NASA's 1977 computers aboard Voyager are still working in interstellar space (April 2026)
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... As millions around the world watched on smartphones, T.V.s, or in person, Artemis II and its four-person crew burst from the ground on April 1 and successfully began its 10-day journey to the moon. While all eyes were focused on the Orion spacecraft, it's worth remembering that it takes a small army of humans"and computers"to make these kinds of awe-inspiring journeys possible. And just like everyday tech users, NASA also has to upgrade its systems from time to time, and the one powering Artemis looks nothing like their relic ancestors. That doesn't necessarily mean those older versions did not work.
Resurfaced footage released by YouTuber Gary Friedman shows some of the sturdy computing hardware that powered Voyager 1 and 2, a pair of spacecraft first launched in 1977 and tasked with taking a trip through our solar system. Incredibly, both of these spacecraft are still functional in deep space, despite relying on vintage hardware older than many of NASA's engineers today.
The roughly 14-minute video shows a NASA engineer taking viewers on a tour of Building 230 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California. As he walks through the room, he passes an assortment of refrigerator-sized computers made by Univac and IBM. He also stops to acknowledge punch cards used to communicate with the spacecraft, old tape drives, and a communication hub lined with phones and small monitors that one engineer calls "the heartbeat of the enterprise," The voice behind the camera says he is documenting these historic devices, "before they replace it all with mainframes."
All of this ancient-looking hardware was tasked with overseeing the operational safety of the Voyager craft, which are currently well over 16 billion miles from Earth in interstellar space. On board both spacecraft is a suite of custom-made computers and electronics built prior to 1977. Each of the Voyager craft has three computer systems onboard, with a total memory capacity of just 69.63 kilobytes -- that's less than a standard JPEG file.
Scientific data collected by the spacecraft is encoded onto a digital 8-track machine before being transmitted back to Earth. Since memory is in such short supply, the spacecraft constantly write over old data once it's transmitted. ...
8750' is the last telemetry received when it was already crashing. It was cruising at 35k.