Antique Voyager Technology

The Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, Australia is still communicating with the two Voyager spacecraft 30 years after they were launched and 18 years after Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune. The bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked. The 1970s hardware is now our world’s only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system’s outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity’s most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometers from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometers from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques. The Voyager technology is so outmoded, said Tidbinbilla’s spokesman, Glen Nagle, We have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them — via Slashdot