Voyager 1 is 171 AU out and its signal takes almost 24 hours to reach us. Two of the five are silent, and we draw them differently — because implying we still hear them would be a lie.
There are five human-made objects on the deck that are never coming back. All of them are drawn where they actually are, propagated from real state vectors.
As of today:
| Craft | Distance | Signal time | Status | |---|---|---|---| | Voyager 1 | 171.4 AU | 23.8 hours | transmitting | | Voyager 2 | 143.6 AU | 19.9 hours | transmitting | | Pioneer 10 | 141.6 AU | 19.6 hours | silent since 2003 | | Pioneer 11 | 117.6 AU | 16.3 hours | silent since 1995 | | New Horizons | 65.3 AU | 9.0 hours | transmitting |
Send a command to Voyager 1 now and it arrives just under a day later. If it answers immediately, you learn the outcome nearly two days after you asked.
Every decision about that spacecraft is made almost two days in the past. It has been that way for years, and the gap grows by about four minutes every week.
Voyager 1 launched in 1977. It crossed the heliopause in 2012 and is now returning data from interstellar space on a transmitter weaker than the bulb in a fridge.
Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 are still out there and still moving, and we know roughly where. But Pioneer 11's signal was lost in 1995 and Pioneer 10's in 2003.
So on the deck they are drawn without the live pulse the transmitting craft carry, and they are labelled as silent.
That is a deliberate design decision and it is worth explaining. A map that showed all five identically would be implying we are tracking five spacecraft. We are tracking three and extrapolating two. The visual difference between those two statements is one small animated dot, and leaving it on would have been the easy, prettier, dishonest choice.
Their positions are honest arithmetic. Their silence is a fact. Both belong on the map.
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