Missed the exciting news that the boffins at NASA JPL have figured out a way to use reserve power to keep using all the scientific instruments on board Voyager 2 for even longer. For a mission that only had a requirement to last until about 1982, job well done. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-will-do-more-science-with-new-power-strategy
Several years ago, I wrote extensively about space probes, including *six* articles about or involving the Voyager probes! https://glog.glennf.com/blog/2017/8/4/if-you-love-voyager-like-i-love-voyager
The Voyager mission is full of incredibly clever ways to extend its life:
* Using backup computers for image compression for Neptune & Uranus
* Including highly efficient error-encoding hardware onboard that took *years* to develop the decoder for (improving data rate efficiency)
* Making use of an expand deep space network
* Incredibly careful energy budgeting that has added probably a decade to the missions’ lives
* Solving a lubricant problem on the camera tracking system that allowed it to take non-blurry photos! https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/27/us/camera-swivel-on-voyager-sticks-while-craft-passes-behind-saturn.html
Data compression and error-correction algorithms sound fairly boring. But these improvements plus the DSN expansion meant that vastly more data could be sent as the Voyagers moved past Jupiter.
@MikeTRose @vruba Build the decoder on the way down
@vruba I will never get over that when they sent a Reed-Solomon encoder into space, there were no Reed-Solomon decoders *on Earth*.