In the 60s and 70s of the last century, when human exploration of space was at its peak, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for the highest position in space power and launched a series of space races. They have spent huge sums of money on manned spacecraft into low-Earth orbit and the moon, as well as unmanned probes on the planets of the solar system. The most sensational during this period is arguably the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969, and Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon, saying at the moment of landing: This is a small step for me, but a big step for mankind.
In fact, in the entire space race, in addition to the Apollo moon landing, there is one thing that is enough to make mankind go down in history, that is, the Voyager probe launched by the United States
At that time, scientists found that the planets of the solar system would encounter a special geometric arrangement that was once encountered in 176, that is, the probe only needed a small amount of fuel for channel correction, and could use the planetary gravitational slingshot effect to accelerate and detect the major planets in turn, so voyager one and voyager two were born!
In 1977, two unmanned probes took off one after another and began a mission to explore the planets, and Voyager One took the lead in visiting Jupiter and Saturn, but due to the failure of orbit change during the exploration of Titan, it immediately terminated the continued visit to the remaining two planets and flew out of the solar system.
Now that Voyager I has flown for more than 40 years, about 22.6 billion kilometers from Earth, and is still increasing at a rate of 17 km/s, it now takes 20 hours and 31 minutes for Earth to call Voyager I to be received, and the data sent by Voyager One will take the same amount of time to be transmitted back to Earth.
So what kind of technology allows Voyager One to fly for more than 40 years and still maintain contact with Earth?
The answer is the high-frequency band communication of Voyager I, in order to transmit radio signals to the earth, voyager one communication frequency chose the 8GHz band, this frequency band has very little interference, can maximize the unimpeded protection of the channel, because Voyager I is designed with a diameter of up to 3.7 meters high gain antenna, with the help of high-precision gyroscopes, can always be aligned with the earth.
However, voyager-1's signal has been very weak after flying for more than 20 hours to reach the earth, so NASA is also building a "deep space network system" on the earth, the deep space network will amplify the signal and then begin to analyze, that is to say, Voyager-1 in the antenna power is only 20 watts, the earth can still receive the data it sends, but the current transmission speed of Voyager-1 is only 1kb/s, even if it takes dozens of hours to send a trillion data
As the working years get longer, scientists estimate that the nuclear battery on Voyager One will be completely depleted around 2025, when it will completely lose contact with Earth, and then fly alone in the universe, flying about 40,000 years past nearby stars, which means that Voyager One will become a "traveler" who can never turn back.