this is the kind of content i come here for! love it.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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The bulb in my hallway is 3.2w. Still impressive though.
The beamwidth of Voyager 1's antenna is about 0.5 degrees. In practical terms, that's very narrow, about an 8 metre wide beam at a kilometre distance.
At its current distance, by the time the beam reaches Earth it is 224 million kilometres wide, 1.5x the distance from the Earth to the sun.
Kinda puts the huge distances into a bit of perspective. How difficult is it to pick up that kind of signal? I struggle to get WiFi in the garden.
The bulb was probably designed and manufactured by people who weren’t even born when Voyager launched. It’s wild how long and how far it’s been calling home.
NASA has a neat little video showing the path taken by Voyager 1: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4139
Very interesting. So they both manouvred (slingshot) using planets' gravity wells? Not everything in SciFi is fiction I guess.
And V1 has traveled further from our solar system than the solar system's diameter. Wow.
Extremely high bitrate on the video due to starry background, btw. My old lappy got wheezy.
Yes, and there was a 175 year window for the planets to be lined up like that.
You mean the planets just sat there for 175 years? Wow, I really learned something new today.
Windows to use all the gas giants for gravity slingshots in quick succession only occur every 175 years. Is that better?
Yes
In the scientific fiction genre, everything is scientifically possible. That's the entire premise. Time tells us what they get right and what becomes fantasy.
Not everything, no.
That's called fantasy.
So it generates about 18 Watts of power while transmitting.
Impressive!