Communicating with the Voyager spacecraft Professor Emeritus Andy Marvin

Event details

York Society of Engineers Lecture

The two Voyager spacecraft were designed and launched back in the seventies when Andy was an engineering student. They use the hardware technology that Andy was taught about at the time. That they are still operational nearly fifty years later is nothing short of amazing. In the early days we saw spectacular colour images of the outer planets. More recently the cameras have been turned off partly to conserve power and partly because even the outer planets are now so far away from the spacecraft that they just show up as dots. Each of the spacecraft is a vast distance from earth, yet we can still communicate with them, receiving data about the local space environment at the edge of the solar system.

How on earth is this possible?

In this lecture Andy will show how it is possible. There will be some very very big numbers and there will be some very very small numbers as he explains how it is done and runs through the calculations to show how it all works.

Andy will do the sums - all you have to do is wonder!

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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