How are the Voyager spacecraft able to transmit radio messages so far?
The two Voyage spacecraft certainly have had an amazing track record. They were sent to photograph planets like Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune and have just kept on going past the outer edge of the solar system. Voyager 1 is currently over 7 billion miles (about 11 billion kilometers) away from Earth and is still transmitting — it takes about 10 hours for the signal to travel from the spacecraft to Earth! The Voyager spacecraft use 23-watt radios. This is higher than the 3 watts a typical cell phone uses, but in the grand scheme of things it is still a low-power transmitter. Big radio stations on Earth transmit at tens of thousands of watts and they still fade out fairly quickly. The key to receiving the signals is therefore not the power of the radio, but a combination of three other things: • Very large antennas • Directional antennas that point right at each other • Radio frequencies without a lot of man-made interference on them The antennas that the Voyager spacecraft use are big. Y
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