As the initial course correcting thrusters have started to wear out, NASA is working on retrofitting the larger thrusters to serve the purpose of keeping Voyager 1's antenna array pointed back home.
The Voyager team expects to have to start flipping off switches in the 2020s, and the probe will likely be completely incommunicado after 2025 or so. But anything we can do to keep in touch with our interstellar buddy for just a little longer gives us a better chance of learning about our region of space.
After that, our research probe will turn into more of time capsule. Voyager 1 won't reach another star for around 40,000 years. Perhaps humanity will be a true spacefaring race by that time, with vessels scattered across the galaxy that manage to outpace our first little beacon into the beyond. But if humanity is long gone, we may make a kind of posthumous contact with other intelligent life. Voyagers 1 and 2 both carry copies of the Golden Record. It's more symbolic than anything—no one expects aliens to know what a record is and how to play it, let alone understand human languages—but just as ancient, sometimes unintelligible cave paintings tell us that our ancestors once roamed distant lands, the etchings on these records will say that we were here. And that we wanted to look for something more.
Such a romantic idea. This is one example where the domains of science, art, and hope for the future intersect. Fascinating to think of this hunk of metal flung out from Earth reaching some other civilization at some point in the far future. Great stuff!
OP here : https://www.popsci.com/voyager-1-thrusters
The Golden Record:
Crazy to think that an object travelling at 40,000 miles per second is moving relatively slow in the universe. Before we consider a future of voyaging out into space, the first step is to preserve our homeworld (or perhaps even find a new one)! My only disappointment is that we probably won't get to see an era of interstellar travel in our lifetime.
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Yeah, certainly need to make sure Spaceship Earth stays a livable space before our species before we focus too much on making other planets habitable.
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