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NASA working on 'Big Bang' upgrade to keep the Voyagers alive for longer
NASA has revealed it’s working on a plan called “The Big Bang” that it hopes will extend the working lives of the Voyager probes. A few details about the plan appear in an April 17 NASA announcement which revealed that during a planned roll maneuver on February 27, “Voyager 1’s power levels fell unexpectedly.” “Mission engineers …
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Monday 20th April 2026 11:20 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: Unserviceable?
"They might not be able to be serviced " - Unserviceable generally means unusable, not useful or impractical.
Even at 25 billion km Voyager is hardly that although the intrepid Archibald Tuttle† is unlikely to make a house call.
"the most serviceable spacecraft" - Definitely very usable and useful.
† If you thought the movie was pure fantasy; renamed today Amerigaga - pure documentary.
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Monday 20th April 2026 09:15 GMT Taliesinawen
1970s technology rules :)
> NASA left LECP in a state that means it can’t do its job but didn’t turn off a small motor that consumes just 0.5 watts because ..
ClippyAI: The small motor rotates the platform that holds the particle sensors. A long-dormant motor could freeze up or develop mechanical issues if left completely off. Keeping it minimally active maintains lubrication, alignment, and readiness.
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 01:49 GMT Erythrite
Elon is an alien
Perhaps Elon Musk *is* an alien. He and his family have been trying to build the technology to get back to their home planet.
Think about it. If you crash landed on a earth, with a bit of advanced technology, how would you get back off?
They all look a little odd, like a bad skin job on an alien. Elon's speech is a little odd. Dad had an "Emerald Mine" to generate some wealth, Elon continues to accumulate wealth, eventually building a rocket company.
Perhaps they need something critical from home, .how would they get it?
His allegedly Epstein-adjacent brother was on the board of Burning Man for many years. If you were an alien, you would land at Burning Man because no one would notice anyone who looked a little weird.
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Monday 20th April 2026 18:08 GMT Sproggit
This isn't so much Off Topic as "Out There"...
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 weighed approximately 1,797 pounds [or 815kg]... Voyager 2 was about the same...
Using the technology commercially available today, SpaceX and the Falcon Heavy - not Starship / Super Heavy, SpaceX could put approximately 37,000lbs or 16,800kg in to Mars Orbit. If you're willing to accept that "If you can get to Mars you can probably get to anywhere in the Solar System and Beyond; it's just a question of how long you'd have to wait to get there", then today, SpaceX has the capacity to pit give or take 20x the payload in to deep space.
Given a mission profile with a total mission weight of something in that capacity - assuming, of course, that SpaceX chose a single-launch approach and did not contemplate any sort of "in-orbit assembly" of a larger or more complex vehicle... then with the addition of the latest reliable version of say the NEXT (NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster) drive, or maybe AEPS (Advanced Electrical Propulsion System) [either of which are many times more thrust efficient than either Voyager vehicle.
Add in some 21st century power plant technology - a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), powered by Americium-241 and you've got a power supply with a half-life of 432 years, making it ideal for a multi-century long-range mission.
The sheer lifting capacity available to NASA today [in the form of Falcon Heavy], coupled with a Xenon-based thruster and 21st-century RTG and you've got the ingredients for a deep-space exploratory vehicle that could probably make it to our nearest stellar neighbour. Not in our lifetimes, of course, [we're talking thousands of years for that sort of vehicle mass] but it's much more likely that we could keep in touch with it than some of these smaller, lighter, "laser light-sail" approaches.
Or... that would be enough of a payload to send a much more serious amount of kit to the more interesting planets/moons in this solar system...
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Monday 20th April 2026 19:08 GMT M.V. Lipvig
Re: This isn't so much Off Topic as "Out There"...
That is an excellent idea. Such a launch would likely have the new probe passing the Voyager probes within 20 years of launch. Although, we should send them in a different direction as the one of the Voyagers is headed for Klingon territory, and the other is going to be sent back after a Borg retrofit. We need a fellow named Jackson Roykirk on the design team, just to make sure.
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 16:54 GMT NickHolland
Re: This isn't so much Off Topic as "Out There"...
> It weighs much, much less today.
Why's that? Only thing I can think of that has been ejected has been fuel, and from what I'm seeing, at launch, there was only 100kg of fuel, so that's less than 15%. That's not even one "much less", much less two much lesses. What am I missing?
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Tuesday 21st April 2026 16:02 GMT ThatOne
Re: This isn't so much Off Topic as "Out There"...
> Using the technology commercially available today [...]
That might be true, but unfortunately only in theory. If they were built the way things are built today, they would have probably fallen apart before crossing the orbit of Pluto...
What I'm saying is that while the Voyagers are pretty unimpressive spec-wise, their absolutely unique feature is that they have proven to be resilient beyond all expectations, and have outlived their planned lifespan by 44 years. Running 48 years non-stop in a fairly hostile environment without any repairs or servicing, that's some serious engineering!
