The best damn things America ever made.
And unimportant?
This is important. We've sent two primitive robots outside of the solar system and have learned marvelous things from them. Things we never imagined. This is something for humanity that nothing will take away and even if earth burns to a cinder billions of years from now, these two robots will last for billions of years more, maybe teaching other civilizations about us.
Voyagers were launched and Voyager 1 left the solar system during the lifetime of my grandfather. A man who met Robert Goddard and Thomas Edison and whose pilot's license was issued to him by Orville Wright. In one generation we've gone from Kitty Hawk to receiving communications from an unmanned robot millions of miles away.
It's something close to miraculous and one of the few things that so well restores my faith in humanity.
Very cool article. One thing that has amazed me is that the Voyagers have been alive and productive for decades longer than was originally planned. The reason for it is that the state of the art of computing and weak signal processing has progressed faster than was originally anticipated when they were launched.
So what has happened is that over the years, new software has been uploaded time after time to the Voyagers exploiting new ways of sending signals back to ever newer signal processing software and ever more sensitive radio technology on the ground.
We have effectively reinvented the Voyagers over and over as they travelled farther and farther away.
We have even reprogrammed the automation on board those things so the onboard cameras and other sensors have been used for things that we never planned on when we launched them.
I don't know about you, but I think this is amazing.
