Voyager

[KAL 9000]

The Voyager spacecraft are really amazing, so I thought I'd make a discussion thread. Also, I have a few questions:

Is the equipment heated by the RTG, or are there separate heaters? 

How do pictures of moons and stuff turn out not blurred, if you need long exposure times to compensate for the dimness of the outer Solar System? 

How are they still working after 35+ years in space with no maintenance?

[DerekL1963]

3 hours ago, KAL 9000 said:

The Voyager spacecraft are really amazing, so I thought I'd make a discussion thread. Also, I have a few questions:

Is the equipment heated by the RTG, or are there separate heaters? 

How do pictures of moons and stuff turn out not blurred, if you need long exposure times to compensate for the dimness of the outer Solar System? 

How are they still working after 35+ years in space with no maintenance?

A mixture.  Some parts are heated by seperate heaters powered from the RTG, others (I.E. the electronics) are self heated and use a passive cooling system.

Why would you expect them to be blurred?  There's no vibration, and except at or near encounters the size/position of the body being imaged changes very little, even over a period of as much as an hour.  That being said, the camera was mounted on a scan platform to compensate for movement during close encounters (among other things).

Luck, good design, luck, skilled construction, and luck.

[Bill Phil]

6 hours ago, KAL 9000 said:

How do pictures of moons and stuff turn out not blurred, if you need long exposure times to compensate for the dimness of the outer Solar System? 

The outer solar system isn't dim. It's pretty well lit, actually. It just doesn't get much heat energy.

[maranble14]

What is the expected lifetime of the onboard RTG?

[DerekL1963]

Somewhere after 2025.

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html

[wumpus]

They have updated the software a few times.  The well published bits include better error-correction and compression of data going in/out (a lot of research on that field has happened since 1977!).  As you might expect, it has rather primitive computer[s?] and the code that gets uploaded would impress Mel himself[1].  NASA also tends to include code to work around failed bits (see Kepler for examples), so this helps with the maintenance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

[Kryten]

A big part of the long lifespan is that it isn't doing very much any longer. Big, power-hungry instruments like the cameras were shut down a long time ago.

[DerekL1963]

5 minutes ago, Kryten said:

A big part of the long lifespan is that it isn't doing very much any longer.

They're still doing particles and fields - and that the most useful thing possible out where they are now.  We're going to start losing much of that this year or next however.

[kerbiloid]

And only 32 kbytes of RAM.
This should be a very old version of Unity...

And they had upgraded its software right in flight.  Ah, those modders...

Edited September 27, 2016 by kerbiloid