If you’ve seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture, you may be aware that one of the possible fates of the NASA’s Voyager Probe is pretty wild. In the first feature film starring Captain Kirk and company, an enormous, mysterious probe advances on earth, killing everything in its path. The Enterprise crew manage to make their way to the center of the probe, where they discover the strange truth: a Voyager probe left the solar system and met up with a race of intelligent machines. Believing the probe to be an injured relative, they refurbished the probe far beyond its original abilities, gifting it with weapons, agency, and intelligence.
We would certainly like Voyager 1 and 2 to have that same experience — minus the murderous rage. They would need to meet sentient space machines pretty soon, as NASA’s interstellar probes are slowly dying. Here’s more from Wired:
Once the Voyagers’ planetary journeys were over, it was possible to begin a new mission phase. After their last planetary stops, both probes reached escape velocity for the solar system, allowing them to be released from the sun’s gravity. Since 2012 for Voyager 1, and 2018 for Voyager 2, they have become interstellar. We know this because after those dates, sensors on the probes showed that charged particles from the sun became less numerous and energetic than those detected from the galactic environment. This was a golden opportunity to study the boundaries of the solar system and the environment outside of it.
Reaching such a distance is only possible with the right energy source. Many probes use solar panels, but if they move too far from the sun, they become useless (the farthest probe that uses them is the Juno probe orbiting Jupiter). The secret of the Voyagers lies in their atomic hearts: both are equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs—small power generators that can produce power directly on board. Each RTG contains 24 plutonium-238 oxide spheres with a total mass of 4.5 kilograms.
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