3 ms·

How much of a lag is there in the data transmission? I guess that should correspond to how many light years it is away? How does the probe know which direction

• rlanday 8y ago
  The current one way transmission times are 20 hours and 5 minutes to Voyager 1 and 16 hours and 38 minutes to Voyager 2: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ The probes use a star tracker to determine their orientation (they apparently look for the sun and one other star). I assume they keep track of their expected position in the solar system, and this is fine-tuned with updates from the ground station. If you have position and orientation, you can compute where the Earth should be at the current time and point the antenna in that direction.
  • jdmichal 8y ago
    Also, at their distance, they don't really have to be that close in aiming. Their beam is plenty wide by the time it reaches Earth.
  • tcarn 8y ago
    All with 1970s technology, simply amazing stuff.
• lodi 8y ago
  "Light years" is a bit optimistic. Voyager 1 is about 20 light-hours away (144 times further from the sun than we are). https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
  • joshlegs 8y ago
    you know, it's pretty damn incredible that we've sent little tiny space probes out of our solar system and they can still talk to us. sometimes i like imagining this tiny ball of circuits floating in space talking to its home planet and it just boggles my mind.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]