Searching for Spacecraft
…Schematics to be clear.
I’m an admitted fan of radio and old circuitry, and recently I’ve been learning the basics of antennas and radiation patterns in class. This led me to a bit of a rabbit hole in trying to find detailed technical documentation of the voyager spacecraft’s electronics. (my thoughts approximately followed the following process: antennas are old tech, the voyager probes are old and far away, what circuitry do they use to power the antennas?)
It may be odd to expect detailed documentation of such a thing to be public, but it seems plausible, given the fame of the voyager probes and the time since they were launched. Surely NASA, having worked on the voyager space-probes for decades has detailed schematics and models of the electronics for reference whenever there’s a problem, and surely it’s gradually leaked out over the decades, right? …right?
After a couple days of research, it turns out, not really? While NASA engineers have decades of institutional knowledge and experienced personnel, they don’t appear to have any operational copies of the onboard electronics on the ground. Instead, they make do with memory dumps, proprietary information on the software language, and the aforementioned decades of experience. The sole software simulation tool they have available is for the main control computer, which is only one of three onboard computers. Their only ground based model was dismantled when the mission went into its long term state back in 1990, over thirty years ago.
This is absolutely fascinating, but it’s not what I was looking for.
Unfortunately, if detailed schematics of the voyager space probes exist, they are likely either proprietary information, or lost to time. Block diagrams, memory dumps, the occasional tool, and architecture documentation are all that even NASA engineers appear to posses.
However, I was able to find some very interesting information on the computers within the probes, and the communication antennas, that I will be talking about in the coming days.
Ian Butler
Electrical Engineering, 2026
Mar 9 2026
