Perhaps you know this already, but Voyager 2 actually uses an tape recorder for data storage. I assume that all other options were either too fragile or too expensive back when it was built.
The vehicle records flight and sensor data to tape, and then periodically broadcasts that back to earth. As of 2022 the tape drive appears to be still working [1].
I believe tape was chosen mostly for capacity reasons. The Voyager DTR can store 109 megabytes, which was impractically large for any other storage medium.
Amazing it happened at all. Some scientists determined that 1977 allowed a once-in-a-millennia planetary alignment and pushed to get NASA money to send a prob. It was touch and go as to whether the funds would be allocated and if there would even be time to get it into the proper trajectory in time.
I wonder if current technology can achieve the same level of reliability.
For software, I fear complexity would make it much harder to build something that works for 50+ years, the probability of some nasty long term overflow bug or slow memory leak would make that difficult.
>I wonder if current technology can achieve the same level of reliability.
Yes, although that is very rarely a design goal.
>For software, I fear complexity would make it much harder to build something that works for 50+ years, the probability of some nasty long term overflow bug or slow memory leak would make that difficult.
Not that hard to handle. You just need to setup an appropriate architecture. In Aeronautic software systems you often have forced resets, if the software is not reaching certain points of exrcution.
You also do not have memory leaks, since you do not have dynamic memory.
The vehicle records flight and sensor data to tape, and then periodically broadcasts that back to earth. As of 2022 the tape drive appears to be still working [1].
[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/a/15291