It has quite a few sensors for various particles and plasma/etc. “A single particle” isn’t as crazy as you might think. Even a human eye is chemically sensitive enough to see a single photon (though highly unlikely the brain would notice unless you’ve been living in a cave for a long while), and electronics can be made to be far more sensitive.
The ‘how’ might take a good bit of your own research because I’m running out of free time today, but for a loose example on photons (not particles), the YouTuber AlphaPhoenix built a 2,000,000,000 fps camera https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o4TdHrMi6do The TLDW for how to sense individual particles is to have very good instruments to make clean signals, and then boost those small signals with good electronics. Of course NASA is going to design and build excellent electronics. Notice how AlphaPhoenix is using vaccuum tubes. A very old tech. The biggest factor that changes over time is how expensive and small electronics can be. As someone already said, the exact tech hasn’t actually changed that much. It’s mostly all the same theories, just refined and mass produced again and again.
It has quite a few sensors for various particles and plasma/etc. “A single particle” isn’t as crazy as you might think. Even a human eye is chemically sensitive enough to see a single photon (though highly unlikely the brain would notice unless you’ve been living in a cave for a long while), and electronics can be made to be far more sensitive.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/instruments/ Gives a decent high level on the sensors these probes have.
The ‘how’ might take a good bit of your own research because I’m running out of free time today, but for a loose example on photons (not particles), the YouTuber AlphaPhoenix built a 2,000,000,000 fps camera https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o4TdHrMi6do The TLDW for how to sense individual particles is to have very good instruments to make clean signals, and then boost those small signals with good electronics. Of course NASA is going to design and build excellent electronics. Notice how AlphaPhoenix is using vaccuum tubes. A very old tech. The biggest factor that changes over time is how expensive and small electronics can be. As someone already said, the exact tech hasn’t actually changed that much. It’s mostly all the same theories, just refined and mass produced again and again.
Very cool, thanks so much!