r/spaceporn • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • Dec 11 '24
Voyager 1 phones home from ~1 light-day away! Related Content
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u/JustATrueWord Dec 11 '24
Voyager took 47 years to travel the distance of 1 light day. So it will travel one light year in ~47x365 = 17,155 years. Go little spacecraft! 💪🏻
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u/Coffeeisbetta Dec 11 '24
I want to read a sci fi about aliens in 20,000 years who are not much more technically advanced than we are now witnessing Voyager fly by their solar system. They call it the Wow! signal and speculate for decades on its origin until one day launching a probe of their own.
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u/Jlikescake Dec 11 '24
Read Rendezvous with Rama!
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u/TheOtherPhilFry Dec 11 '24
Great book. The sequels. . . Not so bueno.
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u/LookingForVoiceWork Dec 11 '24
I enjoyed them, but yea, it's completely different. Same thing with Ender's Game, completely different books.
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u/Everyredditusers Dec 11 '24
Funny because enders game was written as a prelude/origin story to support what was meant to be the main book in the series, Speaker of the Dead.
Side note: Reading the extremely homoerotic parts of those books hit different once you find out the author is an absolute raging homophobe.
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u/Africa-Unite Dec 11 '24
"Voyager 1 is expected to reach the theorized Oort cloud in about 300 years and take about 30,000 years to pass through it. Though it is not heading toward any particular star, in about 40,000 years, it will pass within 1.6 light-years (0.49 parsecs) of the star Gliese 445, which is at present in the constellation Camelopardalis and 17.1 light-years from Earth. That star is generally moving toward the Solar System at about 119 km/s (430,000 km/h; 270,000 mph). NASA says that "The Voyagers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way." In 300,000 years, it will pass within less than 1 light year of the M3V star TYC 3135-52-1." Source
"Voyager 2 is not headed toward any particular star, although in roughly 42,000 years, it will have a close approach with the star Ross 248 at a distance of a few light-years. If undisturbed for 296,000 years, Voyager 2 should pass by the star Sirius at a distance of 4.3 light-years." Source
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u/Otsuko Dec 11 '24
Sounds like something wild in the outer space...
Maybe even the Outer Wilds...
(Go play it)
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u/Exciting-Type-907 Dec 11 '24
What’s wild is, if it’s even pointed that direction, the closest system they’ve seen would take it 72,000 years to reach, if that figure above is correct.
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u/N8dork2020 Dec 11 '24
The closest star outside of the sun is 4.2 light years away so it would be closer to 80,000 years for the next closest solar system.
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u/Haunting_Ad_9013 Dec 11 '24
And it will take about 43 billion years to reach our closest galaxy, Andromeda.
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u/Recent-Hat-6097 Dec 11 '24
Andromeda will collide with the milky way in 4.5 billion years.
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u/thealmightyzfactor Dec 11 '24
Yeah, at those timescales, you actually have to care about the fact galaxies are moving lol
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u/TheDividendReport Dec 11 '24
And moving much faster than a probe we blasted off into space, apparently. I'm struggling to wrap my head around this.
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u/thealmightyzfactor Dec 11 '24
The milky way galaxy we're in is moving at like 1,000,000 mph relative to the cosmic background radiation (and so are other galaxies, hence them smashing into each other on occasion), anything we do that isn't measured in fractions of lightspeed is basically standing still.
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u/StarSchemer Dec 11 '24
What an awesome shortcut for intergalactic travel. Quicker to just wait for the galaxy to come to you.
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u/Suds08 Dec 11 '24
Then, after investigating, we find out it was actually just us creating the signal from a different dimension in a different time period to warn us about an upcoming ...
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u/smoothjedi Dec 11 '24
The closest star is Alpha Centauri, and that's 4.25 light years away. Even if it was going that direction, it would still take, at the given rate of 17,155 years/ly, 72.8k years to get there. 20k years is barely out of our solar system, relatively speaking.
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u/jedadkins Dec 11 '24
Voyager 1 is actually 23 light hours and 3 light minutes away, it won't hit a full light day till early ~2027. We should absolutely throw parties when it finally crosses a full light day
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u/Sharlinator Dec 11 '24
Technically it’s been slowing down all the time since the Saturn flyby, it’s going to take more than 47 years for the next light day.
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u/Sad-Sample-6096 Dec 11 '24
Maybe a few years/days more because it's slowed down by the sun, right?
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u/Busy_Yesterday9455 Dec 11 '24
Link to the original blog post
Scientists have used the historic Dwingeloo radio telescope to receive signals from the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Only a few telescopes in the world have received these signals, which are very faint due to the distance of Voyager 1: almost 25 billion kilometers, more than four times the distance to Pluto.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 to visit the outer planets in the Solar system. After its primary mission ended, it was sent on a journey out of the Solar system. It is currently the most distant and fastest human-made object, traveling in interstellar space. Its radio signals, traveling at the speed of light, currently need 23 hours to reach Earth.
Credit: Thomas Telkamp, Tammo Jan Dijkema, Cees Bassa, Ed Dusschoten
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u/mCanYilmaz Dec 11 '24
Although we know Voyager 1 is out there and can still receive faint signals from it, detecting them is incredibly challenging.
For those who believe we are alone in the universe and that the cosmos is silent, it’s worth considering that finding a radio signal strong enough to detect and interpret—especially one directed toward our location—is practically impossible.
I don’t see the Fermi Paradox as a paradox at all; I think it reflects how bad we are at understanding the vastness of space.
It would be still difficult to study Earth from a planet in the Alpha Centauri system and conclude that there’s life there.
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Dec 11 '24
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u/Upset_Ant2834 Dec 11 '24
Eh I don't think encoding or encryption would keep us from at least detecting an artificial signal. Understanding what it's saying is a different story.
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u/Theron3206 Dec 12 '24
Modern spread spectrum radio comms look like noise spread over a section of the band unless you know the decoding method (and the way to recover the clock).
If the single is barely above the noise threshold of your instrument you are extremely likely to completely miss it.
Afaik the farthest distance we could reliably detect high power radar (of the sort used in the 70s and 80s to look for nuclear missile launches in Russia) is only a few hundred light years and as we get more advanced we radiate less powerful signals (because it's wasteful and expensive).
Couple all that together and you have a time period of a few decades and a radius of a few hundred lightyears from where we might detect EM evidence of alien civilization, not great odds given the size of even our galaxy.
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u/richardizard Dec 11 '24
I don't know how anyone could think we're alone in the universe if they truly understood how mindbreakingly vast it is. Right now, we're like ancient civilizations living in separate continents. Clueless that others exist, but some are curious enough to think there might be a possibility. Until we discover a way to travel at interstellar speeds, we'll continue being that ancient civilization. We just have to hope that whoever makes it to us first is friendly.
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u/LC_From_TheHills Dec 11 '24
Infinite possibilities includes the possibility that something is truly unique.
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u/DJMixwell Dec 11 '24
I think it reflects how bad we are at understanding the vastness of space
Yes and no, idk if that would be my answer to the Fermi paradox. It is a good one, though.
I mean, the idea is based on a few assumptions, right? There’s billions of stars in the Milky Way that could support a planet like earth, and there’s a high likely of planets in the habitable zones of many of those stars, and many of those stars are billions of years older than our sun. Therefore not only is life likely to have emerged, but if it did we might also expect it to be more advanced, especially with how quickly we’ve seen technology progress in the last let’s say 200 years. If a civilization was even just hundreds of years older than ours, with a similar rate of technological advancement, who knows what kind of technology they could have. Billions of years of technological advancements, to us, may be indistinguishable from magic.
It’s hard for us to study planets in other systems, or to traverse the galaxy quickly, but for a society with a billion year head start it might be child’s play. So my interpretation of the Fermi paradox isn’t so much that life must be so abundant that the galaxy should be littered with probes and that we should have found one by now, and moreso that our idea of aliens as being ultra advanced species with FTL travel/warp drives must be wrong. Because if such a species did exist, with a billion year head start, then I do think that surely they would have the ability to locate us and make contact.
So I think it’s moreso a hard limit on what technology can actually achieve, or an evolutionary hurdle that is highly unlikely for life to overcome.
OR, it could be a Star Trek Prime Directive scenario where, until our tech is advanced enough, we’re basically treated like an uncontacted tribe. They know we’re here, they’re choosing to let us work it out on our own.
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u/astronobi Dec 11 '24
but for a society with a billion year head start
There may not be many that have a head start.
Radiogenic heating rates drives planetary habitability (by enabling plate tectonics, carbonate-silicate cycles) and these have increased significantly over cosmic history. Planets which formed in an earlier epoch, when metallicity was lower, are likely cold and geologically dead by now1 => leads to destabilization of atmospheric CO2 levels (either runaway or collapse, depending on outgassing rates).
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u/DuvalHeart Dec 11 '24
It's more likely that Fermi's assumptions are wrong. That life is far more rare than he supposed. Or the concept that life develops on a linear scale is wrong. Might be trillions of planets with non-sentient life out there, because the evolutionary forces weren't correct for big brained self-aware animals to evolve.
Logically, if Fermi were right we'd see other sentient species on Earth.
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u/Spork_the_dork Dec 11 '24
TBF Neanderthals were a thing, so we did see another sentient species on Earth. They just sort of vanished from the gene pool over hundreds of thousands of years.
My guess for as to why we don't see other sentient species on Earth is just that firstly the odds of two forming simultaneously are incredibly low. It would be like expecting two events that both last 5 minutes and occur randomly during the day to happen to happen at the same time. So one of them would have to be first and wonder why there aren't any others.
Statistically speaking it would be more likely for us to not be the first if more were to exist on earth, of course. But then again trying to understand whether that's actually the case or not is like pulling a ball with the number 1 from a bag and trying to deduce what that means when you don't even know how many balls there are in the bag.
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u/GeenoPuggile Dec 11 '24
I do think that we also have the misconception that any other given civilization advanced enough to travel in to the universe is existing right now with us. Instead it could easily be that these civilizations occurred many times along the 13 billion years that we know of of our universe, which are the odds to cross path with one of those, given also the time as a factor?
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u/Caspi7 Dec 11 '24
Yup and that telescope is 68(!) years old, build in 1956
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u/GoudaCheeseAnyone Dec 11 '24
Building resources were still very limited. The Netherlands were rebuilding the country after the destruction during the Second World War. But there was also a sense of wanting to rebuild the fundamental scientific research capabilities, so the advanced radio telescope 📡 was built. If you happen to be in the neighbourhood, a visit is recommended. Old Dutch farming villages and forest surround a large open marshland where the dish is located. You can check their website and their youtube channel for more info.
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u/MWJNOY Dec 11 '24
Voyager 1 is still in the Solar System, it won't reach the Oort Cloud for roughly 300 years.
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u/lostwisdom20 Dec 11 '24
So the manhole cover is being treated as fanfiction?
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u/Greenmanssky Dec 11 '24
The manhole cover was only caught on a single frame and if it had even half of its supposed velocity it would have burned in the atmosphere before reaching space
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u/Nientea Dec 11 '24
I’ve heard that the manhole cover was traveling so fast it didn’t have time to burn up in the atmosphere before it reached space
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u/chewy_mcchewster Dec 11 '24
It still needs to " hit " all those air molecules which would cause it to heat up extremely rapidly.. most likely it disintegrated within just a few more milliseconds just out of video range.. I too however, want to imagine it's floating in space on its way to alpha centauri where it will crack a planet due to its kinetic energy
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u/Rob_thebuilder Dec 11 '24
I can’t figure out what you mean. Please elaborate?
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u/drchem42 Dec 11 '24
IIRC, there was a nuclear weapons test done underground sometime in the Cold War where what was basically a manhole cover was directly above the nuke.
Somebody once calculated that the thing would have reached tremendous speed in the process making it go faster than basically any man made object ever. So if it didn’t get vaporised, it would beat Voyager 1 as the thing travelling furthest from earth. Thing is, it absolutely did get vaporised.
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u/Brixiuss Dec 11 '24
During Operation Plumbbob, which was a series of nuclear tests, a manhole cover was blown up with the power of nuclear explosion and launched into the atmospere. It is said that manhole cover had escape velocity and was the fastest man made object. Missing steel bore cap
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u/diddelidee Dec 11 '24
As I understood from news in Dutch radio, they’re not scientists but amateurs. I don’t mean to downgrade anything. I just think it’s even more impressive that they managed to do this!
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u/SippingSancerre Dec 11 '24
Couple corrections:
According to NASA, Voyager 1 is still about 23 light hours away, not yet one (1) light day
Voyager 1, while traveling very fast at 3.6 AU per year, or 61,602 km/hr, or 38,280 mi/hr is not nearly the fastest human-made object. That record is currently held by the Parker Solar Probe, which hit over 10X Voyager 1's velocity at 394,736 mi/hr this past September, and is projected to reach speeds up to 430,000 mi/hr (690,000 km/hr) as its highly elliptical orbit diminishes in size
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u/Dpow3SUMXpow2 Dec 11 '24
So is it 1 light day away or is it not?! Cant claim that if signal needs 23 hrs to resch us instead of 24h lght hours?
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u/Germshroom Dec 11 '24
It's not. 1 light day is in late 2026 or early 2027. Op just put a ~ and rounded...
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u/suckmypulsating Dec 11 '24
Such an incredible achievement, look what we can achieve when we set our minds to it.
From a humble little planet to outside our suns circle of influence and still signaling home.
The fact that any digital components have survived to this day and are still functional is a monument to human engineering and ingenuity, truly inspiring.
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u/maddierl97 Dec 11 '24
The fact that Voyager is still functional even SO far out in the unknown, this!!!
We are amazing when we really want to be lol.
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u/Glittering_Box_4118 Dec 11 '24
This implies that since 1977, the probe has travelled 26 billion kilometers, a figure that stands in no comparison whatsoever to the vast scales of the universe. Who are we to even begin to understand this?
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u/FlyingPasta Dec 11 '24
I love the Voyager missions so much, it was truly the golden age of curiosity. I can’t imagine people coming together nowadays to take a spacecraft and just freaking fling it into outer space just to see what’s up over there. They also have lasted a lot longer than initially anticipated, with the operators using every trick in the book to keep them going. Today I work at the place that built them, and damn is it different :/
Excited and grateful for Europa Clipper though, Europa is fascinating.
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u/Admirable-Emphasis-6 Dec 11 '24
NASA has been literally sending robotic probes pretty nonstop since the 1950s. Most recently, Europa Clipper. The Voyager missions were impressive but Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons were all just as complex and impressive.
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u/FlyingPasta Dec 11 '24
I’m not saying we stopped sending probes, I’m saying the golden age of space competition that gave us the gall to aim for interstellar space is no longer there, at least not via govt. JPL, which builds the craft, just had one of the most brutal years on record. Hundreds of mission engineers laid off, managers were praying to get the clipper off the planet before something else punches them in the face, and now Trump is appointing some billionaire ex-SpaceX military entrepreneur as the NASA admin while his magat cronies in congress shit all over budget for some air time
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u/OdeezBalls Dec 11 '24
Damn. We are truly insignificant beings lol
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u/Gabe750 Dec 11 '24
And yet we are of the same exact beauty and significance that we see in the stars, we've just forgotten.
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u/3scap3plan Dec 11 '24
Really cool, what info can the voyager tell us other than it's location?
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u/DiWindwaker Dec 11 '24
The four instruments study plasma waves, magnetic fields, and particles. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are the only spacecraft to directly sample interstellar space, which is the region outside the heliosphere — the protective bubble of magnetic fields and solar wind created by the Sun.
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u/LickingSmegma Dec 11 '24
Did they find considerable difference with the heliosphere?
(I'm guessing though that the boundary isn't quite abrupt, and the changes are gradual.)
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u/Krashlandon Dec 11 '24
The boundary actually is rather abrupt. Check out the graphs of solar particles vs interstellar particles. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-voyager-2-probe-enters-interstellar-space/
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u/LickingSmegma Dec 11 '24
Interesting, thanks. Iirc I've seen it previously written that the boundary is where the solar wind is overwhelmed by interstellar particles, which would presumably be gradual — but I guess that was misguided.
Also
While the probes have left the heliosphere, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have not yet left the solar system, and won’t be leaving anytime soon. The boundary of the solar system is considered to be beyond the outer edge of the Oort Cloud, a collection of small objects that are still under the influence of the Sun’s gravity. The width of the Oort Cloud is not known precisely, but it is estimated to begin at about 1,000 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun and to extend to about 100,000 AU. One AU is the distance from the Sun to Earth. It will take about 300 years for Voyager 2 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly 30,000 years to fly beyond it.
Huh.
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u/Jazzlike_Common9005 Dec 11 '24
Data about the interstellar medium and the heliosphere. It’s remaining instruments provide info on magnetic fields, plasma waves, and general particle density of the space they’re flying through. Though the spacecraft will likely run out of power to keep these instruments going within in the next few years. They are very near the end of their lifespan.
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u/Hawkpolicy_bot Dec 11 '24
If I remember correctly, NASA's planning to power down most of the remaining subsystems for both Voyager probes in 2025. There will still be some instruments that are active, but they want to extend those lifespans by shutting down everything else
I'm not sure they'll be scientifically useful after that point but it'd be nice to communicate with them at least
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u/UbiSububi8 Dec 11 '24
Keep playing that golden record, you golden craft!
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u/Pe45nira3 Dec 11 '24
Aliens respond: "Send more Chuck Berry!"
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u/UbiSububi8 Dec 11 '24 edited Dec 12 '24
Well, it is cruising and playing the radio…
…with no particular place to go.
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u/kiltedjohn1000 Dec 11 '24
If it ever reached the nearest star it would take 5 years to send a message
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u/hugo4711 Dec 11 '24
Would only take around 84,600 years for Voyager to reach such a star
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u/dark_hypernova Dec 11 '24
"From the stars came Voyager. Your gift. In sending your message, filled with your music and your joy, you showed such touching desperation to find another. We fell in love all over again.
We had but one chance to put things right. I do not know if you can save us. I do not know if you can change who you one day may be. You say you are trying to survive through your time, so you may live into mine. I really hope that you, you, do.
But above all else, there is one thing you need to know.
From one maker of music to another, across all worlds, all times, no matter what you do or what you become: You are nothing less than beautiful."
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u/FitMathematician811 Dec 11 '24
It's taken 47 years for Voyager 1 to travel a single light day. At that rate, to travel a full lightyear, it would take 17,100 years. So yeah, no wonder we haven't been contacted by aliens, especially if the closest civilization is some 4, 5 or 6 lightyears away
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u/hugo4711 Dec 11 '24
Sneakernet is too slow for such a distance. If they used radio to contact us, round trip would take 10 years to say “hi” to each other
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Dec 11 '24
Fun fact nobody cares about: Voyager 1 was launched at 8:56 am EDT, 09/05/1977. I was born am 8:56 am EDT, 09/05/1997. So, 20 years to the minute of Voyager 1’s launch. Which I find pretty neat.
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u/Snoo-46534 Dec 11 '24
Hey I care about it, that's really cool. 10/10 would befriend you if you told me this irl
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u/Loud-Ad9148 Dec 11 '24
In that space between us and the Voyager, around 2 billion Earths could fit.
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u/Germshroom Dec 11 '24
Saying ~1 light day is a bit misleading. I. The article they state it took 23 hours. 1 light day is expected in late 2026 or early 2027 IRC but still really cool what they did. !!!
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u/thnk_more Dec 11 '24
That was annoying that they decided to “round up” so they could beat everyone else to the headline for clicks.
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u/PracticalShoulder916 Dec 11 '24
I remember when these were launched and we thought we would be contacted by aliens within a few years.
We were incredibly naive back then.
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u/Zealousideal_Cow_341 Dec 11 '24
The fact that we could build and launch a probe with such precise timing and control to perform a gravity assist around two planets blows my mind. Here we are years later and that probe has been flying through interstellar space for 12 years and still successfully talking to us. It’s a totally insane engineering feat.
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u/Trumpet1956 Dec 11 '24
Not that hard. It's not like rocket science or anything. /s
And they did it without the benefits of the advanced computer systems we have now. It really is one of the greatest feats humans have ever accomplished.
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u/john_adams_house_cat Dec 11 '24
How long does it take for the signal to reach Earth?
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u/tritonice Dec 11 '24 edited Dec 11 '24
A little over 23 hours.
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u/QVRedit Dec 11 '24
And it’s using low power 1970’s radio technology. Of course at the receiving end, the technology has improved since it was launched, extending the range of detection.
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u/LilMixDrink Dec 11 '24
Voyager phones home from 4x the distance of Pluto yet I can’t even get a call back from the friends
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u/Discipline_Cautious1 Dec 11 '24
It's says in the message :"Can I get back home now?"
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u/namedjughead Dec 11 '24
It's all fun and games right now, but no one's going to be laughing when Voyager returns after becoming self aware and wants to merge with its creator.
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u/pen15es Dec 11 '24
Damn if we ever invent speed of light travel that probe is going to feel like an idiot.
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u/melo1554 Dec 11 '24
i just watched interstellar for the first time ever and my first imax experience and reading this just makes me so happy lol
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u/veryverythrowaway Dec 11 '24
If you like sci-fi and are excited about this news, try Star Trek: The Motion Picture! It’s very dated and is disliked by some fans of the franchise, but it’s one of my favorites, and without spoilers, I promise it’s related!
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u/sgbg1904 Dec 11 '24
I am sooooo looking forward to the day humanity will catch up to it, snap a photo next to it in their advanced spaceship, and mark the day as a milestone of human achievement.
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u/SufferDieoxide Dec 11 '24
Dumb question - how is Voyager 'fueled'? It has been out there for more than 40 years. What is its source of energy to do all of these activities?
And, how did the signals travel to exact coordinates in Earth without getting physically blocked by some object in space - like a massive asteroid?
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u/rocky3rocky Dec 11 '24
Few points: It doesn't need fuel to move, it's just coasting in empty space. For power, it uses decaying plutonium. The heat generated by that is converted to electricity by a thermoelectric generator.
There are small compressed gas thrusters to 'turn' the probe if needed. But as it is, the main antenna was pointed towards earth a while ago and since it's so far away, the angle between earth and the probe changes really slowly (think of seeing a mountain off the side of the highway and how long it takes to drive to a different angle of it).
Space is incredibly empty. Like 99.99999999999999999% empty. Remember Jupiter is absolutely massive, but from Earth it is only blocking a tiny tiny portion of space behind it from our position.
The signal from Voyager doesn't have to be laser-aligned to reach us. Then antenna on Voyager is probably about 5degrees wide. (Like shouting with your hand making a circle around your mouth). The signal is super weak but we can pick it up with multiple gigantic sensitive 100foot wide antenna dishes on Earth.
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u/theobook Dec 11 '24
[T]he main antenna was pointed towards earth a while ago and since it's so far away, the angle between earth and the probe changes really slowly ...
Technical nit: the antenna does have to be re-pointed to Earth sometimes. Instrument calibration rolls and such performed by the spacecraft require readjustments of its attitude before transmitting back to Earth. Is the 2 AU-wide orbit of the Earth around the Sun no longer a factor given the 5-degree widening of the radio signal at Voyager's current distance?
(The 70-meter dishes are 230-feet wide - about 3/4 the length of an American football field!)
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u/International_Link35 Dec 11 '24
I'm sure I'm not entirely correct, but it's fueled by a reactor that runs off the heat from plutonium decay. As for the signal - space is REALLY empty. Amazingly, stunningly empty.
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u/QVRedit Dec 11 '24
I think it has a plutonium radioactive battery - it uses the decay heat to power a thermoelectric generator. Its power output is quite low.
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u/jockey_killer Dec 11 '24
a small nuclear reactor, and it's been shutting things off to keep the power going... I think.
and constant reattempts every 24 hrs or so? I'm not sure about that part... plus, imagine space is huge, the likely hood of something being in the way could potentially be super small... like almost nothing.
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u/Comprehensive-Dig165 Dec 11 '24
Is the signal available to listen to????
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u/Jisifus Dec 11 '24 edited Dec 11 '24
No. The baseband data is tens of gigabytes, the signal is very narrow and almost indistinguishable from background noise.
If you want to know what a strong terrestrial signal using the same protocol with a low noise floor would sound like, listen to the BPSK31 sample here: https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Phase_Shift_Keying_(PSK))
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u/TheSoundOfMusak Dec 11 '24
Its engineering is absolutely amazing. I am at awe of what human intellect is capable of when we put our minds to it.
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u/SengalBoy Dec 11 '24
I really hope Voyager 1 holds out at the very least until it reaches 50 years old.
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u/Haloman1346-2 Dec 11 '24
And I can't get service in a elevator....
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u/RhesusFactor Dec 11 '24
Learning moment. In the free space path loss equation the gain value for the antenna dimension is squared which makes it significantly more important to the overall gain than other components. So having a really big dish is very helpful for weak signals.
70m of dish plus a second dish to get signals from voyager.
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u/myaccountgotbanmed Dec 11 '24
Damn! 1 light day is such an incredible amount of distance and yet it's also incredibly insignificant.