ARLA/CLUSTER: Quando é que as sondas espaciais Voyager pararam de ligar para casa?

[João Costa > CT1FBF]

When will Voyager stop calling home?

Forty years after they left Earth, the *Voyager* twin spacecraft are still
chugging along, logging 35,000 miles an hour as they zoom farther and
farther into the cosmos.

“I’ve had people ask me, you mean the mission is still going on?� says
Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. “They assumed that it had stopped after it passed Neptune.�

Far from it. After the Voyagers completed their tours of the outer planets
in the 1980s, giving humanity its first real look at Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune, they continued on to the outer reaches of the solar
system.

In August 2012, Voyager 1 left the system entirely, emerging from inside
the protective bubble formed by the sun’s wind and exiting into
interstellar space. Voyager 2 is on its way out; the spacecraft is
currently coasting through the heliosheath, the outermost layer of the
sun’s bubble. Voyagers 1 and 2 are currently about 13 billion and 10
billion miles from Earth, unfathomable distances that mean little more to
us terrestrials than giant numbers on a page.

And they still call home. It takes a while, but they do.

The Voyagers transmit data to Earth every day. The spacecraft collect
information about their surrounding environment in real time and then send
it back through radio signals. Voyager 1 data takes about 19 hours to reach
Earth, and signals from Voyager 2 about 16 hours.
(For comparison, it takes the rovers on Mars 20 minutes on average to call
home.) The signals get picked up by NASA’s Deep Space Network, a collection
of powerful antennae around the world that communicate with dozens of
missions.

Read the full article
www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/voyager-interstellar-space/538881
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