[NewCents05]

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...htm?list923192

so how do they communicate with something a billion miles away yet my cellphone drops calls while im on the highway

[The General]

Very carefully.

[FireFox]

There's a system of sattelites setup across the galaxy that they have conveniently dubbed the "deep space network".

[hillbillybob]

Nope, there is a little russian monkey. It was deemed the secret to the communist russian space success of the sixties by a joint venture between the Air Force, CIA, NSA, and the San Diego Zoo. A crack team of Vietnam war commandoes was sent into a top secret Russian research facility to extracate this primate and set them to work for us. We spent the 16 years before the launch of Voyeger 1 training this pre-homosapien ancestor to compare star charts that were recovered from the Alien crash near Roswell, New Mexico. When it (the monkey - a rhesus monkey to be specific, named Kettch) can positivly identify a celestial construct, it's training will kick in. It will type the message out on a special computer, which will then spit out paper. The monkey is then expected to wad the paper up and eat it. After 3 to 4 hours, depending on how many bananas Kettch ate that day, a wad is formed from his posterior end. Placing this packet of information encased in the protective layer that NASA scientists have called "D.U.N.G" or poo as a nickname into the air lock. The monkey is then to open the Air lock, launching this pile of poo out into space, on a direct trajectory with earth. The protective poo burns upon re-entry where the message is collected by a flock of sea gulls and delivered to Kennedy Space Center for analysis. Similar technology has been adopted for various other means of wireless communications.

[HAVOC]

Originally posted by NewCents05
so how do they communicate with something a billion miles away yet my cellphone drops calls while im on the highway

lol - This made my day... So, so true. Nasa can communicate with a satelite 10 Billion Miles from earth, yet my cellphone gets no service inside the building where I work.

[molsen]

they use 230-ft in diameter dishes on earth to send 20kw signals to the craft.

"Successfully sending a DSN signal into Voyager-2's receiver is like throwing a baseball across thousands of miles of ocean into a porthole of a moving cruise ship."

so imagine how much more difficult it is to reach Voyager-1, 1.6 billion miles fruther away.

supposedly, Voyager-1 won't run out of electrical power until 2020

[FireFox]

I think it has a Uranium based recator on it. Those reactors are awesome as they're small enough to hold in your hand, and safe enough to hold in your hand as well. A company about 40 minutes away from my house "secretly" builds them for NASA....I know that because I know a guy who works for NASA.

[Meithan]

Voyager 1 is powered by a RTG, or "radioisotope thermoelectric generator". This works by converting the heat released from radioactive decay into electricty. Solar cells would be almost useless since the craft is very far from the Sun. The specific RTG power plant of both Voyager crafts (each use three of them) can produce up to 160W of continuous power from 2.4kg of Plutonium 238; the devices weight around 39kg. So they're not really "handheld".