Voyager high-gain antenna

technology

The 3.7-metre parabolic dish that dominates each spacecraft's appearance and does all of its long-range talking. It must stay pointed at Earth to within a fraction of a degree, which is why attitude control and the thruster system, not the radio, are usually the limiting subsystem in old age. The link budget is the hardest number to intuit about this mission: the transmitter runs at a few tens of watts, the signal spreads over more than a hundred astronomical units, and what arrives at a Deep Space Network dish is a vanishingly small fraction of a watt, recovered only because the receiving antennas are enormous, cryogenically cooled and pointed with great precision. Downlink rates have fallen accordingly, to the order of a hundred bits per second. Not a place.

A technology is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.