4 ms·
The fact that we can communicate with Voyager, and in both directions, blows my mind. It's completely counter-intuitive. At least for Voyager->earth we can use
by HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
The fact that we can communicate with Voyager, and in both directions, blows my mind. It's completely counter-intuitive.
At least for Voyager->earth we can use giant radio telescopes to detect the faint signal, but how do we manage to focus on those few hundreds of photons per bit coming from a pinpoint source a light day away?!
In the earth->Voyager direction it seems even less intuitive - sure we can broadcast a powerful signal, but it's being received by a 12' wide antenna 15 billion miles away. WTF?
I guess radio communications in general is magic, a bit like (in nature of counter-intuition) quantum entanglement of particles arbitrarily far apart. It seems there is something deeply wrong about our mental models of space and time.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoPer the article we lose 99.9% of the photons sent. The antenna is as directional as possible but with a similar dish you could pick up the signal on the Moon at this point I expect (probably a smaller dish given the lack of atmospheric noise) Equally we're broadcasting to the area of space Voyager's in. We're not able to to target it to the dish - 12' isn't the DSOC accuracy - it's the size required to pick up enough data given the signal diffusion.