Voyager's incredible 45-year journey through space

Launched in 1977, NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft have defied the odds, still operational after nearly half a century of traversing the cosmos. Their remarkable endurance is a testament to the ingenuity of their design, which squeezes an astonishing amount of capability into a tiny package.

Voyager's memory conundrum

With a mere 68 kilobytes of storage, the Voyagers' onboard computers have survived the most extreme conditions in the universe thanks to an austere and redundant architecture. To put that into perspective, a single email or a 2MB image would leave the spacecraft's hard drive completely full.

Imagine the chaos that would ensue if the Voyagers were to receive a modern smartphone photo, which would require a whopping 2,000 kilobytes of space. The spacecraft's systems would immediately crash, wiping out critical control codes and leaving the vessel adrift in space.

A triumph of efficient engineering

Engineers overcame these challenges by equipping the Voyagers with six redundant computer systems and an extremely lean software stack. Every byte of code serves a vital purpose, demonstrating that efficiency is the ultimate shield against the passage of time.

Maintaining these distant relics requires meticulous work, as commands sent from Earth take over 22 hours to reach the spacecraft. Updates are a daunting task, with engineers having to make draconian decisions to free up space. They must purge old code, like instructions used to capture Jupiter images in the 80s, to make room for security patches.

A slow decline

Despite their remarkable resilience, the Voyagers face an existential threat: dwindling power. Their plutonium batteries lose potency each year, and to extend their lifespan until the end of the decade, NASA is implementing a controlled shutdown of non-essential systems.