Why doesn’t NASA, ESA, or JAXA send a probe like the voyagers on a deep space discovery mission? They could probably cram in a lot more today regarding capacities then they could in the '70s.
Also, the technological advancements in propulsion would probably allow for higher speeds.
A 512 x 512 image in b&w is 262KB . A color image is nearly a MB.
One answer might be the images were not digitally stored … it may be that analog scans were transmitted without storage … so the whole of voyager behaved like an analog camera attached to a radio transmitter rather than a framebuffer.
My guess. Someone must know?
Those someones are either retired (and well into their ninetees) or dead.
NASA appears to be preparing a “voyager 3” mission, in which they’re taking care to transfer knowledge from person to person and document everything, as the mission takes such a long time. They want to investigate outside of the heliopause… and it seems to take a while – over 50 years – to get there. That takes a lot of time, and NASA is planning to make sure the mistakes which happened with Voyager 1 and 2 don’t repeat themselves.
See above, Neville.
Do you mean they never documented voyager?
It is a bit like my CSIRO workplace … nothing is preserved when a research project finishes… only published papers which are generally useless for recovering the essentials.
“Voyager spacecraft carried a digital tape recorder with a storage capacity of 500 million bits.”
Also interesting, “The radio transmitters (there are two complete systems to provide backup in case of failure) have only 23 watts of transmitting power, about the power of a refrigerator light bulb”
More information about the Voyager space crafts can be found at;
So it was not analog.
I guess a tape was about the most rugged technology at the time.
What do modern probes use?
SSD’s or they are call SSDR (Solid State Data Recorders) but special ones that have been built with “Radiation-Hardened & Fault-Tolerant Components”