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The Voyager probes are farther out than anything else we have ever sent to space, but they are still working.
Rather than design a probe that would make a fly-by of a single planet, they designed the craft and the mission so that additional fly-by would be technically possible—if approved later—and that the probes would be able to carry out the extended operations. Once the Voyager probes made it past Uranus and Neptune, in the late 1980s, there was very little left to see out in space. So, in 1990, Voyager 1 turned its camera back towards Earth one last time, snapped the famous pale blue dot photo that inspired Carl Sagan’s famous monologue and then NASA turned off its cameras for good.
“If you think about the design age of the mission, the mission was launched in 1977,” Dodd said, “so most of the technology was early 1970s; including the memory and the flight software. Now we've updated flight software many, many times, but not too much in the last 20 or 30 years, just because it's so far away, it doesn't make sense to try make a lot of modifications to it."
Documenting technical changes or details about a sophisticated piece of equipment like a spacecraft, much like computer code today, is essential for those who come after you to follow along with what was done in the past to keep something like Voyager running. But if you don't even know if anyone is going to be working on your project in three years time, much less 40, keeping notes about software updates or quirks in the electronics is understandably lax.
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