But you dont need to hear voyager in order to hack it. It just needs to hear you. Nasa needs the big dish to hear voyager's tiny transmitters. Someone wanting to send a disruptive message to voyager could use a massive transmitter and a relatively smaller dish.
But you dont even need that. You need just enough outbound signal to jam the legitimate uplink, enough that voyager can no longer tell you from the real signal. That is likely much less than the power needed to send a command.
Or you could jam the nasa ground stations. A one-watt transmitter on a carefully positioned cubesat in low orbit would be enough to nullify voyager's real signal. (Setup the orbit to be over the deep space network stations every day as voyager comes into view.)
Even then you need a fairly large transmitter. It is quite easy to detect EM transmissions even when they are low energy. This would be incredibly easy to detect. There are plenty of regulations already by FCC, ITU and equivalent on what is allowed on what wavelength which most nations are signatories too.
Violating these is already solved by law enforcement, even if a rogue nation state is protecting you it will be handled with big gun diplomacy, America after all has the biggest guns.
As xkcd put it, $5 wrench is all it takes no matter how strong your encryption, that works both ways, if a government can find a malicious actor all it takes is $5 wrench to stop you. There is limited value for nation state to protect you from hacking voyager, there is no military or strategic value in it. Dormant satellites in LEO or GEO can be used as kinetic weapons so are lot more valuable.
There are also tech solutions like active jamming that could easily be deployed to counteract you that civilized world can use first even if they don't/can't blow you up without risking retaliation from your state sponsor.
> Violating these is already solved by law enforcement, even if a rogue nation state is protecting you it will be handled with big gun diplomacy, America after all has the biggest guns.
No one is going to war over ITU regulations or Voyager.
ITU regulations or more precisely spectrum they regulate is one of the most valuable and scarce resources today . Nations would will go to war if they are threatened .
Voyager itself is not economically valuable, but it a cultural symbol of American achievement like say Eiffel Tower in itself does not have value economically (apart from tourism ) but it is very big part of their identity so yeah plausible it would start a war .
> ITU regulations or more precisely spectrum they regulate is one of the most valuable and scarce resources today . Nations would will go to war if they are threatened.
They'd go to war if they're threatened, but a violation is ITU regulations isn't a sufficient threat. I mean, North Korea and South Korea occasionally shell each other (much worse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Yeonpyeong_bombardment), and no hot war has resulted.
> Voyager itself is not economically valuable but it a cultural symbol of American achievement...it is very big part of their identity so yeah plausible it would start a war.
I'm sorry, if you think that, you're in a bubble. Voyager is not a "very big part of [American] identity," it's a nearly-kaput space probe that science and science-adjacent geeks (a tiny minority) occasionally get enthusiastic about.
The absolute worst that would happen if a nation state sabotaged it at this point, is the American government would send a strongly worded letter, and the saboteur's ambassador would be summoned for a tongue lashing.
No one's would start a war over the sabotage, and if they did such a war would go down as one of the stupidest casus belli ever. FFS, no one would even have died.
And no one's signing up to die in a war to avenge it. Would you volunteer to be sent to something like the meat-grinder of Eastern Ukraine, because a Voyager became incommunicado a few years early?
Not if put into an eccentric orbit designed to have it hover in place. A tundra orbit could keep it in the way for many hours each day. Three sats could probably manage 24/7 coverage.
But you dont even need that. You need just enough outbound signal to jam the legitimate uplink, enough that voyager can no longer tell you from the real signal. That is likely much less than the power needed to send a command.
Or you could jam the nasa ground stations. A one-watt transmitter on a carefully positioned cubesat in low orbit would be enough to nullify voyager's real signal. (Setup the orbit to be over the deep space network stations every day as voyager comes into view.)