Voyager 1 Got to Deep Space on Less Memory Than Your iPhone 5

Although it's traveled 11.6 billion miles to interstellar space, Voyager 1's software isn't as high-tech as you may think. In fact, it has less than 40 KB of memory. To put that in perspective, your 16 GB iPhone 5 has about 240,000 times the memory of a Voyager spacecraft

NASA developed Voyager in the 1970s in a pre-computer era when scientists had to rely solely on pencil, paper, chalkboards and their own mathematical skills. While that seems unimaginable in a time when we hold decades' worth of computational power in our pockets, Voyager 1 is one of NASA's most successful missions, and project scientist Edward Stone says he wouldn't have changed a thing. Read more...