How loger can voyager 1 hold ?
The prediction is at least 14 more years… Voyager 1 had as its primary targets the planets Jupiter and Saturn and their associated moons and rings; its current mission is the detection of the heliopause and particle measurements of solar wind and the interstellar medium. Both Voyager probes are powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which have far outlasted their originally intended lifespan, and are now expected to continue to generate enough power to keep communicating with Earth until at least around the year 2020 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_
I have to state that this is not a complete answer, I can’t give you a number – but I’ll get you as close as I can. The Voyager spacecraft uses a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). An RTG converts heat (produced from the decay of a radioactive material) into electricity, the two main components in the process are the radioactive material and the thermocouples which turn the heat into electricity. Radioactive decay is measured in a term called ‘half-life’, the time it takes the element to decay to half it’s original capacity. the most common radioactive fuel, Plutonium (238-Pu), has a half-life of about 87.7 years. this means that after 87.7 years of operation the voyager’s RTG will produce about 50% of its original wattage. The number will actually be lower due to degradation of the thermocouples, data about the specific thermcouples onboard voyager is hard to come by, some sources suggest that after 20-something years of operation the thermocouples onboard Voyager are workin
The two Voyager spacecraft continue to operate, with some loss in subsystem redundancy, but still capable of returning science data from a full complement of VIM science instruments. Both spacecraft also have adequate electrical power and attitude control propellant to continue operating until around 2025 when the available electrical power will no longer support science instrument operation. At this time science data return and spacecraft operations will end. Spacecraft electrical power is supplied by Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) that provided approximately 470 w of 30 volt DC power at launch. Due to the natural radioactive decay of the Plutonium fuel source, the electrical energy provided by the RTGs is continually declining. At the beginning of 2008, the power generated by Voyager 1 had dropped to ~ 285 w and to~ 287 w for Voyager 2. Both of these power levels represent better performance than the pre-launch predictions, which included a conservative degradation mod
