> security concerns
Does anyone know whether the Voyagers even do any command authentication?
Probably doesn't matter now as only the dsn has the ability to talk to them, and that happens comparatively rarely.
Does anyone know whether the Voyagers even do any command authentication?
Probably doesn't matter now as only the dsn has the ability to talk to them, and that happens comparatively rarely.
The problem is simply that you need a huge transmitter with (AIUI) some special and unique modulation hardware. Also there's nothing to be gained from interfering with the Voyagers. Really the only practical thing you could do is shut them down a couple of years before they die anyway. There's just no point.
Even if not, it should be fairly straightforward to compute its position from the initial flightplan. Once it escaped Jupiter its trajectory is just a straight line.
I honestly don't know that we understand gravity well enough to keep this close of track of this small of an object for so long. Plus all the effects of the "negligible" gravities of nearby objects have to add up over time, and we can only include so many bodies in our N-bodies simulation, right?