Since its 1977 launch, the Voyager 1 probe has passed gas-giant planets, beamed back the famous Pale Blue Dot picture of Earth from afar, and is now passing through the limits of the solar wind's reach. Its sister craft, Voyager 2, took the first pictures of the outer gas giants, Uranus and Neptune. Likewise, it's leaving the solar system.
Despite the Voyagers' incredible distance and its 1970s hardware, scientists can still communicate with them. But how much longer will they be able to talk to the first man-made crafts to venture so far? Turns out, nobody is totally sure.
"We thought we might not be able to go beyond where we are right now," says Jim Hodder, the operations manager in charge of the arrays of antennae responsible for Voyager communications. "But because we advanced our ground systems over the past few decades, I think right now it's about another 10 years."
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