Not battery’s, it’s a RTG, a box with a pile of plutonium inside that glows red hot a thermocouple and your good to go!Even though the batteries are nuclear batteries, it's still hard to imagine them lasting 46 years
Yes, but at the same time it is a testament to their value how we are able to keep them going.
well now I’m sader than I was before.
Ok, my end state was kind of dark. However, long before then, we will have uploaded to the cloud, converted the mass of our solar system into computronium, and exist in a virtual world, post-scarcity. However, we will still be plagued by ads.
An RTG -is- a nuclear battery.
That's a great article. Appreciate the detailed description of broken memory chip, moving code around, etc. That's some real embedded engineering heroics.
Correct.
That "odd shaped thing" is the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator aka the "BATTERY" that supplies power to the satellite. The isotope used in the RTG is Pu-238 an Alpha particle emitter, for those not familiar Alpha radiation can be blocked by most anything...a sheet of paper, your skin etc, its extremely short ranged and the isotope has a half life of 87.7 years so in the realm of Pu isotopes its realatively short lived. The RTG probably doesnt need to be on a long boom as the radiation is or should be fairly short ranged unlike Beta and Gamma emitters which can go hundreds of feet and require shielding like lead, concrete, steel, earth, mineral oil etc (heavy shielding). I work in the nuclear cleanup industry and have some knowledge of Radioactive Materials and frequently transport them so I like knowing a little bit about them.......
If I remember correctly, it's on one of the sides of the decagon in the middle. I don't remember which side though.
A small hint, it’s not in that pic because it’s covered up by a part that starts with a M.
It probably is for cooling, but radiation, even short range radiation can play havoc with electronics, and some of the decay isotopes from Pu238 are beta/gamma emitters which have much greater "reach". For more specifics on Voyager1's RTGs (it has 3) wikipedia has an ok page.
True but it is from the 70s electronics where less susceptible to radiation because the transistors where not atomic scale. But you know more than me about this sort of thing.
Probably not the active circuit elements (transistors), but the proton and cosmic ray sensor. I don't remember exactly what Voyagers carry.
I know a very little bit about radiation and electronics, but I am not a EE or Nuclear Physicist?Engineer, we had to develop special remote control machines for handling highly radioactive materials in the burial grounds, other than that I don't know too much except what we talk about while sitting around.
