Keeping in touch with NASA's two aging Voyager spacecraft is getting harder to do as they get farther away and their power sources dwindle.
, chief executive of the Planetary Society, called the two spacecraft the “vanguard of human intellect and treasure,” ranking them alongside the decoding of the human genome and the formulation of the theory of general relativity as premier scientific achievements.
Transmissions from the Voyagers are received by the Deep Space Network, a trio of colossal radio antennas in California’s Mojave Desert, Australia and Spain. They’re spread out across the globe to ensure at least one of them can be aimed at any point in the sky. Survival is a series of trade-offs. With a finite source of energy, what can be sacrificed? What can be preserved?From their remote locations, the two Voyagers form the perfect laboratory — in fact the“It’s really intriguing to me to be able to go out into that medium and make measurements and understand what’s going on out there,” said, a heliophysicist at the University of Iowa who studies interstellar plasma waves. “It helps us understand what the environment around other stars might be like.
That’s why Dodd wasn’t too unsettled by this problem. Nevertheless, sorting it out was still a high priority.
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