NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

by jonathankoren • 2 years ago

780 199 2 years ago

blogs.nasa.gov

anotherhue• 2 years ago

Incredible to see the same faces in that photo as in the excellent documentary: https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/

Voyager might make it to 2027.

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

The documentary only came out less than 2 years ago, one would imagine most of the same people would be there - though I don't see Jefferson Hall.

kibwen• 2 years ago

Voyager might make it to 2027.

With some amount of luck, Voyager might last ten more years beyond that:

"Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth."

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/

(And then, 15,000 years later, maybe this happens: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football )

singleshot_• 2 years ago

Can’t possibly say enough good things about this Jon Bois fellow.

cancerboi• 2 years ago

What is this sbnation link? The text explodes and a calendar pops up.

doctor_eval• 2 years ago

That was remarkably good!

chungy• 2 years ago

With some amount of luck, Voyager might last ten more years beyond that:

Oh, good, it won't have to suffer a year 2038 problem :)

Also: what's with that last link? Definitely didn't expect something to make my browser slow to a crawl.

Keyframe• 2 years ago

no way to purchase/watch this outside of certain regions (I presume US-only or similar). What a shame.

an1sotropy• 2 years ago

What a sweet film. Thank you for the link. This whole time when I heard about work on the Voyager mission I assumed there was a larger team, with fewer single points of failure.

drtgh• 2 years ago

How they manage to squeeze all the resources of the probe and keep it working year after year is an astounding achievement, pleasantly mind-blowing.

It is important that all the know-how about this type of maintenance never disappear. I hope the designs in electronics that this team would have wanted to have available in the probe are implemented in the new designs.

shadowgovt• 2 years ago

I should see whether there's documentation of what they moved and what they replaced. I imagine there's "plenty" of room to do that (in the sense that there's probably some programs that are no longer mission-relevant because they controlled systems that have been shut down), but I'd love to know what got tossed.

Heck of a job.

JackFr• 2 years ago

I forget where I saw the headline, but it's still funny "Voyager: Please let me die. NASA: No."

AstroJetson2• 2 years ago

Yep, 45 years old hardware, still getting software updates. Hey Apple, JPL is close to you, can you get someone to bike over and see how they do it? Thanks!

MadnessASAP2• 2 years ago

Maybe some notes on how to handle degrading power supplies while they're at it.

jonathankoren• 2 years ago

They turn stuff off. It's not a secret. The vast majority of the sensors are off. They're simply not needed in interstellar space.

Salgat• 2 years ago

I bet for a billion they could make a single device that lasts decades too.

dylan604• 2 years ago

and a nuclear battery to last decades. oh, and stagnant software that doesn't get updates meant to work for other hardware

layer84• 2 years ago

I wonder if some billionaire ordered one.

lolive3• 2 years ago

FYI, my original iPad is still working fine.

its_ethan• 2 years ago

The current iOS 17 is compatible with the iPhone XS, which is from 2018. That's 6 years for a piece of tech that the majority of people replace after < 4 years...

Also to nit pick, Apple is based in Cupertino (northern CA) and JPL is in Los Angeles - so it'd be quite a bike ride lol

AstroJetson2• 2 years ago

I have an iPad Air from 2014 that hasn’t been able to get updates since iOS 12.5, so 2019. The electronics are fine, a browser update would be awesome. Would people not replace phones in < 4 years if they could have current software? 4 years on a $800 thing doesn’t seem to be a good deal for the majority of us.

Sorry about the distance thing. I’m from Philadelphia, so all of that (vaguely waving west) has got to be bikeable. But I’ll remember the /s for next time.

karmakaze• 2 years ago

I drove the route on the Pacific Coast Highway and wished I was on my bike instead (motorbike that is).

cdelsolar• 2 years ago

JPL is in Altadena and Apple is in the sf Bay Area

somenameforme6• 2 years ago

Planned obsolescence [1] in the problem. Apple could certainly create modular devices designed to be used and piecemeal modified/updated indefinitely. But it's way more profitable to sell you a brand new phone every couple of years than it is to sell you a modular device that you could update as desired, especially if the parts/connections are standardized meaning you could foster a [normalized] third party market for batteries, screens, etc.

Devices would last way longer, prices would be much lower, and it'd be unimaginably better for the environment. But Apple wouldn't make as much money, and the government's GDP growth figures wouldn't be as high. So clearly it's a terrible idea.

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

vlovich1234• 2 years ago

Modular devices aren't free in terms of engineering tradeoffs. Those interconnects to support modularity add their own unreliability (connectors that can fail more easily), weight (connectors) & increased size. Additionally, the connectors themselves have obsolescence anyway & at some point really expensive components start to be bottlenecks (e.g. upgrading the display uses a new connector or requires processing power/bandwidth that the CPU/RAM/GPU don't have etc). You see this in desktops where modularity is still fairly limited in terms of extending the lifespan of your machine - most people will buy a new computer anyway after 5 years vs trying to upgrade some components piecemeal because the new computer is cheaper / unit of performance than doing piecemeal upgrades.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_smartphone, the modularity of the FairPhone helps it live 5-7 years. Notably that's not different from the 6-8 years that an iPhone is supported for.

It's easy to blame it as planned obsolescence on the part of a single party instead of viewing it as a consequence of natural marketplace dynamics. You may of course adjust those dynamics by having the government impose a different set of constraints to have a different outcome. Politically that can be difficult though, especially in America, & it's not primarily because of the GDP but because people here generally distrust the government.

idiotsecant• 2 years ago

Well goddamn done.

cjk23• 2 years ago

Next time I bitch about debugging something in a container I'm going to look at this and stop bitching. Great job!

Johnie• 2 years ago

Puts your migration projects to shame.

groestl• 2 years ago

/api/v1 stands for Voyager 1 and is forever.

UniverseHacker• 2 years ago

Yep... days worth of work to get Python code I wrote 3 years ago working again from all of the 'bitrot.' Can't imagine how much work it must be for them to produce new binaries to update these old systems from modern computer hardware.

Although I suppose it could actually be easier depending on how the code works- perhaps it's just simple bare metal assembly without the approx 10^99999 libraries a modern python stack has.

shiroiushi6• 2 years ago

It's probably a lot easier in a way, because they don't have to worry about external dependencies changing at all. Modern code is a real PITA that way.

What's hard about their work is 1) it's really, really slow to communicate with, so you can't iterate quickly, 2) the tech is really old and unlike today's stuff, so it's very specialized domain knowledge.

layer84• 2 years ago

Having no customers does help a lot.

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

Hell yeah!

golem14• 2 years ago

Imagine you are the alien finding the probe 10k years from now and have to analyze and reverse engineer the now quite complex logic :)

Night_Thastus• 2 years ago

There's something very beautiful about Voyager's journey so far.

I hope one day when we're a true interstellar species we'll still keep tabs on it. The data may not be useful anymore, but it would be cool to imagine a year 3000 society with a little "Look at where Voyager is now :)" tool that you can see its path and where humans have colonized by comparison.

Buttons840• 2 years ago

Perhaps our descendants will build a museum around it without ever changing its velocity.

beeeeerp• 2 years ago

I’ve never thought about it this way. What a cool idea!

justinclift• 2 years ago

Someone (something?) will probably make a religion out of it. ;)

el-duderino42• 2 years ago

I think a 19 year old yobbo, whose dad is a successful interstellar logistics businessman, who out of a guilty conscience for never having had time for his son and having bought him an overpowered spacecraft, will either put grafitti on it or misjudge his afterburner and half burn it while trying to fly a very tight corner around it, in order to impress the 2 girls he has on board.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

Wasn't there a Star Trek enemy that was based on Voyager colliding with some kind of doomsday machine?

ioblomov• 2 years ago

[SPOILER ALERT]

It was the surprise ending for the first Star Trek film...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur...

batch12• 2 years ago

I think the Klingons destroyed pioneer 10 too.

INGSOCIALITE• 2 years ago

V-GER

sebazzz• 2 years ago

There was a Star Trek: Voyager episode in which Voyager finds one of the original Voyager probes on a planet. The episode is called Friendship One [0].

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Friendship_One_(episode...

echelon2• 2 years ago

when we're a true interstellar species

If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics.

Maybe we don't need to go anywhere at all. Maybe we [1] have all we need right here to become literal gods.

[1] Our digital descendants. Humans are very much fit to the gas exchange and metabolism envelope of our gravity well.

science4sail• 2 years ago

compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans

Unfortunately the simulated classical humans in your Matrioshka Brain will want to mine Bitcoin, which means that our digital descendants will have to become a true interstellar species anyway in order to convert the Laniakea Supercluster into coin-mining computronium.

eru2• 2 years ago

If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics.

I grant that. But why would that keep us from pressing on?

If we have more resources in general, we will also have more resources for interstellar adventures.

iampivot• 2 years ago

Do we know how long the power source will last?

Fatnino2• 2 years ago

It has a few years left as best.

Supposed to run out in the 2020s

retrac2• 2 years ago

The plutonium 238 decays according to a curve, and the thermocouples are degraded as well by heat and radiation according to a curve. So the power output drops rather predictably: "The radioisotope thermoelectric generator on each spacecraft puts out 4 watts less each year." [1]

The Voyagers will soon no longer have enough power to operate any of their instruments. They'll have enough power to continue operating the transmitter (which serves as a science experiment of its own) into the 2030s. The power of the signal will drop before the electronics and control brown out (if it works as designed), and it the signal might become too weak to detect before the probe completely stops operating. Such a fate befell Pioneer 11, who may yet still be warbling away at low power no longer pointed at Earth; its carrier was last detected in 2003.

[1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/

datavirtue• 2 years ago

Oh, you sweet summer child...

tempestn2• 2 years ago

This patronizing phrase should really be scrubbed from the modern lexicon.

IAmGraydon• 2 years ago

We get it. You’re scared and want everyone else to be just as scared as you.

divbzero3• 2 years ago

I’ve imagined a scene playing out, in sci-fi or for real in the distant future, where astronauts test out a new propulsion system by flying out towards Voyager 1 and catch up to it with ease. As they approach, they see the ancient probe grow larger and larger in their window until…

randomtoast• 2 years ago

If my math is correct, we would already need to build a spaceship that can travel at 1/10th the speed of light to reach Voyager 1 within one week. It will be quite an engineering challenge for the future.

qwertox• 2 years ago

Hackers at heart.

I wish media would report about it to illustrate what hacking used to mean.

project2501a• 2 years ago

sorry, i just have a silly question: what would it take to send new probes out there? voyager 3 and 4 for example to follow the same path (more or less, sans planet alignment) V1 and V2 followed, but with better hardware of course.

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

You can't. Voyager's launch date coincided with a planetary alignment allowing for gravitational slingshotting out of our galaxy. We have to wait for the next alignment.

cbhl• 2 years ago

If you only want to get a gravity boost from Jupiter and Saturn (like V1) I wonder if you wouldn't have to wait as long, say, every 20 years instead of every 176?

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/timeline/#event-a-once-...

But you'd still have to fly for ~40 years to get to where they are now, and they'll keep on flying during those 40 years.

layer84• 2 years ago

I think you mean solar system.

pkaye• 2 years ago

Mostly need money to fund them. There are various proposals in US/EU/China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_probe#Proposed_mi...

floxy• 2 years ago

If you just want to fling something out there fast, I think this is a pretty cool way to do it:

https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?si=28yrQW8B2IfbGvqj&t=883

vikingerik2• 2 years ago

There's basically no point scientifically for doing the four-planet flyby again. Since Voyager, we've already done much better at Jupiter and Saturn with years-long orbiter missions. A quick flyby wouldn't get us anything we don't already know at those. Voyager gets the mindshare because it was first and the four-way slingshot is fun to visualize, but the reality is that Galileo and Cassini and Juno delivered thousands of times more data.

We could use more investigation at Uranus and Neptune, but we'd get much more out of extended orbiter missions to those rather than another quick flyby. A Uranus orbiter is currently one of the higher priority missions in planning, and there's a launch window for a Jupiter-Uranus slingshot in 2034 or 2035.

(What I wonder is, how much planning do these things need? Why can't we just launch another copy of Cassini to Uranus and skip all the expensive design? You'd need some changes to antennas and power supply for a more distant planet, but the scientific instruments and computing platform should just be reusable designs.)

wongarsu2• 2 years ago

Going out further than Voyager might be interesting just for studying the conditions outside the inner solar system. Though I'm not sure how much there is to observe unless you go an order of magnitude faster than Voyager to try to reach the oort cloud

dotnet002• 2 years ago

If you mean just to beat them on distance, we could probably launch something capable of it in a decade or two by getting more serious about nuclear propulsion and using some slingshots to pick up speed further.

NKosmatos2• 2 years ago

Nice one! Voyager carries the hopes, aspirations and fantasies of many of us space romantics.

On the technical side of things, there are also other companies doing live patching, like the Ericsson telephone exchanges. Their code can be altered “live” while operating, in order to fix or enhance the software and with zero downtime ;-)

Covzire• 2 years ago

Could NASA send another probe after them to act as a kind of message relay?

jlaneve• 2 years ago

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth.

Talk about a slow feedback loop! And I get frustrated when I need to push code to a repo to test things in CI...

LAC-Tech2• 2 years ago

How much data can you send in a single radio single? I assume it's not TCP/IP

dgfitz• 2 years ago

Have you investigated this or are you just asking? I imagine if you wish to learn the answer it is a few simple searches away. And by “imagine” I mean, it is.

akira2501• 2 years ago

Downlink from Voyager to Earth is currently 40 bits/s but can be up to 160 bits/s. The signal is received at -160dBm or around 100 _zeptowatts_ (1e-22 kW).

z500• 2 years ago

My internet is operating at about 1/100 normal speed today. It feels a bit like I've been remoting into a machine on Mars.

HeckFeck• 2 years ago

So there is something with a worse ping than IP over Avian Carriers.

lang4d• 2 years ago

Hopefully they have a few local benches to iterate on for testing.

fsniper• 2 years ago

Good old segmentation and goto's at work! Are goto's still considered harmful?

CuriousCosmic• 2 years ago

What's the paper title? "goto considered harmful considered harmful" I think?

Even in modern C programming goto is still pulling its weight for handling unrolling and cleanups.

shiroiushi6• 2 years ago

The paper was written by Dijkstra, and even he doesn't like how it's become some kind of mindless mantra, instead of a warning against spaghetti code which it was. He never meant that you should never, ever use GOTO.

whatrocks• 2 years ago

Sucker for any news about the voyage of the Golden Record (almost but not quite a CS Lewis title)! For fun, I wrote a short story two years ago about a top-secret "Voyager 3" mission (and the probe's unexpected return to Earth): https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/

harles2• 2 years ago

Pretty incredible feat of engineering (both back when it was launched and now). Does anyone know its current purpose? I’m curious if there’s anything we’re actively using it for or if it’s just a matter of “look for surprises”.

retrac2• 2 years ago

The magnetometers and charged particle detectors are still operating. So they are measuring the galactic magnetic field, and cosmic rays and the gas in interstellar space. The results are more or less what was predicted, though the exact boundary of the sun's influence was only discovered when Voyager 1 and 2 crossed over it in 2012 and 2018 respectively. Beyond that, yes, they're basically assuring us the sun is still there and that space is very empty. I don't think anyone expects the interstellar gas to vary in density on the timeframe that the Voyagers will be able to observe it but, I guess we'll find out!

Edit: I spoke way too soon. It varies, as discovered with Voyager measurements recently: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/as-nasas-voyager-1-surveys-int...

harles2• 2 years ago

Exactly what I was looking for - thanks! Not earth shattering, but it’s neat to fill out our map of the neighborhood.

taco-hands• 2 years ago

I don't know about anyone else, but that box of assorted pastries/doughnuts should been rapidly consumed after hearing the news!

iancmceachern3• 2 years ago

Voyager has been an inspiration for generations of engineers.

Bless you all that worked on it. Thank you.

Recently I designed in a Voyager inspired secret Easter egg into the surgical robot I designed. I put a gold (plated) plate with everyone's signature engraved on it. Gave everyone one as a surprise Christmas gift.

14• 2 years ago

Cool! What else can you tell us about this robot you built?

iancmceachern3• 2 years ago

It's the Maestro from Moon Surgical, it's done over 200 surgeries, all successful. So far (no whammy) its had 100% reliability with the first 6 systems we built. We designed it (hardware wise) with only 3 engineers, including me, and we hand built the first ones right here in San Carlos, CA. The company is based in Paris and has a whole interesting history there as well.

squarefoot• 2 years ago

"The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory."

Just another proof that we may have gained a lot, but also lost something in our pursuit of modernity: on modern systems direct memory access is discouraged if not prevented by the underlying OSes, and this hack would not have been possible.

lolive3• 2 years ago

I want no remote hacker to do this kind of hack on my devices.

drivebycomment• 2 years ago

Modern systems can automatically detect bad memories and map those hardware pages out. SSDs can do it at the firmware. ECC are also self correcting.

The "hack" wouldn't be necessary, or can be done natively in many modern systems.

InvisibleUp• 2 years ago

The modern equivalent to this would be an embedded system with an RTOS, where you do get full control of memory, because you are the OS. We just have nice abstractions on top of that for the most common use cases, since you very rarely need that precise of control over system timings or memory allocation.

grosswait• 2 years ago

A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth.

It has taken 46 years to get 22.5 light hours away from Earth!

sllabres• 2 years ago

Yes, this is why I always liked 'planet walks' like this [1] If you see Images the planets in the solar system, the solar system itself etc. are mostly not to scale. If you walk such path one get a bit of a feel how large everything is, I think especially if the plantes on the walk are to scale too. Even our solar system is mostly empty. And the distances to moon a microscopic.

Walking such a path is is not the same, but a bit like [3] if one is patient (which is difficult on the internet) and doesn't scroll manually but only via the little "c" in the lower right corner, wich scrolls with light speed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_Planet_Walk (there are several other listed at the bottom of the page)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model

[3] https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....

nirav72• 2 years ago

All I can say is wow! This probe refuses to die. Despite being built with almost 50 year old technology. Amazing engineering by the people that designed and built it. Even more amazing is the people that continue to debug software problems from 2 light days distance.

eh_why_not• 2 years ago

from 2 light days distance

The distance is currently 22.5 light hours (and increases by half-hour per year.) But it is indeed about 2 days of round-trip time for debugging.

nxobject• 2 years ago

I would give my left nut for a Voyager operations + programming sim, complete with live patches and day plus communications round-trip time.

userbinator• 2 years ago

If anyone is curious about the computers they use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Computers_and_...

16/18-bit custom architecture, 4k/8k words (around 9/18KB total). Other sources I could find indicate a 250kHz clock frequency and around 8KIPS.

taylorius• 2 years ago

Could get doom running on that, no problem.

hujun• 2 years ago

Dark Forest Hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

NKosmatos2• 2 years ago

Although that’s one of the many possible explanations of the Fermi paradox [0], I prefer to think that the real reason we haven’t discovered (or we haven’t been discovered) is the fact that we’re limited by the speed of light.

The distances are so vast, almost unfathomable, that we need Faster Than Light means of traveling. Perhaps I’m being naive or romantic, but I prefer to think this is the real reason :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

shiroiushi6• 2 years ago

The speed of light and great distances are indeed a limiter, but the universe has been around for billions of years. Even with the great distances, an interstellar civilization that's been around for millions of years would have had plenty of time to find us by now.

butlike4• 2 years ago

Entropy is probably why.

Also as particles spread out, there's less of a chance of interaction, which by extension makes it so there's less of a chance that a system of electrical impulse that fires in a synapse would exist over large distances. This system, of course, would be the catalyst for producing such thoughts as "I wonder if we're alone in the universe."

That's not to say you can't send dense information over larger distances with a shorter wavelength (re: radiation; gamma rays)... it just means the flying saucers with little green men landing on earth are probably out.

botanical• 2 years ago

The Voyager project is an amazing feat for humanity. But I wonder, does NASA take into account the repercussions of sending a probe deep into space? I know space is big but I can only think of the dark forest hypothesis. What's the plan for further space exploration?

techbuttman• 2 years ago

Well they put a golden record on voyager (https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/) with a lot of our info. so I think they were betting on friendly aliens, if any.

T-A2• 2 years ago

Voyager 1 is currently 2.4e10 km from Earth. Trisolaris - sorry, I mean Proxima Centauri - is 4e13 km away [2], so in the (almost) 47 years since its launch, Voyager 1 has covered a whopping 0.06% of the distance. And it's not even headed that way.

Meanwhile, radio, TV and radar have been advertising the presence of a new technological civilization on Earth for more than a century. That means any entity worth worrying about within a 100+ light year radius - a distance 44+ times longer than to Proxima - already knows about us. And that sphere keeps growing in all directions at the speed of light, or roughly 18000 times faster than Voyager 1 is moving.

If you really want to worry about the Dark Forest, it would be more justified to ask if your local radio station takes into account the repercussions of sending commercials and TOS reruns into deep space.

[1] https://theskylive.com/voyager1-info

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri

wumeow• 2 years ago

repercussions of sending commercials and TOS reruns into deep space.

There’s actually a documentary about this:

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Quest

somenameforme6• 2 years ago

Inverse square law. With the power we're transmitting at, signals become just background noise relatively quickly. They're nowhere near strong enough to be detectable at e.g. Proxima Centauri. This is what makes the radio signals we do detect, like fast radio bursts, so interesting. So for instance, the furthest signal we've detected is called FRB (fast radio burst) 20220610A, and that millisecond length signal came from a source with output energy equivalent to decades of the Sun's entire output.

butlike4• 2 years ago

To scale it up, if you're an intergalactic entity, all you'd have to do is make a note of objects pulsing/resonating where they were not before.

"Oh, looks like Earth just got radio waves, which means there's probably life there."

From there you just monitor the wave Hertz output by the planet, and when they start transmitting waves at higher Hz, you know it might be time to meet up.

"Oh they're sending photonic gamma rays as messages now instead of radio waves, I'm gonna go say Hi."

divbzero3• 2 years ago

The substance of this news release is incredible, but its style is also admirable. The authors managed to convey in seven paragraphs a concise and comprehensible explanation of how the team resolved the technical issue.

fforflo• 2 years ago

That's what happens when you're freed from "SEO-optimized content". It's also a culture thing I'd probably put under military philosophy. I've worked with ex-military engineers, and you can tell from how they communicate. Writing technical reports and memos is a skill.

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

Ha! Thank you for mentioning it. I thought the same as well while reading it. It was terse but not skimping on details while maintaining a certain style.

I really wish most other websites were like this. SEO and Google has really made the world a worse place.

nomercy400• 2 years ago

This is cool.

Does anybody know how they identified the non-working regions of the chip, without being able to probe the chip?

ncr1002• 2 years ago

No, though they should have a real hardware version of the machine here on earth, to test out hypotheses.

ngneer• 2 years ago

Must be difficult debugging a system with a 45 hour round trip each step of the way. And here I thought debugging a system on customer premises was tough. Hats off!

orlp• 2 years ago

Worse than the round-trip is that there's no second chances in some scenarios. If you mess up the wrong part(s) of the system, it's bricked with no way to recover it.

hoseja• 2 years ago

I find it sad they haven't been overtaken by much faster and better probes yet.

DeathArrow• 2 years ago

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working.

No one thought of having backup computers on the spacecraft?

noir_lord• 2 years ago

Most of the computer hardware is duplicated but much of it has already failed/failed earlier - remember these are 50 year old hardware - a lot of the logic is TTL and discrete components - which are far larger than modern equivalents would be.

shiroiushi6• 2 years ago

It's not just 50-year-old hardware: it's hardware that's been subjected to cosmic radiation for 50 years, part of that outside the solar system (so presumably even higher).

hacker_88• 2 years ago

Was it fixed up by intelligent life form

welzel• 2 years ago

I wonder if a "modern" probe from 2024 could ever have a similar lifespan.

With systems hundred times more complex and build by a NASA that is a fraction of what it was 50 years ago, i guess a modern day Voyager will not even make it to the edge, let alone continue to function.

rtkwe• 2 years ago

We'll have a chance to see with New Horizons. It's one of the five craft to ever be put on a solar escape trajectory.

waynesonfire• 2 years ago

22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a

That's about how long it takes for me to deploy a change with modern CI/CD pipelines.

cookingrobot• 2 years ago

How many Starships would it take to go and bring Voyager 1 back to earth?

If each ship was used like an expendable stage, and we were willing to use 100 ships, how long would it take to catch up to Voyager, stop, and return to earth?

butlike4• 2 years ago

How many ships could the ships ship if the ships could ship probes?

wkat42426• 2 years ago

This is so cool. These guys are steely-eyed missile men. (Or women but I know what is most likely - lol). Remotely repairing a 45 year old probe 24 billion kilometers away. Wow.

ncr1002• 2 years ago

This achievement feels like it should be CELEBRATED, like in the Oscars of Software Engineering ... Technical Achievement award:

* NASA

NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

Related Stories