Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Ralf Meuris asks: I just listened to the encore episode “The never-ending Voyager mission”. These probes have been flying through space since the 70s. How come they survive in space for such a long time without any protection against cosmic radiation and things like that? If you look at the Tesla that was sent into space in 2018, it is heavily disintegrated because of the extreme conditions in space.

For starters, the Tesla that was sent into space to test the Falcon Heavy rocket hasn’t disintegrated. It would take millions of years for cosmic rays and micrometeorites to cause any level of disintegration.

So, the structure of the Voyager probes is fine. The danger to any deep-space probe is the electronics. A high-energy particle can strike a memory cell or processor and flip a bit, corrupting data or causing a computer fault.

The Voyager probes protect themselves by hardening their electronics, adding shielding, and redundancy.