# How Voyager Operates

By Yan Kurniawan

Topic: Space

[Open the interactive Jig](https://ask.jig.com/j/RFON1Rl9JUof)

## Guide

### 1. Meet Voyager

This is Voyager, a robot explorer about the size of a small car\. Two of them launched in 1977, and both are still sending messages home today\. Let's see how it keeps working so far from the Sun\.

Drag the empty space around the craft to look at it from any side\.

### 2. Power without sunlight

Out here sunlight is far too weak for solar panels\. Instead, three RTGs \(radioactive power units\) turn the steady warmth of decaying plutonium into electricity\. The gold beads show that power flowing along the boom into the body\.

They made about 470 watts at launch\. Now they make about half that, and a few watts less each year\.

### 3. The brain in the body

The ten\-sided body holds the electronics\. Three small computers share the work: one follows the command list, one packs science data for sending home, and one keeps the craft pointed the right way\.

Together their memory is tiny: far less than one photo on a phone\.

### 4. Keeping the dish on Earth

A Sun sensor and a star tracker tell Voyager which way it faces\. When it drifts a little, tiny hydrazine thrusters \(small gas jets\) give it a gentle nudge\. The blue line points to Earth; the gold line shows where the dish points\.

Voyager has no big engine to steer with\. It coasts, and the jets only turn it\.

### 5. Feeling space

Long arms keep the instruments away from the craft\. The 13\-metre magnetometer boom senses magnetic fields, and two thin 10\-metre antennas listen for waves in the thin gas between the stars\.

The cameras on the short science boom took famous planet pictures\. They were switched off long ago to save power\.

### 6. Talking to Earth

The big 3\.7\-metre dish is a radio antenna, not a telescope\. It beams data home as radio waves, which travel at the speed of light\. Even so, a message takes nearly a whole day to reach us\.

Voyager 1's signal will be one light\-day away in November 2026\.

### 7. Listening on Earth

By the time it arrives, Voyager's whisper is unimaginably faint\. Huge dishes of NASA's Deep Space Network, up to 70 metres wide, catch it\. Commands go back the other way, and each round trip takes about two days\.

This little desert diorama stands in for the giant dish at Goldstone, California\.

### 8. Still going

Voyager 1 left the Sun's bubble of solar wind in 2012 and now sails between the stars at about 17 kilometres per second\. On its side rides the Golden Record, a message of sounds and pictures from Earth\.

As power fades, the team switches instruments off one by one to keep Voyager talking into the 2030s\.