The plutonium 238 decays according to a curve, and the thermocouples are degraded as well by heat and radiation according to a curve. So the power output drops rather predictably: "The radioisotope thermoelectric generator on each spacecraft puts out 4 watts less each year." [1]
The Voyagers will soon no longer have enough power to operate any of their instruments. They'll have enough power to continue operating the transmitter (which serves as a science experiment of its own) into the 2030s. The power of the signal will drop before the electronics and control brown out (if it works as designed), and it the signal might become too weak to detect before the probe completely stops operating. Such a fate befell Pioneer 11, who may yet still be warbling away at low power no longer pointed at Earth; its carrier was last detected in 2003.
Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth.
That FAQ covers a lot of interesting ground (though it talks about 2020 in the future tense).
After Voyager 1 took its last image (the "Solar System Family Portrait" in 1990), the cameras were turned off to save power and memory ...
I didn't realize that was the last image.
... it is very dark where the Voyagers are now. While you could still see some brighter stars and some of the planets with the cameras, you can actually see these stars and planets better with amateur telescopes on Earth.
> the cameras were turned off to save power and memory
Since it’s powered by an RTG, how does the power get “used up”? I assume that this refers to the available power budget at a given moment versus some sort of expendable power reserve.
It's the first question at the top of that ^ FAQ page. One of their comments is :
"Mission managers removed the software from both spacecraft that controls the camera." Makes me wonder if that unused RAM came in handy lately!
It's radioactive so the half-life has a serious effect. Its half-life is 87 years so it's not even used up one. I guess it wasn't really very overdimensioned. But it wasn't meant to last this long.
> the transmitter (which serves as a science experiment of its own) into the 2030s.
One of the longest-running scientific experiments, too. It's already about as old as the Queensland pitch drop experiment was when Voyager I was launched.
Looking at the video on their website it seems the EV motors are supposed to be mounted directly into each wheel, then you only need to account for oscillations on the X and Y axis.
I got that impression at first, but looking closer, the motor isn't in each wheel. It is on the frame of the car - just much closer to the wheel than a CV joint allows.
I wonder if it's really required to have 1g gravity in order to avoid this. It's much easier to artificially create, say 1/6g (moon) gravity by rotation than 1g, since rotational speed required is quite a bit slower.
I wonder how much the rotation speed really matters. It comes down to the tensile strength of the material required to hold everything together I suppose but most metals should be able to handle 1g just fine. Once it's rotating you don't need much energy to keep it going, just enough to overcome any frictional losses from whatever interfaces happen to be required.
To echo some of the points from the aurora book, I think that the human body is really well optimised for 1G environments. We know that there are issues in zero gravity. As you adapt to 2G, you may well get stronger but the stress and strains may have a severe effect on health, life expectancy. Hate to think about the effects on your blood pressure etc
That's actually seen in anime. In Dragon Ball Z, Goku trained in 100 G. I remember thinking it was clever. It reminded me of Spain national football team training for some weeks in La Paz previous to Mexico World Cup in 1986. The idea is enduring harder conditions (> altitude -> less oxygen) to overcompensate.
With the little difference that spring boot offers you 99% of your needs, both to fetch the data from (sql, nosql, you-name-it), and to offer your interface out (web, rest), and programming style (syncronous, asyncronous), and observability, ....
while for go you'll find yourself deep in the mud of choosing what 3rd part library to use for logging and how to make it work with the rest of custom stuff you have to write
it's kinda funny to me when people with latest macbooks, loaded with actually useful but comically expensive programs, open up goland that itself has a shit ton of features, to write some error handling in go
I went the other way as I was sick of all the repetition in Go. Spring boot/JPA data repositories save so much SQL, and spring boot automatically marshals to and from JSON, form data, etc. It means you can just work on the meaningful business logic. Add on Lombok and there's even less to maintain.
