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The signal we receive is about one RF photon per second per square meter.


That's too incredible to be true. I'd love to quote it though - where does it come from?


Ah. This writeup https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240604-voyager-1-photons-... says that the 70m dish collects 240,000 photons per second, which is about 60 per second per square meter. The 1/sec figure was from the recent outage when Voyager's transmitter glitched and fell back to S-band. Received energy per bit is 4.5e-21 Joule across the whole dish, or 1e-24J per square meter.


Too bad; it was a great story. Still, they managed to communicate, in an emergency, using 1 photon/sec/m^2 !?




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