There was me thinking that the signal processing took 20 hrs but it turns out that whoever wrote that article has little grasp over physics.

I wonder if it was messed with in editing or something, like maybe they have a style guide rule against long sentences.

Anything to merge the ideas together would make it clear that it is just one phenomenon, for example.

> Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft, and so the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.

The NASA press release is written: "In addition, commands from mission controllers on Earth take 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, ... That means the engineering team has to wait 45 hours to get a response"

The CNN writing looks uncannily similar but without the same meaning. I'm not saying it's machine generated, but I won't say it isn't.

It's an additional fact.

Are we all sure the times aren’t asymmetric?

The transmitter on Earth can be massive with an enormous power budget. Sending from Voyager might be much more constrained: less compute to compress the payload, less power to send it.

The speed of light is obviously the same either way but it’s not obvious to me that the speed of a byte (error corrected, etc) must be.

Maybe it's TCP handshake :)

Should it have been additively?