Voyager 1

Actually, as dedicated Trekkies will know, one of the Voyager probes is indeed found by an alien civilization who build an incredible advanced spaceship around it and send it back on a mission that will accidentally destroy Earth, if the (by now rather elderly) crew of the Enterprise can’t save us first….

It will probably be found in several million years by humans who have forgotten where it came from and use it to claim there is alien life out there.
Either that or get destroyed by the Klingons (again).

I’d have loved to have designed some tiny part of the Voyager probes; some memorial to my existence travelling for tens of thousands of years in endless cold dark space!

I bet Voyager is covered in ‘secret’ messages! 😉

It will continue to travel further into space and then into deep space for ever. Maybe it will be “thrown” from galaxy to galaxy but I don’t think we’ll see it back here because it is no longer in our sun’s orbit.

So what will happen to Voyager eventually?
Presumably it will get picked up in the gravitational pull of a planet, enter it’s orbit and reenter crashing onto said planet?
Will it ever return, admittedly on a wide orbit, back to Earth – assuming earth is still there of course. I’m talking billions of years?

Radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation just as visible light is – y’all knew that, right? As such, there isn’t a fixed bound as to how far a signal will travel but the trick lies in picking it out from the background – there are an awful lot of electromagnetic emitters out there so you (or, indeed, any other intergalactic species) either need to know what you’re looking for (frequency) or get damn lucky.

Originally Posted by charliehunt
Voyager 1 has nuclear batteries to provide electrical power until at least 2020…
I actually meant the power of the radio transmitter fitted to the Voyager craft…

…which are apparently only twenty-three Watts! The average mobile-phone is about three Watts.

Surely it’s to power the little fluffy bunny with the drums.

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…we are now literally, broadcasting our existence to anything within about 100 light years of us…

Years ago I read that if a ‘very large array’ (VLA) radio-telescope were built, something like a thousand metres square (or many smaller radio-telescopes laid-out in a grid pattern and connected electronically), that mankind would be able to watch alien television!

I couldn’t understand why this wasn’t done immediately; and now it apparently is being done. I think the various space-agencies are building a VLA in South Africa; not sure when the alien TV will be on…

…it couldn’t be any worse than Earth TV!

Apparently the new VLA project is called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). I wish I knew how to add a link with this damn iPad thingy!

Voyager 1 has nuclear batteries to provide electrical power until at least 2020…

I actually meant the power of the radio transmitter fitted to the Voyager craft…

…which are apparently only twenty-three Watts! The average mobile-phone is about three Watts.

Interestingly, in view of my earlier comments, it seems the Voyager craft transmit their radio signals in a highly directional manner using the nearly four metre diameter ‘dish’ fitted to the craft. I suspect that my comments about the square of the distance still hold true and that the signal is tiny when it reaches Earth. The signals use a dedicated frequency to avoid interference from other man-made signals.

“just how far can a radio signal travel,?”

Radio waves travel outwards indefinitely at the speed of light. Which means that we are now literally, broadcasting our existence to anything within about 100 light years of us. At that distance you would hear the earliest radio broadcasts ever made – and you could theoretically home on in the signals, hearing radio and eventually TV broadcasts that were more and more up to date the closer you got.

As Tony T says – lets hope anyone listening isn’t hungry….

CDE – a part answer to your question – Voyager 1 has long-lived nuclear batteries which are expected to provide electrical power until at least 2020 when it will be more than 13 billion miles from Earth and may have reached interstellar space. It is currently travelling away from the Sun and towards interstellar space at about 1 million miles a day.

Good question. I once looked into the power of RADAR which is also, of course, a form of radio.

Imagine a projector pointing at a wall; if you move the projector twice as far from the wall the image on the wall gets twice as wide and twice as high so it is four times the size. The power of the projector is spread over a greater area; and the ‘power’ of the projection for each area of wall diminishes as a square of the distance the projector is from the wall. And radio signals, unlike a projector or RADAR, radiate in every direction so most of the signal is wasted.

The radio return from Voyager will (probably) be picked-up by a large radio-telescope which can pick-up very, very, small radio signals; I once read that all the energy ever picked-up by all the radio-telescopes ever built is less than the energy released when a single snowflake lands!

So the question is really: how much power has the Voyager transmitter got (and this will be limited), and how small a radio signal can the radio-telescopes on Earth pick-up (before it is drowned-out by background radio noise).

Just a question. Voyager was flipped around to take a photo of the Earth, right on the outer limits of our Solar system. No doubt this means that a radio signal must be able to travel that far to make Voyager flip round.
So, my question is, just how far can a radio signal travel,? through infinity and beyound?.
Jim.
Lincoln .7

Let’s hope it never gets found by a race that want to use us as a food source.

I quite agree although I do enjoy many of the science programmes. I saw it when it was first broadcast and it left me with similar impressions. In fact in some ways the whole Voyager programme is more impressive than some other space programmes. I strongly recommend “NASA’s Voyager Missions” as a fascinating book on the subject.