Why not send a space craft to refuel the voyager 1?

Both Voyager 1 & 2 do not have any fuel and do not have a rocket engine to travel. They are traveling by Newton's law - they keep on moving until they are stopped. They picked up their speed by sling effect and will keep on traveling. However they do have a power nuclear power generator to operate their instruments. This generator is expected to last till about 2050.

Both Voyager 1 &2 are too far out in outer space, decades ahead. If we send any now space craft it may not catch up. By the time a new space craft catches up both Voyagers will be dead. Moreover the instruments in Voyager 1 & 2 are all of old generation and very primitive by today's technology. Not worth the effort to send a refueling mission. If we want to send a new probe we might as well equip it with newest technology instruments, computers, etc. and send it as a fresh new probe.

Several reasons why this wouldn't be worth it:

* Voyager is decades away, and it would take decades to reach it and refuel it. All the money you spent on doing that, carrying all that fuel (which will decay on route), you could have spent on new probes to do more science work with new equipment. Refuelling it would also be a very complex operation that would require a lot of complex equipment- why bother?

To make matters worse, it's not designed to be refueled, as the planners of the original mission knew there was no chance anyone would ever try it.

* It's well outside the solar system and far from anything we're likely to want to explore- it's thousands of years from the nearest star, and decades away from the planets or Kuiper belt. What are we going to do with it.

* It's old, and the equipment is outdated. We could make a new one much easier.

All in all, doing this would be akin to salvaging a cargo ship that had been at the bottom of the ocean for decades and refitting it for more shipping cargo now. Even if it were possible to resurrect it (which is doubtful), it would be much easier to just build a new one.

Well, ..., Refueling Voyager isn't possible. Because of it's design and construction. You'd have to rip the probe apart just to get to it's plutonium power supply. The other problem is that it's thermocouples are starting to corrode and decay and there's no way to replace them. So, really, it is best to let the probe and let it go on it's merry way.

By design,it was meant to eventually go dead and serve as a silent marker to a future alien race that might discover it.

Why not just build a better, faster, smarter probe and send it to the nether reaches of space? That would be a much more useful project for the money.

Well, it has a 35-year head start, and is currently the fastest moving man-made object in the solar system - that's one reason against it.

Another is, how do you build a robot craft to re-fuel it? That's not a trivial operation, especially working remotely (or automatically) 12 light hours out. And, really - what more do we need to see for the next 30 years? Aside from locating the edge heliophase... there's just not much else out there to detect.

I don't think it should be done. Cheaper to build a new one that's more capable.

1, Voyager 1 has been traveling for 37 years, so far. How would another space craft be able to travel fast enough to catch up with it? 2, How would that space craft be able to carry enough fuel for both craft?

3, How would the other craft be able to transfer the fuel, when Voyager was never designed for refueling in space?

Are you going to pay for this?

But it will continue for a very long time, even without an energy source.

Truth.... NASA hasn't built anything that can be "refueled" because they don't want to lose funding for new "toys".... Voyager was built when people still built things for the future of man kind...(like the hoover dam)...now it's all about there bottom dollar...."Space probe that can last forever...that kind of talk will get you fired at NASA...... You want a example...ok...lets take the last rover to land on Mars..(curiosity)..It's battery will fizzle out but the rover opportunity has been there for 7 years now and may last another 7.... you think they would of put solar panels on the most current ones...since it works better than anything...but no for some reason they reverted back to 1960 technology... If I had a dime for every time NASA screwed the pooch I'd be a trillionare.

it has no fuel. if we could do this, we would be traveling to the stars.