Eli5: how does voyager send a message 15 billion miles with ~200watts of power and we struggle with cellphones and satellites signals right here on earth?
In: Engineering
Your phone has an antenna approximately the length of your phone, pointed in a random direction trying to communicate with a tower that is trying to point in all directions. NASA has several radio telescopes up to 70 metres in diameter, which are pointed exactly at what they are communicating with, with the things they’re communicating with pointed at us.
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