar system on solar panels, the panels have to get really large and heavy.
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  18. No, that won't help. The Voyager transmitter has 2 fixed power levels: 12 and 18 W. The transmitter cannot be run with less power. It also doesn't have a battery to buffer energy.
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  19. JWST will "find life" by detecting the spectroscopic signature of a molecule that is produced by life. Every day, JWST is looking at planets and making those spectrograms.
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  20. We could stay in contact with them to a distance of about 200 AU.
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