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Its useless. Most of the time Earth is closer to the Voyager spacecraft than Pluto (or Saturn or...) is! In addition, we can build and maintain much better equi
by Misdicorl 6y ago
Its useless. Most of the time Earth is closer to the Voyager spacecraft than Pluto (or Saturn or...) is! In addition, we can build and maintain much better equipment here on Earth than we can ship to Pluto.
If you wanted to do this "for real", the better option is to send a train of repeaters after the Voyager spacecraft in roughly the same flightpath. More effective, and vastly easier.
- pvaldes 6y agoYes but that would need a similar planetary alignment I assume. Could a repeater send orders to voyager too?
- Misdicorl 6y agoYou'd need a good planetary alignment to get the huge boost that voyager got. But not to get on the trajectory. Your repeater would get further and further from voyager, but not as quickly as earth is. And yes, the repeater can both do tx and rx repeating. That said, I'd expect Earth based (including earth based orbit) solutions to outperform at a lower cost for a long long time.
- Anarch157a 6y agoProbably not. It takes Megawats of power to ensure the small antenna on the proves gets the signal, it's not feasible to put such a thing on a spacecraft. Add to this the limited usefull life of Voyager's RTG power source (after 40 years, half the plutonium have already decayed) and we can conclude that this is not a good idea.
- doomjunky 6y agoAnybody wondering why earth is closer to yovager than pluto? CGP Grey has a good explanation https://youtu.be/SumDHcnCRuU https://youtu.be/SumDHcnCRuU