"well youve had it 6 years that's a good amount of time for that kind of thing to work"
"you should be grateful you got 3 years of use out of that thing, I'm lucky if mine last a year haha"
listen, in 1977 nasa launched the voyager spacecrafts to take advantage of a planetary alignment that takes place every 175 years. These 2 crafts were planned to flyby the outer planets of our solar system and gather data on them to send back to us. Voyager 2 launched first on the 20th of August despite its name because it was planned to reach our gas giants after its counterpart voyager 1, which launched a little later on the 5th of September.
The voyager mission was planned to end 12 years later in 1989. In that time, voyager 1 and 2 passed by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. They discovered new moons, confirmed theories about Saturn's rings, found the first active volcanoes found outside the earth, and they take close-up images of planets only seen at that point from telescopes.
On the 25th of August 1989, voyager 2 encounters Neptune, the last planet in our solar system the voyagers will meet. And that was that. End of mission. Now obsolete.
Less than 1 year later on valentine's day in 1990 voyager 1 looked back on the planet that had built it and sent with it a world's worth of hopes and dreams and took a picture. We called it the solar system family portrait and in it, we see ourselves. The pale blue dot nestled in the darkness of space
And then commands were sent to shut down their cameras. Preserve fuel.
35 years after launch, in 2012 voyager 1 sent back to us data about interstellar space. The very first manmade object to enter it.
41 years after launch voyager 2 did the same. Still operational, still going. Still sending back to us invaluable data, teaching us about our own solar system and the suns influence in our local bubble of space.
They are expected to continue to operate until the year 2025 - almost 50 whole years after they were launched and 36 years after their mission was supposed to have ended.
48 years of harsh space travel, battered by solar winds, pulled by gravity but fast enough just to escape, pelted by who knows how much space dust and radiation.
And even after that, they still have a purpose. Each craft was given a golden record. A disc filled with human knowledge and knowledge of humans and the planet they live on. Greetings and well-wishes to any prospective extraterrestrial life that could potentially pick it up. Co-ordinates, an invite. Samples of our music, the things we love, sounds of the earth, a story of our world. The surf, the wind, birds and whales, images of a mother, our moon, a sunset. Long after the voyager spacecrafts go dark, probably long after we are gone, they will still be doing their job; educating a species about our very tiny corner of the galaxy.
They are nasa's longest-running operation.
And it was all done using 70s technology.
So excuse me if I want a phone that lasts more than 2 years or a vacuum cleaner that doesn't break down after 6, or god fucking forbid, a refrigerator that will keep my food cold my entire fucking lifetime.
blakekathryn
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gummygunk
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