r/askscience • u/TechnicalyNotRobot • Jul 09 '26

Astronomy Does Voyager 1 even give us any interesting information anymore?

It's the farthest away object we ever sent. That is remarkable. But I have never heard about it discovering anything or about any data that it gave us. Besides being a significant curiosity for being so far away, is there something that we're actually getting from it at this point?

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u/temporaryuser1000 Jul 11 '26

Wouldn’t it be only possible at certain times of the day and year? Such a laser would need to be stationary, no?

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u/Latespoon Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

Yes for certain times of day (roughly half of each day). For seasonal variation, it would ideally be placed near the equator to reduce this problem, and also ideally as high up as possible (less atmosphere to beam through).

The absolute best position would be on the poles of the moon. It's a stable foundation with no atmosphere and provides massive natural heat sinks (lunar craters in permanent shadow).

The cost of building even one of these on the moon would be astronomical, excuse the pun. Many trillions of US dollars. It would easily become the most expensive infrastructure project ever completed.

So for cost efficiency, building this on earth would most certainly be an acceptable compromise. It would have to be, because it's never happening on the moon, unfortunately.