NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/31/nasa_mistakenly_disconnects_voyager_2/

by belter • 3 years ago

490 435 3 years ago

theregister.com

samhuk2• 3 years ago

TL;DR:

1. Voyager 2 has been pointing 2 degrees off from Earth

2. Been that way for a while and nobody noticed because very old computers.

3. Meaning that the probe has gone dark (ingress and egress comms are not possible)

4. However, both Voyager probes have software that tells them to routinely calibrate themselves every few months

5. Meaning that it should point at Earth in the next few months (most likely).

Qem3• 3 years ago

Can we also regain contact through the yearly movement of Earth on its orbit? Like the planet just walking into the new beam position?

OnACoffeeBreak• 3 years ago

Wouldn't work if the 2 degrees is not in the orbital plane of Earth. Right?

ummonk2• 3 years ago

The Earth is only about 150 million km (1 AU) from the sun, so nope the Earth can't move far enough to make up for a 2 degree miss from 32 billion km away, even if it's in the right direction.

samhuk2• 3 years ago

No. 2 degrees error at such a large distance equals huge distance error.

Also, empty space is huge and matter-things like Earth and the Sun are tiny compared to it.

somenameforme• 3 years ago

I think we can answer this exactly. To visualize this think about the plane shared by the satellite and Earth. We'll imagine this as a 2D unit circle. In this graph Earth is at (1,0) and the satellite is at (0,0). So we end up with a scale where the radius is the same as the distance from the Earth to the satellite. But instead of pointing at (1,0), the satellite is now pointing at (cos(2), sin(2)) or (0.9994, 0.0349).

The distance from Earth (1,0) to the new location (0.9994, 0.0349) is about 0.0349. We need to scale that back up to "real" units so multiplying it by 15 billion miles. And we get about 520 million miles. The earth is about 93 million miles from the Sun, so its max positional shift (under extremely improbable absolutely perfect conditions) would be ~180 million miles.

So there's no way we could regain contact with just yearly movement, even before we account for the fact that it's getting further and further away. 2 degrees intuitively sounds small, but on an astronomical scale it's huge and this sounds like a pretty major flub by NASA.

jannyfer• 3 years ago

I don’t think the article or the news release from NASA actually says #2. They could have known for a week but took a week to release the news.

iszomer• 3 years ago

5. Meaning that it should point at Earth in the next few months (most likely).

Provided that V2 still has enough propellent to make this adjustment.

padjo• 3 years ago

Hope the re-calibration works. Would be a sad way to lose contact after all these years.

midoridensha• 3 years ago

True, but they only had enough power on-board for it to last until 2025 anyway, so it's already on its last legs.

albert_e6• 3 years ago

The power needs are mainly for radio communications back home?

Or that includes navigation / propulsion / course corrections / reorientation also?

(There is not enough "solar power" that can be harvested at that distance I presume)

If we spread out the communications to be less frequent and say bring it down to essentially a heartbeat signal once a month ..would it prolong the service life. Mostly for emotional reasons at that point :)

jabart2• 3 years ago

They made some updates and expect it to go through 2026

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=129

noughtnaut• 3 years ago

"the antenna on the spacecraft had been pointing two degrees away from the Earth [...] left it without the ability to receive commands or transmit data [...] NASA reckons the situation is temporary [...]"

I wonder how it's temporary. Does the probe have a re-targeting function? The answer is in the original statement:

"Voyager 2 is programmed to reset its orientation multiple times each year to keep its antenna pointing at Earth; the next reset will occur on Oct. 15, which should enable communication to resume. The mission team expects Voyager 2 to remain on its planned trajectory during the quiet period."

williamdclt• 3 years ago

I wonder why the reorientation is so infrequent? Is it a long process or a strain on hardware that you wouldn't want it to happen every day or even every month?

Dalewyn• 3 years ago

Reorienting requires using a reaction wheel or propellent to move yourself.

Propellent is finite, so you want to use it as rarely as possible.

A reaction wheel is by itself infinite (assuming it doesn't break), but eventually it saturates and you need to desaturate it, which basically means spinning the wheel the other way while spending propellent to maintain position.

All of this is to say, reorientation is an expensive process especially if refueling isn't an option.

rvnx3• 3 years ago

It costs fuel to reorientate

csunbird• 3 years ago

In addition to the points made by sibling comments, there is always a chance something going wrong in the reorientation, so you do not want to do this more than necessary

Out_of_Characte• 3 years ago

Does anyone know how Voyager calibrates their antennas?

NeoTar• 3 years ago

Not in any detail, but as a hand-waving explanation it keeps tracks of the Sun and the star Canopus, so by two fixed reference points you can have a known orientation.

potamic• 3 years ago

I can't even begin to imagine how you would go about building an automated star tracker in the 60s.

waihtis• 3 years ago

Would be very interested in any writeups on how NASA anticipates all the thousands of scenarios that can go wrong up-front and prepares for them. Sounds like there might be some useful thoughts there on how to write more resilient software

Zealotux• 3 years ago

I thought just that about the JWST; I remember an interview with one of the lead engineers saying he wasn't stressed about the launch because he knew they had done everything possible to ensure success and everything was in fate's hands now.

For Voyager 2, 45 years of uptime in the hazardous space environment, billions of miles away, is simply incredible.

onetimeuse923047• 3 years ago

I think it isn't about anticipating every possible scenario as much as designing a platform with enough redundancy and ability to measure, turn off/on, adjust, reprogram, etc. pretty much everything.

Part of this is just necessary for ability to learn for future missions. If something fails in space, you want to be able to figure out what happened so that you don't make the same mistake the next time. And you don't have a chance to send a second mission just to "replicate" the problem.

So you do things like build your test equipment into the probe so you can measure stuff while in operation. Or maybe make sure you have a switch for everything so that you can turn something on or off to see if the problem persists.

alex_suzuki2• 3 years ago

It’s so inspiring when you see how these things are just built to last.

quote: “In the past, engineers have compared keeping the probes operational to keeping an old car running. The tech is severely outdated, yet it keeps ticking over – a trend often seen in the spacecraft of past decades.”

At some point us humans will probably simply have forgotten how to maintain them.

bayindirh• 3 years ago

You should read "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster. Also, "Pump Six" from "Pump Six and Other Stories" will also do fantastic job of diving into this "forgetting how to maintain them" reality.

tass• 3 years ago

Ringworld

alex_suzuki2• 3 years ago

Awesome, thank you! Just as I was again running out of things to read.

tleilaxu• 3 years ago

The most incredible thing about The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster is how casually prescient it is - first published in 1909!

Instant messaging, video calls, the internet…

the_af• 3 years ago

Pump Six really nails that feeling of "this thing we don't really understand keeps filling the log with warnings we don't know what to do about, let's ignore them and pray it just keeps working."

Any similarities with the real world are surely coincidental.

freilanzer• 3 years ago

"forgetting how to maintain them" reality

I serve the Omnissiah.

joshstrange5• 3 years ago

The Foundation series covers this as well though I can't really recommend the book series. I tried a re-read when the TV show came out and felt pretty icky with how women were portrayed in the books. Also they aren't as good I remember. The TV completely diverges from the books but in a good way IMHO. Normally that bothers me a lot but after rereading the first book again I think I prefer the TV show.

pstuart• 3 years ago

I loved the series as young teen but rereading the first book was a disappointment. I'll be checking out Foundation after I finish Silo.

WWLink• 3 years ago

At some point us humans will probably simply have forgotten how to maintain them.

Nah, these systems are simple and incredibly well documented. A ton of people have operated them, too. They'll be fine.

I'd expect something like that to happen to a university cubesat lol.

op00to• 3 years ago

We can only hope that because they're so well documented, we can work around any "dead hardware" or "dead media" issue. Like, I hope the Voyager manual doesn't say "see disk 2 for firmware", and disk 2 has turned to dust 10 years ago.

eimrine• 3 years ago

The probe is currently around 32 billion kilometers from Earth, and gets 15km further away every second.

I beg anybody to rephrase it understandingly with using some units similar to football fields. Is it possible to launch a little cheap rocket with a transmitter just to correct Voyager's position?

zichy• 3 years ago

Not sure if you are trolling.

qingcharles5• 3 years ago

I'm think GP means we could launch a rocket to the place where Voyager thinks Earth is supposed to be (where its antenna is pointing towards) and fire off a signal to tell it to move.

awestroke• 3 years ago

How to tell if somebody is an American

chank• 3 years ago

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

Okay, if you tossed a football in 1977, and you tossed it really hard, like with the force of 5,000 Joe Namaths, then the football would have traversed 350 billion football fields (that's 44 stadiums per human on Earth) and the football would be speeding across 164 more fields per second; that's 7,380 in the time I took to post this comment.

*Joe forces estimated

ourmandave• 3 years ago

Once time travelers have conquered all the big challenges (i.e. kill Hitler, buy Apple in 1980, stop Skynet), they can go back and make sure Sir Isaac Namath discovers the law of gravity.

It's the 24th century version of jacking with Wikipedia.

i000• 3 years ago

It is one trillion baker's dozens times the height of 1 fl oz of 200 proof ethanol in a quarter inch glass tube heated to 100F.

castis• 3 years ago

Is it possible.

Using current technology we could probably make an object go faster than that so yes, it would be able to catch up.

However, we'd probably just put better instruments on this new object and make that the priority.

KineticLensman• 3 years ago

Using current technology we could probably make an object go faster than that so yes, it would be able to catch up

We could achieve slightly greater speed immediately after launch but we wouldn't be able to exploit the planetary gravity assists that accelerated the Voyager spacecraft.

emmjay_• 3 years ago

32 billion kilometers launch a little cheap rocket

My sides.

tgv• 3 years ago

Not only that, it also has to locate a pretty small object whose position is not well known, and course corrections, if they would help, from Earth take 18 hours (round trips 36).

throwaway2990• 3 years ago

About 30,000 AR15 lengths per second.

__alexs2• 3 years ago

Since the muzzle velocity (1km/s) of an AR15 is about 1/15th the speed of Voyager (15km/s), if you had a matryoshka doll of AR15s that could fire other AR15s you would only need 15 nested AR15s to shoot a bullet as fast Voyager is travelling.

desmond373• 3 years ago

Its 3250000 australias away and gets 1 more australia away every 10 days.

Im not sure if thats what you wanted but australias per day is my new favourite unit.

amenhotep• 3 years ago

15 km further away every second and 1 Australia every 10 days implies that it would take 10 days to cross Australia if you were going at 15 km per second, which from my understanding of travel options there means either planes and trains are a lot faster than I was aware or something's got mixed up somewhere with these numbers!

ummonk2• 3 years ago

Check your math. It gets ~65 australias away each day.

selimthegrim• 3 years ago

Australia is wider than the moon so not a terrible unit

ohthehugemanate2• 3 years ago

It's about 3.5 trillion NFL football fields away. 15km/s is about 33,000 mph - more than 10x the speed of sound, and faster than a bullet. Does that help?

We are talking about distances that are so big, there is no comparison that makes sense. Nothing else IS that big. The numbers are literally "astronomical". If you're struggling to wrap your head around it, you're doing it right.

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams

onetimeuse923047• 3 years ago

15km/s is about 33,000 mph - more than 10x the speed of sound

Well, technically, 15km/s IS "more than 10x the speed of sound". An average car, is, TECHNICALLY, more than twice the size of a bicycle.

roody15• 3 years ago

Good description.. reminds me of Vernor Vince’s description in his novels.

We are truly lost in a “The Deep” … as in absolute nothingness

cheschire3• 3 years ago

When you start getting beyond the "thousands of football fields" it starts becoming difficult to conceptualize. In this case, even though GP was asking for football fields, it may be easier to visualize it as flying nearly 800 thousand times around the entire equator of earth. And voyager is going around the equator roughly once every 45 minutes or so.

So to catch up, you would have to be faster. Let's say you were able to travel around the equator in 15 minutes, so you're gaining 30 minutes per equator. If my napkin math is right, it would take you roughly 45 years to catch up to voyager.

withinboredom• 3 years ago

It’s crazy when you consider that the sun is 8 LIGHT MINUTES away from earth. Light can go around the entire planet hundreds, no, thousands of times in that same period. Space is huge. Incredibly huge.

themoonisachees• 3 years ago

... and it's not even close to being that far away from the solar system.

louthy2• 3 years ago

It’s 128,000,000,000,000 bald eagles

fodkodrasz• 3 years ago

I beg anybody to rephrase it understandingly with using some units similar to football fields. Is it possible to launch a little cheap rocket with a transmitter just to correct Voyager's position?

please tell me you are being sarcastic!

jl6• 3 years ago

The antenna is pointing two degrees off course, so you wouldn’t need to send a spacecraft all the way to catch up with Voyager 2 and fix it, you’d just need to launch a relay spacecraft to the nearest point that intersects the signal beam. If Voyager 2 is about 32 billion km away, that point would be only about 1 billion km away, assuming the signal is a straight line.

“Only”.

It’s probably not worth it.

contravariant• 3 years ago

That sounds like too much, but turns out that 2 degrees is indeed about 1/30 radians.

megous• 3 years ago

You mean sending this antenna to space?

https://megous.com/dl/tmp/95ce96af5966be24.png

gerdesj• 3 years ago

0.5003% of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum (1)

(1) https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

fennecfoxy• 3 years ago

Apparently 32 billion km is about 29.65 light hours, so to catch up we'd need a magical massless spacecraft to travel at the speed of light for a bit over a day to reach it. Hopefully that demonstrates how utterly infeasible it would be to reach it.

It's also near the end of its usable life so it wouldn't be worth it anyway.

And actually, according to https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ it's actually 19,936,472,690 km from Earth so I think like 20ish light hours or so.

igleria• 3 years ago

constant 15 km/s and 32 billion km gives something like 67 years. IF a 120 yard football field was equivalent to this distance and a very slow fly is moving through it, it means it's advancing 1.8 yards per year.

or something, dunno.

hans_castorp• 3 years ago

I gets 2 poronkusema further away every second

eddieroger• 3 years ago

Kind of tangential, but I've been watching a lot of original Star Trek recently, so I was curious about how far this was in lightyears, probably because of the Enterprise's proclivity to run in to Voyager.

If it's 15 billion miles away (sorry for my Freedom Units), it is 22 light-hours away, or 0.0026 light years away (unless my Google-fu is way off). If we could move at the speed of light, which we can't, it would still take nearly a day to get there. So if we were on the Enterprise moving at Warp 1, it would take a day to get there and reorient it back towards Earth. If we could move at Warp 10, we'd have already been there and fixed it.

kridsdale32• 3 years ago

22 hours is assuming you only wanted to reach that location (and not stop to visit the craft) and you had instant acceleration up to c for your velocity, which would be infinite G forces and turn your cells in to quantum foam.

More realistically, even if say we did have a light speed capable craft, we'd be limited by the forces for accel and decel to have a starting speed of 0 relative to Earth, and ending speed of 0 relative to Voyager. The limits would be determined by the withstanding capability of the bodies of the pilots, or the mechanical strength if it were another drone.

I don't feel like doing the math properly, so I asked GPT4 this question:

let's say we wanted to move a human astronought in a spacecraft to the current position of Voyager 2 which is 22 light-hours away. We want to get there as fast as possible, and arrive at a co-moving frame with Voyager, which has a relative velocity of 32000 miles per hour moving away from the Earth. Assuming the astronaut can withstand a g-force maximum on their body of 6G, and using that to inform the maximum accelleration and deceleration for the voyage, how long does it take to reach the Voyager 2 co-moving frame?

Response:

Firstly, let's convert everything to consistent units. Here we'll use hours for time, miles for distance, and miles per hour^2 for acceleration.

1 G is approximately equal to 22 miles/hour^2. Therefore, 6G is approximately 132 miles/hour^2. The distance to Voyager 2 in miles is 22 light-hours * 670616629 miles/light-hour = approximately 14753561838 miles.

Assuming we accelerate at 6G until halfway, then decelerate at 6G for the second half, we can use the kinematic equation:

d = 0.5 * a * t^2

Solving for t when d equals half the total distance gives:

t = sqrt((2 * d) / a)

Substituting in the values:

t = sqrt((2 * (14753561838 miles / 2)) / 132 miles/hour^2) = 84331.5 hours

So, the total time to reach Voyager 2 while maintaining a maximum acceleration/deceleration of 6G is approximately 84331.5 hours * 2 = 168663 hours, or about 19.25 years.

This is a rough estimation and doesn't take into account the relative velocity of Voyager 2 or relativistic effects at high speeds.

It also assumes constant acceleration and deceleration, which wouldn't be feasible with today's technology due to fuel constraints.

-------------

So our 22 hour lightspeed trip would still take 19 years if it had a human onboard.

The biggest limitation with sci-fi travel isn't breaking relativity, it's finding a way to accelerate squishy meat-bags. This person will be living at an effective weight of nearly 1000lbs for 20 years, which will really mess them up.

For the sake of the longevity of our pilot, I asked to re-run the calculation limiting the on-board gravity to 1G. It now takes 114 years to reach Voyager's current position, which by then will be much farther. It turns out we will never catch up, and reaching it is impossible if we limit our craft to earth like conditions necessary for human health.

danbruc2• 3 years ago

The number is wrong to begin with, Voyager 2 is about 20 billion kilometers from Earth [1] if I did not do the conversion incorrectly as NASA shows it in miles only.

[1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

elif2• 3 years ago

It's been travelling the width of the earth every 14 minutes for the last 47 years.

To reach the point 2 degrees from earth would take 1.64 years at that speed.

To reach that point before October 15th it would need to travel about 9x faster than falcon 9 second stage or almost twice as fast as the fastest spacecraft in history.

But it would need significant additional time and fuel to slow down such that it didn't immediately blow past that point and become useless, so it would need an even higher speed.

Merad• 3 years ago

Is it possible to launch a little cheap rocket with a transmitter just to correct Voyager's position?

Possible, maybe. Little or cheap, definitely not. Both Voyager probes relied on a unique alignment of the planets in the outer solar system that allowed them to get a series of speed boosts using gravity assists from the gas giants. If we wanted to launch a rocket anytime in the near future that would be able to catch up with Voyager 2 we'd probably have to rely on good old fashioned brute force (rocket power). But then if you want the rocket to catch up in the next thousand years it's going to need REALLY big ass rockets to catch up with Voyager... and if you want it to rendezvous with Voyager instead of just zipping past, it will need to haul more rockets all the way out to Voyager so it can slow down and match speeds (which means even bigger rockets to launch from earth, etc.).

tl;dr - space is big and the rocket equation is brutal.

kamaal• 3 years ago

>and gets 15km further away every second
>I beg anybody to rephrase it understandingly with using some units similar to football fields.

More like it can go from Earth to Moon in like 8 hours(or so).

ender341341• 3 years ago

For reference

- my quick calculation shows just over 7 hours 6 minutes based of google saying the moon is 384,400 km away.

- It took 3 days for Apollo 11 to reach the moon.

gregshap• 3 years ago

Here's a 'wrong' but possibly helpful comparison, in the spirit of football fields:

32 billion kilometers is about 100 times the distance a satellite travels from earth to Mars. [1]

That Earth-Mars trip is estimated in the same article to take 4 months, so figure 400 months or 30+ years to shoot another satellite out to reach Voyager 2.

This is ignoring planetary slingshot math, the extra speed to 'catch' voyager 2, and surely lots of other details. Personally I find years and "mars" to be more intuitive in this case than trillions of football fields.

[1]https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline/cruise/#:~:text=The%....

kridsdale32• 3 years ago

Wolfram Alpha just told me that it's 800,000 laps around Earth's equator away. You can probably compare that to a very long airplane ride (about a 45 hour flight) done nearly a million times.

If that's not enough for human scale understanding, it's gone the same distance Earth goes in its orbit in 34 years.

beeforpork• 3 years ago

It will probably readjust. And power supply is expected to be dead ca. 2025 anyway.

OK, OK, if the Klingons find it now, then it'd be a shame not to get some measurements. (The cameras, however, are off since decades.)

foobarbecue• 3 years ago

Let's just hope it doesn't make it to the machine planet.

teddyh• 3 years ago

That’s Voyager 6, not Voyager 2.

zelphirkalt• 3 years ago

This seems like a multi-reference to me:

(1) Dune, (2) Turrican, others?

jabart2• 3 years ago

They made some updates and expect it to go through 2026

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=129

tivert• 3 years ago

> It will probably readjust. And power supply is expected to be dead ca. 2025 anyway.
Are you both misunderstanding that? Your link says:
Launched in 1977, the Voyager 2 spacecraft is more than 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from Earth, using five science instruments to study interstellar space. To help keep those instruments operating despite a diminishing power supply, the aging spacecraft has begun using a small reservoir of backup power set aside as part of an onboard safety mechanism. The move will enable the mission to postpone shutting down a science instrument until 2026, rather than this year.
Switching off a science instrument will not end the mission. After shutting off the one instrument in 2026, the probe will continue to operate four science instruments until the declining power supply requires another to be turned off. If Voyager 2 remains healthy, the engineering team anticipates the mission could potentially continue for years to come.

Going from 5 science instruments to 4 in 2026 is hardly "dead."

moron4hire• 3 years ago

At 32 billion kilometers distance, 2° off target means the communication beam is missing Earth by about 1.1 billion kilometers.

EDIT: This is about 7.4AU. If Jupiter and Saturn were in a line from Earth right now, this distance from Earth would be about the halfway point between the two gas giants. So no, we also won't be launching a rocket to go catch the beam just to re-establish comms.

hutzlibu6• 3 years ago

In short, it was remote bricked, by giving it commands to rotate a bit. After successfully executing those commands - no further commands could be received, as now the antennas are not facing earth anymore.

But luckily it automatically readjust itself to earth automatically every half year exactly for these events. So on 15.10 we will know, if it is really lost. In either case, the end of its mission is near anyway, because the nuclear batteries are near its end.

edit: Nasa has a blog post on this https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/07/28/mission-update-voy...

swarnie• 3 years ago

Amazing that someone thought up a solution to a hypothetical problem 46 years ago, then fired it 30 billion km away

behnamoh• 3 years ago

Sometimes we don’t give enough credit to previous generations.

bumby10• 3 years ago

Aerospace has a very high quality standard compared to other industries.

Lots of formal processes capture what would otherwise be informal design decisions elsewhere. In this case, they probably have reams of pages detailing a failure mode effects analysis (FMEA). One mode is “oops, we sent the wrong command” and the document would define the specific design mitigation(s) for that outcome until it reaches an accepted risk threshold.

rcxdude• 3 years ago

It's not really hypothetical: losing communication with stuff in space is a very common failure mode and a huge amount of the system design is focused on making it as unlikely as possible (generally the radio system gets a huge priority in almost everything and there are a lot of failsafes built at every level to make it possible to reestablish communication if anything disrupts it).

jjk1665• 3 years ago

It wasn't a solution for this specific problem. Spacecraft orientations are going to drift over time, periodically rehoming is the simplest way of dealing with it. That it doesn't care whether the orientation drift was natural or artificial is just a bonus.

whartung4• 3 years ago

The Voyager that's flying now is not necessarily the Voyager that was launched.

The hardware is the same, but they've updated, patched, and rewritten the software that's running in it throughout the years.

I'm not suggesting that the failsafe mode wasn't originally considered, and implemented, but simply that it doesn't have to be the case. They could have made changes to it over time.

kdinn• 3 years ago

Actually there's a couple of work arounds for this problem as they anticipated it all along. My father was Director of Operations at Tidbinbilla deep space tracking station which ran most of the comms to Voyager 1.

I am paraphrasing what he said as a non-technical person: Voyager has both a dish receiver, and a pole antenna. The dish is the usual mechanism for comms but in an emergency such as this they would send commands to the other antenna. To do this they would turn the main tracking station dish up to max, and send a "TURN AROUND!" signal out.

But prior to that they had to alert the local electricity grid, and the local air traffic control to not have any planes flying over at the time!

I guess the Voyagers are too far away for this manoeuvre now.

politelemon• 3 years ago

This link from NASA mentions the October 15 date:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-mission-update-voyager-2-...

hutzlibu6• 3 years ago

The text and link I provided mention it as well, but I am now not sure, if giving 15.10 as a date was maybe confusing for non europeans (or non germans, I am a bit lost who uses what date format)...

mromanuk• 3 years ago

who and when was this automatic reset on 15.10 added?

ck2• 3 years ago

How the heck does it know where earth is?

That's some impressive science there, not like there is a deep-space GPS.

Does it look for the sun and figure out from there?

gregsadetsky3• 3 years ago

I assume star tracking -- wikipedia seems to confirm

"... and celestial referencing instruments (Sun sensor/Canopus Star Tracker) to maintain pointing of the high-gain antenna toward Earth"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2

vntok• 3 years ago

Basically the probe knows where it is because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the probe from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.

Dylan168075• 3 years ago

So other people talked about how it does track, but there's another thing to note here.

"The high-gain antenna has a beamwidth of 0.5° for X-band, and 2.3° for S-band."

At 130-150 AU, the earth is always within about 0.4° of the sun. Since commands are sent on S-band, pointing directly at the sun gets a pretty good signal.

detourdog2• 3 years ago

it probably has both gyroscopes and star-charts for navigation.

dekhn6• 3 years ago

I should point at that astronomical navigation is a remarkable skill that was developed and turned into routine calculations in a relatively short period of time. The first order calculations are based on star imaging and used a Kalman filter,which had been invented just a few years before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter#History) along with a star catalog (list of known star locations relative to the sun/earth) and direct observation by astronauts. I think a sextant was useful.

Second order calculations use careful analysis of the signal pattern in telemetry data- IIRC you can see a slow stretch of the phase which can be used to estimate distance and velocity with high accuracy.

Voyager, along with Apollo, stand as the finest examples of human engineering done yet- we got a bunch of people to the moon and back, and built a probe that still operates 50 years later... farther than anything else humans have launched... I'd be lucky if I can deploy my web app once a week.

madacol2• 3 years ago

Oh man that reminds me a lot to Kerbal Space Program, those times I lost communication because of a wrong turn and the antenna/solar panel faced the wrong way

NBJack3• 3 years ago

I like to think at least a few NASA engineers come to meetings with some brilliant ideas....that were cooked up at the 1am mark of a 7 hour weekend KSP binge.

matheusmoreira3• 3 years ago

A bad case of planet between antenna and space center! Is orbit stable? If so, launch and maneuver into position a huge network of relays until connectivity is restored. If not, watch while probe crashes and burns onto the celestial body. An automatic realignment function would be nice...

wafflemaker• 3 years ago

How? What mods do you use? I played pretty much without mods, so if you could also mention your whole mods' stack would be cool.

In vanilla, all antennas are omnidirectional and as long as there is a working solar panel on a probe, it can be used as a relay sat.

dang3• 3 years ago

All: if you want to argue about what "bricked" means, please do that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36946612, not here. But also consider: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dylan6044• 3 years ago

reminds me of the time I forgot i was on a remote connection, and could not figure out why the thing quit responding when i typed eth0 down

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Had a node that I was connected to over wireguard. Wanted to reset the wireguard conf.

    sudo wg-quick down wg0

Nice one, mate. Had to drive back to log in and bring up that interface. I still do this, FWIW, but now I use `at` to schedule "up" 1 min in future haha. So far so good though it's not smart :)

huehehue• 3 years ago

or when I was futzing with display configs on a linux install, accidentally disabled my screen, and had to restore it blind

mananaysiempre• 3 years ago

The Debian package installer once asked me (a long long time ago) whether I want to restart sshd after a glibc update, saying existing sessions wouldn’t be affected. That was a lie, apparently, because the SSH session I was updating the system died and the resulting SIGHUP killed the update process in a way that necessitated some recovery later.

More seriously, Mikrotik routers have a nice feature where they will rollback your config change if the connection you’re configuring one over stops responding to keepalives. Like a lot of Microtik features, it’s probably copied from some Serious Business network OS, but I wouldn’t know.

m463• 3 years ago

usually I do something like:

    # ifconfig eth0 down; ifconfig eth0 up

that said, I have done this:

    # reboot

...on the wrong system

knodi123• 3 years ago

lol, reminds me of the time I forgot I was on localhost, and needed to run a huge statistics processing task. I remembered to carefully use bg and disown so the program would keep running even after I disconnected. Then I sighed in relief and powered off my machine.

dunham• 3 years ago

Or the time I typed `reboot` and my workstation didn't reboot, because that xterm was the department file server.

dekhn6• 3 years ago

this is actually the hardest problem in computer science (develop a general intelligence capable of predicting when a command will shut down your session)

ryanisnan• 3 years ago

Heh, this reminds me of my ~10 year old self. I had unknowingly infected my family PC with some form of malware, but no knowledge of AV software. I guessed, incorrectly, that perhaps the OS developers would have been smart enough to disallow users from deleting OS owned/managed files. So I went around finding and deleting everything that looked remotely official, including C:\Windows\System32. To my surprise, it worked. Until I rebooted :(

datadeft• 3 years ago

because the nuclear batteries are near its end.

and we are charging our phones daily....

Inityx• 3 years ago

https://youtu.be/NT8-b5YEyjo

WalterBright• 3 years ago

Perhaps a better design would be to realign the antenna automatically if it hasn't received any signal from Earth after a week or whatever.

jonny_eh• 3 years ago

We can certainly do that with Voyager 3!

amelius• 3 years ago

So they don't have a simulator they run these commands on first?

michaelcampbell• 3 years ago

In short, it was remote bricked, by giving it commands to rotate a bit. After successfully executing those commands - no further commands could be received, as now the antennas are not facing earth anymore.

I did this exact thing in the small last night - wanted to work on fixing a faulty switch, so my wife and I get on the intercom system on our landline phone so she can tell me when the correct breaker is off.

And of course, breaker #1 is the one that controls the intercom, severing our connection.

jdkee• 3 years ago

Who is directly in charge of the program?

inopinatus4• 3 years ago

That official statement seems incredibly light on detail, almost as if written for children, or worse, members of congress.

I wonder, is there a technical publication elsewhere that has more substantial coverage for interested people?

michaelt• 3 years ago

What more is there to say? It seems like a pretty clear explanation to me.

inopinatus4• 3 years ago

Well, congressman, I might be curious what the actual commands were, why they were issued, how it led to the unfavourable outcome, how they detected and measured the degree of misalignment, what a corrected command sequence might’ve been, and then cross-referenced to a hopefully existing article on how the spacecraft will eventually re-align itself, and perhaps some further reading on other commands that are routinely or not-so-routinely issued and how they are received, decoded, and executed on board the spacecraft. Basic stuff, y’know; after all, this isn’t rocket science.

If there is such an archive, or some approximation thereof, it would surely be fascinating to pore over it.

mark-r2• 3 years ago

I'm amazed there was as much detail as there was. How do they know how far off the antenna is?

lb1lf• 3 years ago

Presumably because that was the orientation the spacecraft was asked to get to before comms was lost.

Also, it is possible that 2 degrees of misalignment still allows some fraction of the signal to be detected, but it not being strong enough to be decoded. The received signal strength and the beamwidth of the antenna could then be used to estimate how far off the mark the Voyager 2 dish is.

jjw1414• 3 years ago

I expect that a technical publication will be available soon at one of these sources: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/data-access/

5d41402abc4b• 3 years ago

Are communications with voyager encrypted? Is it possible for someone to setup a big antenna in their backyard and take over the probe?

yonatan8070• 3 years ago

I don't think there's any encryption going on there, just because it's so old

But I also don't think most back yards can fit an antenna that big... search "NASA deep space network" on google images to get a scale of the antennas that are used to talk to voyager

arbuge• 3 years ago

It doesn't matter how big your antenna is if Voyager's antenna is no longer facing earth, as seems to have been accidentally induced here.

bell-cot2• 3 years ago

Untrue, strictly speaking. So long as the combination of your transmitter's power and your antenna's directionality (aka 'gain') provide enough extra dB's of signal strength (to compensate for the dB's "lost" on Voyager's end, due to the off-axis antenna) it'll work fine.

OTOH, dB's are effectively a log scale, and NASA's "not good enough now" transmitter & antenna cost quite a few $million. What's your budget?

(Yeah - if the Arecibo radio telescope was still on operation, it might well have been capable of doing this.)

palijer• 3 years ago

If someone sets up an antenna in their backyard to accurately transmit and receive signals 32 billion km away, I'm willing to bet NASA would gladly trade old probes for that scientific breakthrough of the century.

db48x• 3 years ago

Their HOA would be _really_ mad.

helsinkiandrew• 3 years ago

A 70 metre antenna with enough control to point in the right direction. As voyagers batteries are meant to die in a couple of years, there’s probably more interesting things to do with your money.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=118

whartung4• 3 years ago

"Encrypted". That's really funny.

A favorite anecdote of Voyager.

Paraphrasing, "You carry around more computing power in your pocket than what is on Voyager. I'm not talking about your phone, I'm talking about your key fob".

The data Golay encoded, but not encrypted. That's exhausting enough for the 1/2 dozen NAND gates up there that make up its computer.

qingcharles5• 3 years ago

These guys[1] hacked a NASA space probe and refired its motors. I read the entire blog once but I can't remember if there was any sort of encryption on the communication, although I know that was brought up. Modern probes do use cryptography, but I doubt Voyager does. I suspect if you fired commands at it you could control it. For the lulz or whatever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explore...

qingcharles5• 3 years ago

If you want to decode the downlink of a more recent probe, here's the details (apparently NASA don't have the source code for the decoder, but a binary was found):

https://skyriddles.wordpress.com/2023/07/03/stereo-a-comes-h...

albert_e6• 3 years ago

it is programmed to recalibrate its position a few times a year. October 15 is the next scheduled reset.

Curious to know how this recalibration actually works. Any explainer that anyone can point to would be appreciated. Thanks!

ZiiS2• 3 years ago

Not a rocket scientist; but I have tuned in a TV. I imagine it is simply programed to turn a few degrees then turn back to wherever it saw the strongest signal from earth.

albert_e6• 3 years ago

Makes sense.

So I presume it uses its thrusters to impart a very small spin on one axis, and then on an orthogonal axis.

A mechanism records the signal strength as it sweeps all angles, and once the optimum direction is determined, the thrusters are fired in just the right way to counteract the spin and bring the craft to a halt at the optimum orientation.

Given this was programmed decades ago - the electromechanical system that does all this jugglery and runs reliably for so long would be a great case study for systems design.

Even the programming that ensures that this routine is triggered without fail every few months must also have gone through intense reliability testing.

j16sdiz• 3 years ago

But....How does it know it's the earth?

It is billions km away.., is the earth that noisy compare to solar wind and cosmic rays?

JdeBP4• 3 years ago

Start at the Voyager book at https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/summary.html .

albert_e6• 3 years ago

Excellent link - thanks

I skimmed though the Voyager document and it seems to have very good coverage of overall telecommunications system.

For the topic of the periodic calibration the following is all I could spot

> Four 7-hour and two 0.5-hour attitude control calibration maneuvers are performed per spacecraft every year, each requiring 70-m station downlink coverage to ensure uninterrupted downlink telemetry.

While this is interesting in itself, it merely states the schedule but doesn't satisfy my curiosity about the exact mechanism used to do the recalibration.

Thanks nevertheless. Interesting reads here.

sqrt_1• 3 years ago

Good video on the topic - there is a sun sensor on the dish - looks for the brightest object and orients to face it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbsHgE89qO4&t=340s

albert_e6• 3 years ago

Superb! Thanks for the link.

superb_dev• 3 years ago

For all the distance Voyager has covered, our Sun is still the brightest object in its view? That’s incredible

qingcharles5• 3 years ago

How bright does the Sun appear compared to other stars at a distance of 32Bn km?

Here is a photo from Voyager 1 at a distance of 4Bn miles:

https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00450

kyberias• 3 years ago

I find it hilarious that they're refering to the speed of the spacecraft.

mark-r2• 3 years ago

"Voyager 2's trajectory is expected to remain unchanged" - I should hope so! There can't be any fuel left on board that would budge it, even if they wanted to.

sho_hn2• 3 years ago

Dave from EEVBlog just visited a facility communicating with Voyager 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=586Zn1ct-QA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUvzgZt1Vug

There's a part 3 with a tour of the complex.

silverscania2• 3 years ago

It's a re-upload from 2017, just in case anyone else thinks they are going crazy like me.

mlindner• 3 years ago

Why would someone reupload their own old videos?

whartung4• 3 years ago

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to visit Goldstone, up in the California desert on Fort Irwin. It's not open to the public very often.

I got to visit most everything there, including the 70m telescope. It was just a cool space tech nerd day of tours, presentations, and sunshine.

The dichotomy of the 70m antenna is interesting is that it broadcasts 450 kilowatts of power out into space, but has to receive and decode, "as small as 1 billionth of 1 billionth of 1 watt" signals from the space craft.

One of the reasons its on a military base is to restrict the airspace above it so that they don't accidentally cook some aircraft that happens to overfly the antenna when it's transmitting.

It's truly astonishing they're able to pull that off, frankly.

kylehotchkiss• 3 years ago

450 kilowatts? Is this the most powerful transmitter on earth? Where does it source the electricity for this?

ChrisArchitect• 3 years ago

Official blog post from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36909736

KenArrari• 3 years ago

aliens

elif2• 3 years ago

I can't believe it doesn't attempt to auto-calibrate after x days of no signal in some kind of exponential ramp up

chriswalz• 3 years ago

It does. It’s supposed to realign itself twice a year

danbruc2• 3 years ago

Just two degrees off? Can they not wiggle the antenna a bit around [1] just as in the old days when you had to hold the TV antenna a bit above the TV to see anything but noise?

[1] Joking aside, they obviously can not, Voyager is missing the Earth by 4.5 AE. How wide is the beam, how precisely do they have to aim the antenna to maintain communication?

drmpeg• 3 years ago

The beam width is 0.65° at x-band. If it's off pointed by 0.5°, the signal will be 7 dB lower (which in this case, is a lot).

idlewords• 3 years ago

This is why you always have a backup Voyager

notyourwork• 3 years ago

Every time I read about space engineering, I'm amazed by how contingencies have contingencies. It's so much careful planning and rigor compared to my world. I can always re-compile, re-deploy and regularly realize that my job is not life or death.

swozey2• 3 years ago

I like when people mention that they're "computer doctors." I have some stressful migrations that require a lot of planning and could cost a significant amount money if botched but I can't imagine the additional stress of someones life being at my fingertips.

NikolaNovak2• 3 years ago

It's tricky.

Many moons ago when I was hands-on and stressed about migrations & config, my team lead at the time would say exactly the same thing - his wife is a doctor and her job is way more stressful - People die. And I bought into it as a relief for a while.

But... I work on a payroll system. My team does impact people. Mistakes can have important negative consequences to real live individuals - from stress invoked in trying to call help centre and fix their paycheques, to disconnected utilities if they don't get paid correctly/timely, to other downstream consequences.

Any number of other IT systems have significant consequences - e.g. airline ticket systems, airbnb bookings, etc. I feel the "nobody died" is a double-edged sword: it can help relieve people of the daily sense of artificial stress, urgency and grind that management may impose; but also builds a false dichotomy / unreasonably binary threshold on when our job matters / impacts ...

Enginerrrd2• 3 years ago

Honestly, I'd say most engineering is like that outside of the software world. In the classic engineering disciplines with actual licensures at the end of the pipeline, the responsibility and ethics of this are ingrained into students from day 1. (Budget and importance of the application doesn't always allow for the indulgence of this though, at least to a point.)

This type of thinking also follows from decades of experience.

For some reason the software engineering world largely abandoned esteem and respect for all of the above.

throwawaysleep• 3 years ago

Errors in software rarely ever matter and even when they do, can usually be trivially corrected.

NBJack3• 3 years ago

To be honest with ourselves, until we have standardized licensing/accreditation that is fully recognized, we aren't really engineers.

I would love to see a day when redundancy like this is just a standardized, accepted practice rather than a stand-up debate. Easier said than done of course.

Tade0• 3 years ago

Honestly, I'd say most engineering is like that outside of the software world.

Add civil engineering to that nowadays - both buildings and roads.

Sure, there are regulations and licensing, but quite often the entity financing the whole thing cares little about such things.

bilalq• 3 years ago

I don't understand why this dig is constantly taken at software. Look at how many layers of fallbacks exist even on the average webapp written by junior devs. Optimistic rendering on form submissions, graceful degradation of features, falling back to last cached data, HTTP request retries with binomial exponential backoff and jitter, TCP packet retransmits, ECC corrections on servers, etc.

In cases where fault tolerance isn't as robust, it's for the same reasons as other disciplines you mentioned: budget and importance.

furyofantares• 3 years ago

For some reason the software engineering world largely abandoned esteem and respect for all of the above.

The main contingency with most software is that you fix it.

thrashh• 3 years ago

It’s not the licensing or the ethics classes or the responsible thinking or the professors that causes some engineering disciplines to be more carful.

It’s the cost when something fucks up.

If I’m holding my phone near a cliff, and I rely on it for navigation and I’m hours from civilization, I’m a little more careful, not because I’m normally super careful. It’s because — in that specific scenario — losing my phone would cost me so much and the chance of it happening is much more likely.

Space companies spend a little extra because the cost is years of development and billions of dollar evaporating in a few seconds.

And there are software teams in certain industries that dot their I’s and cross their T’s as well.

Even on some dumb CRUD app, if it’s a critical piece of code that the rest of the software hinges upon, you spend a little extra time because the cost of fuck up is so major.

Or you’re launching a product and you have a sign up that will seed your user base, you damn well make sure it works.

bee_rider2• 3 years ago

I did an engineering degree but I have to say, the ethics imparted on me were basically “be diligent and don’t build anything that harms people by accident” which… really ought to be, like, table stakes for living in society, right?

alex_lav• 3 years ago

Move Fast And Break Things^TM

Jokes aside I think it's mostly a value/cost thing. NASA's software has different requirements and failure scenarios than most software developers (in this context I will not call them software engineers) have to care about. Verifiable correctness is harder to predict, and in most devs' roles it's easier to just try something and see what happens, rather than know what'll happen up front.

serf• 3 years ago

For some reason the software engineering world largely abandoned esteem and respect for all of the above.

it's a lower bar for entry, any kid can run a compiler -- it's harder to acquire a bulldozer and planning permits.

similarly if you look at 'diy' or 'garage' engineering you can find all sorts of hazardous/poorly-built/never-should-have-existed death traps. How many people have died in recent years from fractal burning?

it's still engineering -- they're building their own tools -- but it's within a realm (DIY/maker) that historically has undersold the dangers inherent with the things.

Why? Mostly because they're self-taught, mentorless, and without the direction within their education to be taught the importance of engineering rigor, similar to the kid given the compiler who starts making forkbombs and goofy dialogs to prank their friends.

matheusmoreira3• 3 years ago

For some reason the software engineering world largely abandoned esteem and respect for all of the above.

That's what happens when there's no liability. Even if you're a billion dollar corporation, you can just slap some standard legal boilerplate disclaimer on the license agreement and absolve yourself of all responsibility even when hackers pwn the private information of your customers. They can't complain since technically the contract says there were no guarantees.

Some version if this legal boilerplate can be found in virtually all software licenses, including open source ones:

  THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS",
  WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
  INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
  FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS OR ANYONE DISTRIBUTING
  THE SOFTWARE BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
  WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF
  OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS
  IN THE SOFTWARE.

Start holding developers and especially corporations directly accountable and liable for any problems and I guarantee they'll start respecting it the very next second.

starkparker• 3 years ago

Jon Bois is probably livid and/or excited

syndicatedjelly• 3 years ago

I too know what this reference is

Nifty39293• 3 years ago

I used to do remote work in firewalls quite often, and after locking myself out once or twice, I came up with a new habit: before making any changes I would schedule a reboot for 5min out which would revert any changes. That way if I locked myself out I could just wait for the reboot and get back in.

dang3• 3 years ago

And then if it worked for those 5 min before the reboot, you'd redeploy the change 'for real', without a reboot?

2snakes• 3 years ago

Yeah, there are different kinds of memory in firewalls. Like a running-config and a startup-config. If you just change the running-config and don't commit to the startup-config, when the reboot takes place it'll pull the config from the (non-modified) startup-config instead, reverting changes.

Nifty39293• 3 years ago

My typical workflow was:

- Schedule the reboot

- do my changes

- Make sure everything was working properly

- Go get lunch

- Notice a bunch of pages and alarms about a firewall going offline

- Rush back to my office

- Login to the firewall

- Schedule the reboot

- Re apply the changes

- Test it again

- CANCEL THE FING REBOOT THIS TIME

- Eat my now cold lunch

prox• 3 years ago

This is clever, I like it.

knorker2• 3 years ago

"commit confirmed" from Juniper routers is much better

knorker2• 3 years ago

Standard practice on Cisco routers, where I've worked, is to do "reload 5" before doing dangerous things.

On juniper, it's "commit confirmed".

comboy• 3 years ago

or safe mode on mikrotik

hsbauauvhabzb• 3 years ago

‘sleep 300 && init 6’ was my go-to, but since then systemd has made firing init 6 unreliable (it won’t trigger a reboot locally if root has an open ssh session, at least on Ubuntu).

stouset• 3 years ago

I did a similar thing in the early days of my career, but I actually caused an outage as a result.

In this instance, I was adding itables rules to a host. I wrote a script that add all the rules to enable expected network traffic, then set the default policy to DROP. Before running this script, I scheduled another script to be run which would delete all the rules I'd added. I did not remember to set the default policy to ALLOW.

The script runs, everything looks good. Five minutes later, pagers start going off.

Thankfully we were able to remotely power-cycle the host and didn't have to drive down to the datacenter in order to fix the issue.

paulddraper• 3 years ago

Kinda like changing display settings in Windows.

Changes will revert in 15 seconds....

dang3• 3 years ago

Stub for arguing about what "bricked" means. These comments were originally replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36941191, but we moved them because the offtopic discussion was choking the thread.

Normally I'd have marked the entire subthread offtopic, but hutzlibu's comment deserves to be at the top, even if it does use the word "bricked" wrong.

burnte4• 3 years ago

In short, it was remote bricked, by giving it commands to rotate a bit. But luckily it automatically readjust itself to earth automatically every half year exactly for these events.

I remember when bricking something meant it was totally unrecoverable. Now it means "temporarily not working but will automatically heal".

hutzlibu6• 3 years ago

A device that is acting as a brick cannot receive commands and is not useful at all. That is the current status of voyager 2.

"Unbricking" will hopefully work automatically, because there is no other option. But that can also fail and there is no way to know, or influence it.

I use bricking in the definition of mobile phone tinkerers .. there are many results for unbricking btw, but I just checked and with the first result it seems that Apple now uses unbricking for activating a new device. Because technically before, it is also just a brick - but here I would agree, that it is not a appropriate term, but rather should be for somehow broken devices.

mindslight3• 3 years ago

I remember when bricking something meant it was totally unrecoverable

It may have seemed that way to you, but actually no. "Bricked" has generally referred to devices that are likely straightforwardly recoverable, but for a lack of documentation from the manufacturer.

pohl• 3 years ago

My device is as worthless as a brick, but only for the 2 or 3 seconds it takes for the tip of my finger to travel to this reset button over here... <Tongue in="cheek"/>

phaedrus• 3 years ago

Instead of saying "bricked" you could say Voyager 2 is "soft locked".

rvz• 3 years ago

I remember when bricking something meant it was totally unrecoverable.

Precisely. 'Bricking' something means it is unrecoverable and is irreversible.

No idea at what point in time the definition was changed to mean 'temporarily not working'.

Ao7bei3s• 3 years ago

Nothing is ever truly unrecoverable. If a device was built, it can be built again.

What is bricked vs recoverable has always greatly depended on time and effort, individual skill level, available hardware/software tools, documentation, crypto keys, physical access, willingness to replace individual parts etc.

Sometimes, even within an org, some teams e-waste expensive devices that aren't bricked deeper than what other teams recover from as part of everyday workflow.

Taking a typical network device as an example, where do you draw the line? Driving to a remote location to plug the cable into another port, pressing a reset button, booting from USB, flashing a new firmware with TFTP, plugging in an external or internal console cable, opening the case and soldering a header to get access to the console, doing the same with no documentation, or an unknown (but maybe Google-able or reverse engineerable) password, flashing firmware with JTAG, shipping the device back to the engineers (or shipping an engineer to the device)...? It's always been arbitrary.

millerm• 3 years ago

I got into an argument with a fellow Tesla owner on a forum who was screaming their car was bricked after their 12V battery died. All they had to do was replace the battery. It wasn't bricked. I sure received a lot of vitriol for saying it wasn't bricked. If you can simply perform a maintenance task, it's not bricked.

weinzierl• 3 years ago

I'd say "totally unrecoverable but physically intact". You wouldn't call a device bricked if it has the form of small pile of ashes.

Then "totally unrecoverable" is rare and the term bricked has always been relative. Your bricked device may be as good as new to someone who has a JTAG adaper and knows how to use it.

spullara• 3 years ago

Bricked things can't be unbricked (unless it wasn't actually bricked to begin with and was misdiagnosed). That is why it is called bricked.

catiopatio2• 3 years ago

Bricked things absolutely can be unbricked, e.g. by opening them up and reflashing a component, or otherwise engaging a special-case recovery path.

glimshe2• 3 years ago

A brick can't fix itself in case of problems. Just grab a brick, put it in a corner of the room and you'll see. It stays there doing nothing, it's kind of amazing how little it can do.

deepspace• 3 years ago

There is also such a thing as subtlety and nuance. Words borrowed from physical objects do not need to have, and in general do not have exactly the same meaning when applied to software.

I would love to see a picture of your computer pulling itself up by the straps on its physical boots the next time you press reset. Bleeding when a process is "killed".

Even something as superficially similar to real-world behaviour a "queueing" is implmented in a very different way in software, for the most part.

qingcharles5• 3 years ago

Does NASA have any sort of emulator to test commands against before they run them on live?

I mean, we're all human, I've made some really shitty fatal errors hacking untested code onto production servers.

mcguire4• 3 years ago

It's hard to find anything about older programs, but they currently put a lot of work into simulators.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/ivv_grubb_nasa_ivv_...

On the other hand, at one time there was a physical "proof test model" of the Voyagers.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia21734-voyager-test-model-...

travisgriggs• 3 years ago

"severs" huh. A bit clickbaity maybe? I think I'd gone with

"OOPS, NASA gave V2 the wrong number to phone home. Engineers of old have last laugh and reassure 'it's OK, V2 will sort it out'"

bradgessler• 3 years ago

This will make for the ultimate "that time I brought down production" story for the engineers involved in this oversight.

Aardwolf• 3 years ago

Why aren't there more space ships like voyager 2, going outside the solar system but still providing some signal?

It's got to be possible to launch some in space now and have them go faster than voyager 2, so that the outside can be explored faster?

dragonwriter4• 3 years ago

Why aren't there more space ships like voyager 2, going outside the solar system but still providing some signal?

Because that part is a side benefit not worth launching for, and the main motivation (grand tour of the outer planets) for the Voyagers relied on a once-in-175-years alignment of the planets.

But maybe we’ll have nice probes ready to launch in the 2150s next time the alignment happens.

utopcell• 3 years ago

So, until Oct/15, some poor planet with intelligent life in our galaxy will be thinking that an alien civilization is trying to make contact.

dcdc123• 3 years ago

which is currently almost 24 billion clicks away from Earth

It makes no sense to use that term in this article not to mention it is usually spelled klick.

noelrock• 3 years ago

One thing that’s bothering me - the story text says it’s 32 bn kilometres from earth but looking it up it appears to be about 19 bn kilometres. Which is it?

js2• 3 years ago

The probe is currently around 32 billion kilometers from Earth

No it isn't. It's 20 billion kilometers. It's closer than Voyager 1.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

StillBored• 3 years ago

Wasn't there some conversation a few years back about how anyone with a big enough antenna could take the probe over because it doesn't really have any security measures and all the command/etc documentation is now public?

In a way this sounds like a way to keep that from happening.

linsomniac• 3 years ago

I'm surprised at this point that they don't have a "voyager simulator" akin to Kerbal Space Program, that they can try changes like this on before sending it to the real spacecraft...

r2on3nge• 3 years ago

This sounds like a tragic incidence!

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

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