Hide and seek in outer space highlights a battle here on Earth
. Modern storage gives them long observation periods during which they just need very low-speed housekeeping telemetry via very low gain antennas. Voyager was built around one big antenna and the engineering limitations of 50 years ago. Those 50 years have seen huge improvements in digital methods to improve radio links, both on the ground and in space - Voyager was designed for software updates. Old fashioned muscle and new brains: even if things go skew-whiff. The system has slack.
This combination of longevity in the face of the vastness of space, time, and finger trouble, combined with the huge and dazzling haul of science, has kept the Voyagers in the headlines. With most of the instruments powered down on both Voyagers and just a trickle of data coming back, it's tempting to see them being kept alive more from sentiment than science – tempting, but wrong.
At some point, we'll have to send probes designed explicitly to follow up on this. Then again, virtually all missions beyond Mars have been follow-ups to Voyager, bringing increasingly sophisticated instruments to the Jupiter and Saturn systems. Uranus and Neptune await It'll be a very long time before we close the book on the Voyagers.
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