Annoying delays can happen even in terrestrial communication.
I’ve sat in my cubicle on a conference call and heard the person in the next cubicle on the same call, with an annoying gap between hearing their voice in person and on the phone.
47 years old and still working some!
The Voyagers’ radioisotope power system loses around 4 watts each year, so to preserve power, NASA engineers have been shutting down some of the science instruments carried by each probe. Voyager 1’s cosmic ray subsystem experiment was turned off on February 25th. When the low-energy charged particle instrument aboard Voyager 2 is shut down on March 24th, both spacecraft will have three out of the ten identical science instruments they launched with remaining operational.
“Electrical power is running low,” said Voyager project manager, Suzanne Dodd. “If we don’t turn off an instrument on each Voyager now, they would probably have only a few more months of power before we would need to declare end of mission. The Voyagers have been deep space rock stars since launch, and we want to keep it that way as long as possible.”
Deep Space Rock Stars would make a good band name.
They certainly were. An impressive achievement in space exploration that will long be legendary. The Voyagers gave us an amazing first close look at the planets of our solar system, thanks to a serendipitous alignment of planetary orbits and technological capability. It’s truly fitting that they should also be the first to achieve interstellar travel, possibly being discovered by some distant future civilization after we’re long gone.
I like to imagine being one of the people who, in some small way, contributed to building the Voyager craft. Say the guy who made some small subassembly. That tiny little bit of work, along with the rest of the Voyager craft, might survive everything else built by mankind.
The last thing to be turned off, of course, will be the radios that are sending the rest of the data home. And it’s worth noting that, even with just the radios and no other instruments operating, there’s still a lot of good science that can be done there.
My dad was one of the lead engineers on the Surveyor program. They predate Voyager and should be on the Moon forever. Of course they haven’t sent back any data in a while.
Well, until the Sun goes supernova. Voyager may escape that event.
True enough. Twenty years after that Voyager takes the crown
There are a few missions that have left the Solar System. Also Pioneers 10 and 11 and New Horizons, off the top of my head.
So everyone associated with those missions might have their work survive everything else made by mankind. In the long run, the works of powerful people will long be forgotten while these spacecraft survive.
Nitpick: the Sun will never go supernova. It’s too small for a core collapse event and there’s no companion star for an accretion-driven event. It will however eventually balloon up into a red giant which will just possibly consume the Earth and Moon, although probably will just miss becoming large enough to do even that.
And everyone knows that Voyager’s ultimate fate is to lose a few letters of its name and return to Earth, looking for the Creator.
One more:
He makes it sound certain that this encounter will give it the necessary kick. I don’t think it’s actually that certain, but more likely just probable.
Will they turn them off, or just keep trying to use them until they fail?
yeah, but there’s something that bothers me about that scene, from a scientific point of view.https://youtu.be/gxAaVqdz_Vk?t=86
What is covering up the letters of V-ger?
It looks like soot from the back of a diesel truck.
Can one you science-y Dopers please 'xplain to me how much diesel soot there is in space?
And why it sticks only to the middle three letters ?
And why is Voyager’s name inscribed on a 2-foot long brass plaque on the outside, anyway?–that much brass weighs several pounds, hardly a useful part of the limited payload.
Must have been a first stage from a Saturn V rocket made it into space and was still burning some RP-1 fuel.
jeezzz…this place depresses me! (well, actually it frikin’ impresses the hell outa me.)
I thought I was making a clever, snarky comment-- because a smart guy like me knows for sure that there ain’t no soot in space.
And then I find out how dumb I am…
Thanks! 
Soot is mostly long chain carbon-heavy molecules. Probably a lot of those in interstellar dust.