NASA’s Voyager spacecraft is 15 billion miles away, out beyond Pluto, which means it can't be fixed if there is a mechanical issue. But FORTRAN is pretty elegant code, and it's self-powered, so if the CMOS isn't messed up and the telemetry modulation unit gets going it should be communicating fine for decades.

Maybe even long enough to leave the solar system - in 25,000 years.



Voyager was the great plot of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" - it returned to earth after learning everything it needed and it didn't like what it found.

The "Star Trek" screenwriters left out the size of just our solar system for storytelling. CNN does some storytelling of its own. Their journalist makes it sound like it's something extraordinary at 46 years, stating that its mission was only 5 years, but no one stuck music, pictures, and words on a disc because they thought it was only going to Jupiter. We know no life is there, or even 400 light years away.

It should outlive us all. It just may be a dead piece of stuff by the time anyone else is advanced enough to find it, much less understand it.