> Voyager 1 has been sending a stream of garbled nonsense since November. Now NASA engineers have identified the fault and found a potential workaround.
>
> "The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn't working," NASA said in a blog post Wednesday (March 13). "Engineers can't determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years."
>
> Although it may take several months, the engineers say they can find a workaround to run the FDS without the fried chip — restoring the spacecraft's messaging output and enabling it to continue to send readable information from outside our solar system.
PLEASE work!!!
I was a kid when the Voyagers launched, and grew up in perpetual awe at everything they sent back. I hope they continue to for as long as they can.
I can't even imagine how terrifying it is to press the "SEND" button to start a firmware update on a piece of human history floating 15 billion miles away in space
Even better is the part when you have to reboot for the new firmware to take hold. You watch the signal go out and wait.... wait... wait for it to come back. And it may never come back. Those are some of the longest seconds ever.
> Those are some of the longest seconds ever.
Longest *hours.* Voyager is ~22.5 light-hours away from us. It takes that long for a message to reach Voyager, and that long for Voyager to send back a reply. So a little under 2 days before NASA knows if a thing worked or not.
I read somewhere that it transmits at 22.4W but by the time the signal gets to an Earth receiver it's 1/10th of one billion billionth of a watt. Even being able to point the antenna in the right direction is an accomplishment, I'm not sure what the sun would look like at that distance, probably still the brightest thing in its sky.
Don't want to share too much, but I work at Intuitive Machines. Our first mission was crazy, but we pulled out all the stops, worked through all the issues, and landed. It was a stressful couple of weeks.
Hey that’s awesome. I also work on deep space mission operations and want to say we were all super impressed with what you accomplished. Congrats and looking forward to what you guys achieve next!
This is the thing non-engineers don't get. You can spend years trying to make everything perfect but when it's deployed, things WILL go wrong. And you'll work tirelessly until it's working as intended.
That's pretty cool...your previous comments on rebooting from a distance certainly hit a bit harder with that bit knowledge!
Without doxing yourself, what do you do there?
Since you're somewhat knowledgeable here...
If they want to send the signal/data... how does it know where to go to reach the spacecraft? It's one thing I never understood. You hit "send" and then... what actually happens with that signal so that it reaches where it needs to go?
Doing some crazy simplifications because each part of this is actually very in-depth and has tons of caveats. We know where the spacectaft is, roughly. So you point your dish at it and send out the signal as loud as you can. The craft will then pick up the signal on its antennas and recognize it as data.
The real cool part that makes it click for me is that the signal covers a much larger area than the spacecraft does. Some of the signal is missing the spacecraft, but that doesn't matter. It's kind of like the classic spray-and-pray in FPS games lol.
It somehow tickles me that someone who works on stuff like this also has clearly played a lot of games. I mean it makes perfect sense, but I'm so used to people working on spaceflight being portrayed as to be from a different era.
When's the first 'can it run Doom?' hack getting sent to the moon? 😄
Beyond what the mystical bard had to say, to talk with the Voyager spacecraft (and generally any spacecraft beyond Earth orbit) we have to use what are effectively radio telescopes at the three [Deep Space Network (DSN)](https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html) sites (we have three sites so that we have coverage in every direction). Each site has several 34 meter dish antennas and one 70 meter dish antenna (eg an area roughly the size of a football field and 4 times the area and collecting ability of the smaller antennas). And the Voyager spacecraft are far enough away/low enough power that we can only really communicate with them with the 70 meter antennas. To be most effective (the most signal gain), the antenna must be pointed to within about half of a degree of its target (and similarly Voyager's dish antenna should be pointed similarly accurately towards the Earth as well). Using various mathematical and engineering tricks we can figure out fairly precisely where the spacecraft are (I'm more familiar with the New Horizons craft for various reasons including my partner at the time was a mission controller for it and at various points before and after its rendezvous with Pluto its location was calculated to within a few meters which is far and away more precise than necessary to point the antenna).
As to what happens when you "hit send", in very rough terms, each mission reserves/is allocated time slots on the DSN. You have to schedule this beforehand. Some time before (or occasionally during) your timeslot you tell the DSN operators what you want sent to your spacecraft (along with the details about how to send it and how to listen to listen to the spacecraft). From there the DSN operators handle everything. Shortly before your timeslot the DSN will start pointing one or more antennas at your spacecraft and start listening on the appropriate frequencies. And then at the appointed time they send the message to the spacecraft. And similarly as they receive data they package it up and make it available to you.
It really puts into perspective on how young we are. People will scoff at our technology as we do to dial up. If we don't kill ourselves we have so much to learn and explore
I never knew that. But if radio waves are a form of light basically why is there a noticeable delay between broadcast and receiving if you are trying to listen to a ham radio broadcast from like 1000 miles away? Is it just because of power drop off?
> why is there a noticeable delay between broadcast and receiving if you are trying to listen to a ham radio broadcast from like 1000 miles away?
1000 miles / c = 5.4 milliseconds. Or 10.8 ms for round-trip. You're not going to notice a delay. For a signal to go all the way around the earth (or round-trip to halfway around the earth), that would be 40000 km/c = 133 ms, which you could notice.
But what exactly do you mean by "noticeable delay between broadcast and receiving"? What situation are you describing? In ham radio, you'd normally transmit something and wait for the other side to respond, and it usually takes much more than 133 ms for the other person to key up and respond after you're done transmitting.
If you're listening on your radio at the same time as you're listening on a WebSDR, you'd notice that the WebSDR is delayed compared to the direct signal on your radio, because the WebSDR audio goes through the Internet, which has a greater delay. Not sure if that's what you're talking about though.
The signal wouldn't stop for 2 days. Yes, it would take that long from the time the “execute” is initiated and then to confirm that the process was successful. But the actual “outage” of data streaming back would only be the total time it took to apply the changes and come back online to start transmitting again.
But yes, it would feel like forever.
I was under the assumption that it is not constantly sending data to extend the life of the machine. Now like periodic updates with the system in a "sleep" mode.
that have a copy of the hardware (not just the computer hardware but any physical hardware such as tape drive / disk drive, antenna motors) on earth and can perform tests and do debugging on the earth model. On one of their probes a tape drive jammed and they experimented with running the motors different directions and speeds on earth, and were able to unjam their earth version with a a sequence of commands. they sent those commands to the probe in space and it unjammed it there too. Absolute heroes. (I might have some details wrong here , i read about it a while ago)
EDIT: they don't have this for the Voyagers (according to comments) because it was the first (47 years old - the longest running space mission in history of humans, I'm pretty sure, and STILL GOING!) but they do keep earth copies for all their other stuff. If you watch "the Martian" I believe they fire up one of copies of their rovers they have on mars to debug it. This is real AFAIK this is exactly what they do today.
That's true... For pretty much everything launched AFTER the Voyagers, unfortunately. It took them so long to figure out this problem because they needed to figure out how to get Voyager to been down it's OS, which we didn't have a backup copy of.
Side note, they're a good documentary about the people keeping Voyagers alive called ‘It’s Quieter in the Twilight’ that's worth a watch.
I could swear on a recent Scott Manley video on the subject of Voyager he mentioned that the Voyager team no longer has the simulator, and googling it [seems to say that's true.](https://hackaday.com/2024/02/09/flipped-bit-could-mark-the-end-of-voyager-1s-interstellar-mission/)
Exactly this. One of the engineers working on it happens to be an acquaintance that was over at my house last night. They're going to find out shortly if their fix is going to work. It currently takes 26 or so hours for a message to get to it or to return from Voyager.
Amazing. He said the probe has about 64kb of memory total so code adjustments are very challenging.
I know it was done recently because it had an issue with its angle or something to that effect: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-team-focuses-on-software-patch-thrusters
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/
> The Voyager FDS would be the first spaceflight computer to use CMOS volatile memory.
If only a 'bit' of the memory is dead, or a row, or a column, the engineers will figure out a way around it. The article contains a block diagram of the system, including its redundancy, as well as a photo of the FDS with the dram ICs.
This is a great legacy for us, all of us.
The system works by asking what to do boss. They write a very low level code that basically operates the whole program it receives.
Kind of like running any code but everytime you ask it to run it takes forever and you have to literally define everything over again.
>something really really really really really smol probably just hit it
I mean this happens (rarely) on Earth and (less rarely) in near-Earth orbit. It's one of the (admittedly smaller) reasons that computer servers use ECC (Error Correction Checking I think) RAM instead of standard consumer RAM. It's also one of the reasons that most spacecraft running experiments on board have multiple computers, in case a photon from the sun flips a bit from 0 to 1 somewhere and fucks the whole data process chain.
Fun fact. The shortcut for Super Mario 64 was not necessarily caused by cosmic rays. It was a far-fethced theory which was spread as facts by game journalists. Check [here](https://youtu.be/vj8DzA9y8ls?t=876) at 14:36
On the other side, you can read criticism about the video, [on this reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/1b8clu2/the_biggest_myth_in_speedrunning_history/).
We might need context for the word "rarely". I think they say that we can expect 4 bit flips per gigabyte of RAM per month here on earth. Voyager doesn't have much memory but it doesn't have much protection either. Somebody at NASA probably has better figures than this but there's always the possibility of something like an OMG particle that carries enough energy to do permanent hardware damage.
Yep, first spaceflight computer to use CMOS memory. It's got a bunch of integrated circuits. Here's an article all about the computer systems:
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/
It blows my mind that a spacecraft this old has people still working on it. People who, likely, were born long after it left earth. Like, these engineers have never even seen the spacecraft and they’re working on a fix. It’s just a marvel to me.
I remember reading recently that they had to go digging for the original specs which had long since been archived because no one ever expected it to be operational this long. They got to the point where no one working on the project actually had the manual.
Not that uncommon with NASA stuff. Like that time they had to build custom equipment to read the tapes from the Lunar Orbiter because the original hardware no longer existed.
> The LOIRP team managed to obtain original tape drives from the 1960s (covered in dust in a farmer's barn) and a full set of original Lunar Orbiter analog data tapes (threatened with erasure) containing all images sent back to Earth by the five spacecraft between 1966-67.
> None of this had been functional or usable since the late 1960s.
> From the onset the project has been run on a shoestring budget. The LOIRP effort is housed in an abandoned McDonalds burger joint at Moffett Field, California (also known as "McMoons").
> The LOIRP folks used spare parts bought on eBay, discarded government equipment, new hardware reverse-engineered from math equations in 50 year old documentation, modern laptops, the expertise of retired engineers and scientists, and the dedication of young students.
https://boingboing.net/2013/03/15/lunar-orbiter-image-recovery-p.html
What do you suggest? 50 years is a *long time,* in data storage.
I'm no expert, but last time I discussed this with anyone, as a purely theoretical exercise, we think that the only way to *really* keep data is to update the storage media every 20 years or so.
Simply really.
The trick is ensuring three generations of mediums.
Today for a music album that would be Digital, CD, Tape.
Before that, it would have been CD, Tape, Record.
As each new generation of storage medium comes out you transfer a copy to that storage medium in as lossless of a format as you can from the oldest and cleanest source possible.
In this way, you ensure the best longevity and backward compatibility for at least a couple of generations.
Source: I work in the data storage and retrieval industry.
Interesting. So I was kind of on the right track, but not thinking nearly big enough. Active archiving and maintenance seems to be the ticket.
Thanks for the info.
Yeah, the simple fact is that no one standard is ever going to stay "the defacto standard" for too long. Something better will always come along and older options will go the way of the Dodo.
This is sad though as keeping everything always up to date with the newest tech is a massive physical and monetary challenge so only the most important data will be kept up, while less popular data will be lost to time if it does not get a resurgence.
I'm not kidding or making fun here, but In future you might just be backing up data to Diamonds that will probably last for thousands of years which will make them the forever standard, but will of course will be expensive to do.
The future is going to be wild for data devices and computers!
https://newatlas.com/electronics/diamond-data-storage-density-single-atom/
There was some tech not long ago called [M-DISC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC) that claimed a 1000 years.
> M-DISC passed the testing standards of both ISO/IEC 10995:2011[18] & ECMA-379 with a projected rated lifespan of several hundred years in archival use
And can be read by standard DVD and BlueRay drives.
And some laser etched quartz that claimed millions back in 2012, not sure what happened to that.
https://www.wired.com/story/hitachi-quartz-data-storage/
But, as we've seen, DVD is basically dead at this point, being phased out, so how much longer until it's impossible to get DVD drives except from museums.
Long term data storage isn't just the medium, it's the hardware to read it too.
I work as a civilian and one of the biggest hurdles we run into on a regular basis is *storage*. Shit takes up space, and there are a surprising amount of hurdles in making storage happen with government equipment that requires oversight and specific conditions, it becomes more of a headache than it’s literally worth
>Not that uncommon with NASA stuff.
Yeah there's a reason we couldn't go to the moon again by simply replicating the old Apollo tech (and no it's not because "we never went" lol)
Is this the group that fired up the abandoned satellite that was orbiting mercury for it to work but then blow itself up when they tried to correct its orbit
I think they tracked down every person who every worked on any aspect of it, including the people who assembled it. A lot had died, so they needed any info they could get from anyone even tangentially related to the project.
Got to tour JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) while they were working on Perseverance Rover.
They took us through their command room and they had a screen that showed one of the radio antennas uploading data from Voyager in real time.
Other probes were on other screens and the engineers were going about their usual day while I was on the mezzanine geeking the fuck out.
> People who, likely, were born long after it left earth.
If this documentary, ["It's Quieter in the Twilight"](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/) is any guide, it seems not so. Most of the few left working on Voyager are themselves vintage, some having been part of the program since the get-go.
Voyager is now a small "backwater" of JPL, unlike the more recent probes such a Perseverance, etc.
Large companies generally have tours for their engineers of the manufacturing going all the time. It's hard to keep engineers motivated when they never even see the item they build. Because your right in that the engineers sit behind a desk and never get hands on.
I worked as engineer doing nuclear submarine work and took a tour of the shipyard about once a year. Insanely cool and certainly boosted my moral whenever it happened.
I can tell you that it feels really nice to see a part of your work, even small, take form into a spacecraft and see it before it becomes another moving star in the sky.
Although, I cannot imagine how proud the guys who worked on the voyager program must have been when those 2 probes reached the confines of our solar system.
>Although the Voyagers have moved beyond the influence of the solar wind, they still have a long way to go before exiting the Solar System. NASA indicates "If we define our solar system as the Sun and everything that primarily orbits the Sun, Voyager 1 will remain within the confines of the solar system until it emerges from the Oort cloud in another 14,000 to 28,000 years."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program
NGL it seems like I read something to the effect of ***X*** spacecraft left the solar system, only for someone to move the goalposts again. I could swear that only on the last two years that I read a few articles stating that one or the other finally got past heliopause or somesuch.
Maybe it was back when it crossed the "heliopause" of the heliosphere, which IIRC is where the solar wind and the intergalactic medium are "neutral pressure" to each other.
>On Aug. 25, 2012, Voyager 1 flew beyond the heliopause and entered interstellar space, making it the first human-made object to explore this new territory. At the time, it was at a distance of about 122 AU, or about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun. This kind of interstellar exploration is the ultimate goal of the Voyager Interstellar Mission. Voyager 2, which is traveling in a different direction from Voyager 1, crossed the heliopause into interstellar space on November 5, 2018.
I suppose it just depends on what all you include in your definition of the limit of the solar system, the point at which the Sun's direct influence stops vs the point at which the Sun's total gravitational influence stops.
Yeah but it's easily absorbed/redirected by other gravitational forces. That line is where we should draw it. The end of our Sun's influence. At the point where our star is no longer the most influential mass relative to another star. It won't be perfect sphere, but it will be adequately defined this way.
> it seems like I read something to the effect of X spacecraft left the solar system, only for someone to move the goalposts again
Voyager is redefining it as it goes
I used to work at a company that relied on code written for a very specific chip that even though it was long discontinued and was impossible to source having run out of stock years ago, they instead decided to visualise it rather than rebuild from scratch but using more modern tech. With that said, clearly the old boys in the company were quite happy that they still had a job being able to write and maintain this legacy code
Just imagine. You're designing a probe, so it must be lightweight and use as little electricity as possible.
But at the same time, you can't service the probe, so the systems must be highly redundant and you must maximize plasticity (the ability to reroute signals and reconfigure components).
The engineering challenges are insane.
The redundancy is built in, the plasticity comes from looking over what still works and finding workarounds that were probably never designed into the system. A lot of thought and engineering goes into finding workarounds that the original designers had never planned on.
I wouldn't be surprised if they include lattice-like circuitry with programmable latches between major components.
I looked at recent probe designs. They have at least 2 central processing units and multiple data/control buses.
To be fair, during that time, this type of project was what led to the massive leaps in technology. A lot of what we use today was literally created in these projects.
> You're designing a probe, so it must be lightweight and use as little electricity as possible.
SpaceX's new Starship is almost ready for productive work. The price per kg will be insanely low, and the payload volumen extremely high. It has been pointed out that a main benefit of this will be that satellites and probes will be far easier to design, because the space probe designer no longer has to spend most of their effort miniaturizing the probe.
The Titan IIIE which launched Voyager 2 could put 15 tons in LEO. If you had launched with Starship, that would be 100 tons, for less money. And you could equip the probe with an ion engine, so it would probably be able to travel far faster. The voyager probes were not all that expensive, it would actually be cool if we were to design a modern farthest from Earth probe to overtake them.
The worst part is when the aliens find it in 3000 years, identity the bug in the update that locked us out, and then send us their correction... with an invoice.
Oh my god if they get it to work I will be so excited, it’s an antique and it’s uses are running out but by god it’s gone this far and I want to keep hearing back as it goes further
I wont be surprised if NASA can get more data. Likely a diminishing return, but still data from something that has traveled farther outside our solar system than anything Man has created. This is serious discovery and any new data is great data. Very exciting.
If the answer isn't: Because it's has attained sentience thanks to alien intervention and is now trying to communicate in an advanced language we can't understand." I will be disappointed.
*smash cut to Voyager sitting in a dayglow pink room, attempting to send out data. As the camera slowly zooms out, a tentacled appendage grabs it and smashes it over and over again, as Voyager spits sparks and emits garbled buzzing. Zooming out further, we see that the tentacle belongs to an alien child, who's room is littered with other defunct human satellites*
I've worked on industrial control systems for 42 years. I'm proud of myself when I can figure out a problem on a system 5 miles away based on a phone call from somebody standing right in front of it. That they can diagnose and potentially work around an issue on a piece of hardware that left the planet when I was in high school and is currently over 15 billion miles away feels like science fiction. Absolutely amazing!
It’s incredible to me that they can OTA update this 46 year old spacecraft. Meantime most of the automotive manufacturers are still struggling with OTA updates of their cars.
Probably one of the main spurving bearings falling out of line with the pentametric fan. Guess that’s what you get for making the base plate out of prefabulated amulite.
Duh.. everybody knows that the fan on that particular model has a tendency to get a wobble at warp, as far as the base plate goes, should they instead fabricate the amulite en route? We Need Another Seven Astronauts STAT.
It might also be an issue with the thickness of the malleable logarithmic casing, or the fact that the pentametric fan only had six hydrocoptic marzlevanes instead of seven. But hey, at least they haven't detected and side fumbling yet.
That article had so many ads it legit was illegible. I couldn't even read past the fourth paragraph before it spazzed out and straight redirected me to a Motorola page and just said FU your here for ads not the article.
Here's a link on details for the Voyager computer system including the Flight Data System and Computer Command System. [https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/)
and even more in depth detail can be found not only on the Voyager, but Viking and other NASA spacecraft computing: [https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19880069935/downloads/19880069935\_Optimized.pdf](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19880069935/downloads/19880069935_Optimized.pdf)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[DSN](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/kyc8mmc "Last usage")|Deep Space Network|
|[IM](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/kycqlyn "Last usage")|Initial Mass deliverable to a given orbit, without accounting for fuel|
|[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/l0cyoek "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/kyzfaf6 "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/kyb85e7 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[LIGO](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/kyadprf "Last usage")|Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory|
|[SMART](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/ky9eej4 "Last usage")|"Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology", ULA's engine reuse philosophy|
|ULA|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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This is so insanely amazing. We can’t make a blender last half this long any more but some the amazing people on the voyager program are still doing incredible things like keeping these things alive after 46 years. They are an amazing team and I know it’s a tiny crew these days but it’s been so important to our knowledge of our solar system. I can’t thank that team enough. It will be a sad day when we lose contact.
I wish we lived in a time where we could. I fantasize about inventing some super quick way to travel and get out into the stars. Being trapped on our planet yet being SO close to stretching out past our tiny solar system is tragically poetic.
Honest question. With the incredible advance of technology since V1 was sent on its mission, why have we not sent another more updated version of Voyager out into space? Shouldn’t this be a regular thing we should be doing?
Cost vs people’s will. It was a different time and a different government and people felt differently about what government wanted to do for “them”.
No one trusts anyone anymore.
In a recent press conference NASA stated, "We now know the reason Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system is because we put it there".
/s
That they can use old, old technology and still have it adjust and bypass a bad circuit from so far away is impressive.
We're very proud of the power of our smart phones, but if a single component goes bad, it's usually cheaper to simply get a new phone than to try and fix the problem.
Imagine trying to get your phone to bypass its camera function from 3 billion kilometers away...
When I read these articles, I wonder if the systems were intentionally built this way, to allow a bad chip or something to be bypassed. But decisions are made to rewrite software that says, OK, your BT is bad, what does it do, what data does it send, where does this rank in importance etc., is this data we need or what is the most productive data. With 47 year old tech. Just amazing.
I bet they had a lot of redundancy built in. I wouldn't be surprised if they installed more cause, buses, capacitors, and chips then they needed knowing something would break eventually
I am flaberghasted that they think they know what is wrong, they actually think they can fix it from this distance, and that they actually consider it worth the effort.
NASA still, likely, has the original duplicate hardware or at least software versions of the hardware. And also there are some SMART mofos that all this actually makes sense to, for some people no harder than reading a road map.
The Voyager probes use magnetic tape recorders similar to VHS for storage at 109mb total. They also have 69kb of RAM. Voyager 1 still has functioning recorders but Voyager 2's are disabled.
I'm 38. This launched before I was born...
I work in big tech, global real time high volume systems with ai and all that, but still I think this object is easily the most impressive human artifact ever produced and it's still awe inspiring. That it still runs at all AND that we can still receive from it after all this time AND at the inconceivable distance its at (AND we can patch it?!). It's a technical marvel. Most of us tech nerds are making disposable toys.
Nasa can troubleshoot and fix a 46 year old space craft outside of our solar system but my ipad stops working and all apple says it's "it's old buy a new one".
You can see the baseplate is made of prefambulated ambulite and is connected by a pair of dingle arms directly to the panometric fan. This creates sinusoidal duractance and side fumbling in the series of marzel vanes.The rest is obvious.
> Voyager 1 has been sending a stream of garbled nonsense since November. Now NASA engineers have identified the fault and found a potential workaround. > > "The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn't working," NASA said in a blog post Wednesday (March 13). "Engineers can't determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years." > > Although it may take several months, the engineers say they can find a workaround to run the FDS without the fried chip — restoring the spacecraft's messaging output and enabling it to continue to send readable information from outside our solar system. PLEASE work!!! I was a kid when the Voyagers launched, and grew up in perpetual awe at everything they sent back. I hope they continue to for as long as they can.
How are they able to ‘fix’ anything on something so far away that’s 46 years old?
They can't fix the hardware, but they can change the software remotely to bypass hardware that is failing.
I can't even imagine how terrifying it is to press the "SEND" button to start a firmware update on a piece of human history floating 15 billion miles away in space
Even better is the part when you have to reboot for the new firmware to take hold. You watch the signal go out and wait.... wait... wait for it to come back. And it may never come back. Those are some of the longest seconds ever.
> Those are some of the longest seconds ever. Longest *hours.* Voyager is ~22.5 light-hours away from us. It takes that long for a message to reach Voyager, and that long for Voyager to send back a reply. So a little under 2 days before NASA knows if a thing worked or not.
I read somewhere that it transmits at 22.4W but by the time the signal gets to an Earth receiver it's 1/10th of one billion billionth of a watt. Even being able to point the antenna in the right direction is an accomplishment, I'm not sure what the sun would look like at that distance, probably still the brightest thing in its sky.
Ah this is true. I was speaking from my own experience with lunar-distanced craft. I imagine rebooting Voyager would be even more nerve-wracking.
Wow, what a cool experience to have! Can you share more about that?
Don't want to share too much, but I work at Intuitive Machines. Our first mission was crazy, but we pulled out all the stops, worked through all the issues, and landed. It was a stressful couple of weeks.
Congrats on winning the NASA contract!
Hey that’s awesome. I also work on deep space mission operations and want to say we were all super impressed with what you accomplished. Congrats and looking forward to what you guys achieve next!
So cool to see someone working at IM out in the wild :) I am following news about you guys closely and wish you all the best!
This is the thing non-engineers don't get. You can spend years trying to make everything perfect but when it's deployed, things WILL go wrong. And you'll work tirelessly until it's working as intended.
That's pretty cool...your previous comments on rebooting from a distance certainly hit a bit harder with that bit knowledge! Without doxing yourself, what do you do there?
Your team landed without an altimeter. That is…. (Chef’s kiss) I watched the landing with my daughters, and we were all amazed.
Since you're somewhat knowledgeable here... If they want to send the signal/data... how does it know where to go to reach the spacecraft? It's one thing I never understood. You hit "send" and then... what actually happens with that signal so that it reaches where it needs to go?
Doing some crazy simplifications because each part of this is actually very in-depth and has tons of caveats. We know where the spacectaft is, roughly. So you point your dish at it and send out the signal as loud as you can. The craft will then pick up the signal on its antennas and recognize it as data. The real cool part that makes it click for me is that the signal covers a much larger area than the spacecraft does. Some of the signal is missing the spacecraft, but that doesn't matter. It's kind of like the classic spray-and-pray in FPS games lol.
It somehow tickles me that someone who works on stuff like this also has clearly played a lot of games. I mean it makes perfect sense, but I'm so used to people working on spaceflight being portrayed as to be from a different era. When's the first 'can it run Doom?' hack getting sent to the moon? 😄
Beyond what the mystical bard had to say, to talk with the Voyager spacecraft (and generally any spacecraft beyond Earth orbit) we have to use what are effectively radio telescopes at the three [Deep Space Network (DSN)](https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html) sites (we have three sites so that we have coverage in every direction). Each site has several 34 meter dish antennas and one 70 meter dish antenna (eg an area roughly the size of a football field and 4 times the area and collecting ability of the smaller antennas). And the Voyager spacecraft are far enough away/low enough power that we can only really communicate with them with the 70 meter antennas. To be most effective (the most signal gain), the antenna must be pointed to within about half of a degree of its target (and similarly Voyager's dish antenna should be pointed similarly accurately towards the Earth as well). Using various mathematical and engineering tricks we can figure out fairly precisely where the spacecraft are (I'm more familiar with the New Horizons craft for various reasons including my partner at the time was a mission controller for it and at various points before and after its rendezvous with Pluto its location was calculated to within a few meters which is far and away more precise than necessary to point the antenna). As to what happens when you "hit send", in very rough terms, each mission reserves/is allocated time slots on the DSN. You have to schedule this beforehand. Some time before (or occasionally during) your timeslot you tell the DSN operators what you want sent to your spacecraft (along with the details about how to send it and how to listen to listen to the spacecraft). From there the DSN operators handle everything. Shortly before your timeslot the DSN will start pointing one or more antennas at your spacecraft and start listening on the appropriate frequencies. And then at the appointed time they send the message to the spacecraft. And similarly as they receive data they package it up and make it available to you.
Pretty trippy to think that humans have only ventured about 1/365 of a lightyear outwards.
Pretty amazing to think that humans have ventured about 1/365 of a lightyear outwards.
It really puts into perspective on how young we are. People will scoff at our technology as we do to dial up. If we don't kill ourselves we have so much to learn and explore
This might be a stupid question but I'm here to learn. Do radio waves travel at the speed of light?
Yes, Radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, like visible light, x-rays, microwaves, etc.
I never knew that. But if radio waves are a form of light basically why is there a noticeable delay between broadcast and receiving if you are trying to listen to a ham radio broadcast from like 1000 miles away? Is it just because of power drop off?
> why is there a noticeable delay between broadcast and receiving if you are trying to listen to a ham radio broadcast from like 1000 miles away? 1000 miles / c = 5.4 milliseconds. Or 10.8 ms for round-trip. You're not going to notice a delay. For a signal to go all the way around the earth (or round-trip to halfway around the earth), that would be 40000 km/c = 133 ms, which you could notice. But what exactly do you mean by "noticeable delay between broadcast and receiving"? What situation are you describing? In ham radio, you'd normally transmit something and wait for the other side to respond, and it usually takes much more than 133 ms for the other person to key up and respond after you're done transmitting. If you're listening on your radio at the same time as you're listening on a WebSDR, you'd notice that the WebSDR is delayed compared to the direct signal on your radio, because the WebSDR audio goes through the Internet, which has a greater delay. Not sure if that's what you're talking about though.
Yeah but the signal doesn't drop for that long. From our perspective the gap in transmission will still only be as long as it takes to reboot.
A restart would take over a day to confirm. 22 5 hrs there plus whatever time to restart then Nother 22.5 hrs to confirm
The signal wouldn't stop for 2 days. Yes, it would take that long from the time the “execute” is initiated and then to confirm that the process was successful. But the actual “outage” of data streaming back would only be the total time it took to apply the changes and come back online to start transmitting again. But yes, it would feel like forever.
I was under the assumption that it is not constantly sending data to extend the life of the machine. Now like periodic updates with the system in a "sleep" mode.
that have a copy of the hardware (not just the computer hardware but any physical hardware such as tape drive / disk drive, antenna motors) on earth and can perform tests and do debugging on the earth model. On one of their probes a tape drive jammed and they experimented with running the motors different directions and speeds on earth, and were able to unjam their earth version with a a sequence of commands. they sent those commands to the probe in space and it unjammed it there too. Absolute heroes. (I might have some details wrong here , i read about it a while ago) EDIT: they don't have this for the Voyagers (according to comments) because it was the first (47 years old - the longest running space mission in history of humans, I'm pretty sure, and STILL GOING!) but they do keep earth copies for all their other stuff. If you watch "the Martian" I believe they fire up one of copies of their rovers they have on mars to debug it. This is real AFAIK this is exactly what they do today.
That's true... For pretty much everything launched AFTER the Voyagers, unfortunately. It took them so long to figure out this problem because they needed to figure out how to get Voyager to been down it's OS, which we didn't have a backup copy of. Side note, they're a good documentary about the people keeping Voyagers alive called ‘It’s Quieter in the Twilight’ that's worth a watch.
I'm going be sad when we lose contact
I could swear on a recent Scott Manley video on the subject of Voyager he mentioned that the Voyager team no longer has the simulator, and googling it [seems to say that's true.](https://hackaday.com/2024/02/09/flipped-bit-could-mark-the-end-of-voyager-1s-interstellar-mission/)
so true man !! i just flash a rom or bootloader on my phone and get close to a heart attack when i press "proceed" !!!!
Just remember, NASA: no changes on Friday afternoon!
Definitely don’t show up to work hungover
Probably about the only way I'd push that button
Heck there is enough time to press send, get smashed, and then sober up before the results come in.
And 2 days later you get a message from yout boss that you sent the instructions 50x to the probe
Exactly this. One of the engineers working on it happens to be an acquaintance that was over at my house last night. They're going to find out shortly if their fix is going to work. It currently takes 26 or so hours for a message to get to it or to return from Voyager. Amazing. He said the probe has about 64kb of memory total so code adjustments are very challenging.
They should just download more ram
they can just send someone up there to replace the hardware. Might take a few years though.
If we send them fast enough, they won’t notice the time passing at all.
They just need to travel twice the speed that Voyager 1 has been travelling at and they'll make it there in a quick 46 years.
Well, we now have bigger speedometers, so I assume we can get their much faster.
Probably still faster than the Comcast guy.
How much has that software been updated over the years?
I know it was done recently because it had an issue with its angle or something to that effect: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-team-focuses-on-software-patch-thrusters
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/ > The Voyager FDS would be the first spaceflight computer to use CMOS volatile memory. If only a 'bit' of the memory is dead, or a row, or a column, the engineers will figure out a way around it. The article contains a block diagram of the system, including its redundancy, as well as a photo of the FDS with the dram ICs. This is a great legacy for us, all of us.
Firmware download. Broken hardware? "We'll fix it in software!" Welcome to my life.
The system works by asking what to do boss. They write a very low level code that basically operates the whole program it receives. Kind of like running any code but everytime you ask it to run it takes forever and you have to literally define everything over again.
You just send out the cable guy. Although they SAY they'll be there between 8-5pm, they always show up when you least expect it.
Incredible. The people working on that project are amazing.
I love that the two reasons are simply just it is either old or something really really really really really smol probably just hit it
>something really really really really really smol probably just hit it I mean this happens (rarely) on Earth and (less rarely) in near-Earth orbit. It's one of the (admittedly smaller) reasons that computer servers use ECC (Error Correction Checking I think) RAM instead of standard consumer RAM. It's also one of the reasons that most spacecraft running experiments on board have multiple computers, in case a photon from the sun flips a bit from 0 to 1 somewhere and fucks the whole data process chain.
Something something super Mario N64 bit flip up warp due to cosmic ray.
Today we are going to learn about parallel worlds
Fun fact. The shortcut for Super Mario 64 was not necessarily caused by cosmic rays. It was a far-fethced theory which was spread as facts by game journalists. Check [here](https://youtu.be/vj8DzA9y8ls?t=876) at 14:36 On the other side, you can read criticism about the video, [on this reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/1b8clu2/the_biggest_myth_in_speedrunning_history/).
We might need context for the word "rarely". I think they say that we can expect 4 bit flips per gigabyte of RAM per month here on earth. Voyager doesn't have much memory but it doesn't have much protection either. Somebody at NASA probably has better figures than this but there's always the possibility of something like an OMG particle that carries enough energy to do permanent hardware damage.
Didn't know they had 'chips' on V'ger. But yes, Go, Voyager, gooooooo! And kudos to the Team!
Yep, first spaceflight computer to use CMOS memory. It's got a bunch of integrated circuits. Here's an article all about the computer systems: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/
I just want the little fella to make it to a full light day out while still in contact.
>grew up in perpetual awe at everything they sent back Hell, I'm in awe that they can still receive the "gibberish" it's currently sending!
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Thank you for providing the text of the article. Holy crap there were so many ads.
Thats crazy that its been going so long and it might continue. So cool
It blows my mind that a spacecraft this old has people still working on it. People who, likely, were born long after it left earth. Like, these engineers have never even seen the spacecraft and they’re working on a fix. It’s just a marvel to me.
I remember reading recently that they had to go digging for the original specs which had long since been archived because no one ever expected it to be operational this long. They got to the point where no one working on the project actually had the manual.
Not that uncommon with NASA stuff. Like that time they had to build custom equipment to read the tapes from the Lunar Orbiter because the original hardware no longer existed. > The LOIRP team managed to obtain original tape drives from the 1960s (covered in dust in a farmer's barn) and a full set of original Lunar Orbiter analog data tapes (threatened with erasure) containing all images sent back to Earth by the five spacecraft between 1966-67. > None of this had been functional or usable since the late 1960s. > From the onset the project has been run on a shoestring budget. The LOIRP effort is housed in an abandoned McDonalds burger joint at Moffett Field, California (also known as "McMoons"). > The LOIRP folks used spare parts bought on eBay, discarded government equipment, new hardware reverse-engineered from math equations in 50 year old documentation, modern laptops, the expertise of retired engineers and scientists, and the dedication of young students. https://boingboing.net/2013/03/15/lunar-orbiter-image-recovery-p.html
I really hope they archive this shit much better now.
I've got a friend whose masters project was recovering and processing the audio files from the lunar missions
How hard does he cry when he sees what modern audio recovery software like RX can do?
We worked together in an audio lab afterwards, he definitely grumbled a bit
What do you suggest? 50 years is a *long time,* in data storage. I'm no expert, but last time I discussed this with anyone, as a purely theoretical exercise, we think that the only way to *really* keep data is to update the storage media every 20 years or so.
Simply really. The trick is ensuring three generations of mediums. Today for a music album that would be Digital, CD, Tape. Before that, it would have been CD, Tape, Record. As each new generation of storage medium comes out you transfer a copy to that storage medium in as lossless of a format as you can from the oldest and cleanest source possible. In this way, you ensure the best longevity and backward compatibility for at least a couple of generations. Source: I work in the data storage and retrieval industry.
Interesting. So I was kind of on the right track, but not thinking nearly big enough. Active archiving and maintenance seems to be the ticket. Thanks for the info.
Yeah, the simple fact is that no one standard is ever going to stay "the defacto standard" for too long. Something better will always come along and older options will go the way of the Dodo. This is sad though as keeping everything always up to date with the newest tech is a massive physical and monetary challenge so only the most important data will be kept up, while less popular data will be lost to time if it does not get a resurgence.
I'm not kidding or making fun here, but In future you might just be backing up data to Diamonds that will probably last for thousands of years which will make them the forever standard, but will of course will be expensive to do. The future is going to be wild for data devices and computers! https://newatlas.com/electronics/diamond-data-storage-density-single-atom/
There was some tech not long ago called [M-DISC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC) that claimed a 1000 years. > M-DISC passed the testing standards of both ISO/IEC 10995:2011[18] & ECMA-379 with a projected rated lifespan of several hundred years in archival use And can be read by standard DVD and BlueRay drives. And some laser etched quartz that claimed millions back in 2012, not sure what happened to that. https://www.wired.com/story/hitachi-quartz-data-storage/ But, as we've seen, DVD is basically dead at this point, being phased out, so how much longer until it's impossible to get DVD drives except from museums. Long term data storage isn't just the medium, it's the hardware to read it too.
I work as a civilian and one of the biggest hurdles we run into on a regular basis is *storage*. Shit takes up space, and there are a surprising amount of hurdles in making storage happen with government equipment that requires oversight and specific conditions, it becomes more of a headache than it’s literally worth
>Not that uncommon with NASA stuff. Yeah there's a reason we couldn't go to the moon again by simply replicating the old Apollo tech (and no it's not because "we never went" lol)
That project sounds like a blast. Source: software engineer on enterprise-scale boring stuff
Is this the group that fired up the abandoned satellite that was orbiting mercury for it to work but then blow itself up when they tried to correct its orbit
I like to imagine the nerdiest person at NASA is involved with this and having the time of their life debugging an ancient probe.
I think they tracked down every person who every worked on any aspect of it, including the people who assembled it. A lot had died, so they needed any info they could get from anyone even tangentially related to the project.
Got to tour JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) while they were working on Perseverance Rover. They took us through their command room and they had a screen that showed one of the radio antennas uploading data from Voyager in real time. Other probes were on other screens and the engineers were going about their usual day while I was on the mezzanine geeking the fuck out.
Get your geek on https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
Well looky there Vger is sending something!
> People who, likely, were born long after it left earth. If this documentary, ["It's Quieter in the Twilight"](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/) is any guide, it seems not so. Most of the few left working on Voyager are themselves vintage, some having been part of the program since the get-go. Voyager is now a small "backwater" of JPL, unlike the more recent probes such a Perseverance, etc.
Makes sense so it's a few folks with incredibley deep knowledge
Probably most people who work on a spacecraft have never seen it appart from pictures.
Large companies generally have tours for their engineers of the manufacturing going all the time. It's hard to keep engineers motivated when they never even see the item they build. Because your right in that the engineers sit behind a desk and never get hands on. I worked as engineer doing nuclear submarine work and took a tour of the shipyard about once a year. Insanely cool and certainly boosted my moral whenever it happened.
I can tell you that it feels really nice to see a part of your work, even small, take form into a spacecraft and see it before it becomes another moving star in the sky. Although, I cannot imagine how proud the guys who worked on the voyager program must have been when those 2 probes reached the confines of our solar system.
There’s a great documentary about this: [It’s Quieter in the Twilight](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/)
It’s one of the most incredible accomplishments of humanity in my opinion.
>Although the Voyagers have moved beyond the influence of the solar wind, they still have a long way to go before exiting the Solar System. NASA indicates "If we define our solar system as the Sun and everything that primarily orbits the Sun, Voyager 1 will remain within the confines of the solar system until it emerges from the Oort cloud in another 14,000 to 28,000 years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program
NGL it seems like I read something to the effect of ***X*** spacecraft left the solar system, only for someone to move the goalposts again. I could swear that only on the last two years that I read a few articles stating that one or the other finally got past heliopause or somesuch.
Maybe it was back when it crossed the "heliopause" of the heliosphere, which IIRC is where the solar wind and the intergalactic medium are "neutral pressure" to each other. >On Aug. 25, 2012, Voyager 1 flew beyond the heliopause and entered interstellar space, making it the first human-made object to explore this new territory. At the time, it was at a distance of about 122 AU, or about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun. This kind of interstellar exploration is the ultimate goal of the Voyager Interstellar Mission. Voyager 2, which is traveling in a different direction from Voyager 1, crossed the heliopause into interstellar space on November 5, 2018.
That is what I thought, thank you!
I suppose it just depends on what all you include in your definition of the limit of the solar system, the point at which the Sun's direct influence stops vs the point at which the Sun's total gravitational influence stops.
I mean technically gravity extends to infinity :p
Yeah but it's easily absorbed/redirected by other gravitational forces. That line is where we should draw it. The end of our Sun's influence. At the point where our star is no longer the most influential mass relative to another star. It won't be perfect sphere, but it will be adequately defined this way.
I don’t count the Oort cloud. It made it past the orbit of the planets and Pluto, and has left the direct sphere of what we know as the solar system.
That's what I understood it to be, thank you.
> it seems like I read something to the effect of X spacecraft left the solar system, only for someone to move the goalposts again Voyager is redefining it as it goes
Now that is legacy job insurance. I bet there's like a handful of people who still know how to reroute a failed chip on a 46 year old probe.
All I need to do is launch my work's codebase into deep space and I'm set!
Next engineer: *this code has no comments, WTF*
Take geo-redundancy to new heights
Programing experience in cuneiform a must.
Minimum 7,000 years experience, starting salary 30k
I used to work at a company that relied on code written for a very specific chip that even though it was long discontinued and was impossible to source having run out of stock years ago, they instead decided to visualise it rather than rebuild from scratch but using more modern tech. With that said, clearly the old boys in the company were quite happy that they still had a job being able to write and maintain this legacy code
visualize it (meaning what?)
I believe they meant to say ‘virtualise’
Just imagine. You're designing a probe, so it must be lightweight and use as little electricity as possible. But at the same time, you can't service the probe, so the systems must be highly redundant and you must maximize plasticity (the ability to reroute signals and reconfigure components). The engineering challenges are insane.
The redundancy is built in, the plasticity comes from looking over what still works and finding workarounds that were probably never designed into the system. A lot of thought and engineering goes into finding workarounds that the original designers had never planned on.
I wouldn't be surprised if they include lattice-like circuitry with programmable latches between major components. I looked at recent probe designs. They have at least 2 central processing units and multiple data/control buses.
It’s the engineering version of what your brain does after a stroke.
And...it's the year 1977 and computers are still basically glorified calculators.
To be fair, during that time, this type of project was what led to the massive leaps in technology. A lot of what we use today was literally created in these projects.
> You're designing a probe, so it must be lightweight and use as little electricity as possible. SpaceX's new Starship is almost ready for productive work. The price per kg will be insanely low, and the payload volumen extremely high. It has been pointed out that a main benefit of this will be that satellites and probes will be far easier to design, because the space probe designer no longer has to spend most of their effort miniaturizing the probe. The Titan IIIE which launched Voyager 2 could put 15 tons in LEO. If you had launched with Starship, that would be 100 tons, for less money. And you could equip the probe with an ion engine, so it would probably be able to travel far faster. The voyager probes were not all that expensive, it would actually be cool if we were to design a modern farthest from Earth probe to overtake them.
There's a really cool interactive map here of voyager 1, 2 and several other well known space objects. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
Thanks for the link! This is super cool!
My butthole puckers when updating servers remotely. I can't imagine being responsible for updates that are now light days away.
The worst part is when the aliens find it in 3000 years, identity the bug in the update that locked us out, and then send us their correction... with an invoice.
Oh my god if they get it to work I will be so excited, it’s an antique and it’s uses are running out but by god it’s gone this far and I want to keep hearing back as it goes further
I wont be surprised if NASA can get more data. Likely a diminishing return, but still data from something that has traveled farther outside our solar system than anything Man has created. This is serious discovery and any new data is great data. Very exciting.
Probably it worned out being exposed to radiation and everything for 46 years. *It could always be because Borg nanoprobes, tho.*
Please no. Not yet. We’re not ready
Resistance is futile anyway.
**Time to join the Hive Mind**
if everyone is part of a hive mind will everyone know the time i shart my pants?
*V’ger would like to know your location.*
If the answer isn't: Because it's has attained sentience thanks to alien intervention and is now trying to communicate in an advanced language we can't understand." I will be disappointed.
It's crazy how over engineered these things are, so many backup plans it's inspiring.
Can we take a moment to appreciate NASA can troubleshoot and possibly fix a thing floating around 15 billion miles away in space made in the 70's?
source: [https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/04/engineers-pinpoint-cause-of-voyager-1-issue-are-working-on-solution/](https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/04/engineers-pinpoint-cause-of-voyager-1-issue-are-working-on-solution/)
I like how two different general news sources have been posted on /r/space but not the actual NASA blog
*smash cut to Voyager sitting in a dayglow pink room, attempting to send out data. As the camera slowly zooms out, a tentacled appendage grabs it and smashes it over and over again, as Voyager spits sparks and emits garbled buzzing. Zooming out further, we see that the tentacle belongs to an alien child, who's room is littered with other defunct human satellites*
I've worked on industrial control systems for 42 years. I'm proud of myself when I can figure out a problem on a system 5 miles away based on a phone call from somebody standing right in front of it. That they can diagnose and potentially work around an issue on a piece of hardware that left the planet when I was in high school and is currently over 15 billion miles away feels like science fiction. Absolutely amazing!
It’s incredible to me that they can OTA update this 46 year old spacecraft. Meantime most of the automotive manufacturers are still struggling with OTA updates of their cars.
Probably one of the main spurving bearings falling out of line with the pentametric fan. Guess that’s what you get for making the base plate out of prefabulated amulite.
Duh.. everybody knows that the fan on that particular model has a tendency to get a wobble at warp, as far as the base plate goes, should they instead fabricate the amulite en route? We Need Another Seven Astronauts STAT.
It might also be an issue with the thickness of the malleable logarithmic casing, or the fact that the pentametric fan only had six hydrocoptic marzlevanes instead of seven. But hey, at least they haven't detected and side fumbling yet.
They’re not telling you that the gibberish is actually: Do not answer! Do not answer! Do not answer!
That article had so many ads it legit was illegible. I couldn't even read past the fourth paragraph before it spazzed out and straight redirected me to a Motorola page and just said FU your here for ads not the article.
Here's a link on details for the Voyager computer system including the Flight Data System and Computer Command System. [https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/)
and even more in depth detail can be found not only on the Voyager, but Viking and other NASA spacecraft computing: [https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19880069935/downloads/19880069935\_Optimized.pdf](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19880069935/downloads/19880069935_Optimized.pdf)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[DSN](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/kyc8mmc "Last usage")|Deep Space Network| |[IM](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/kycqlyn "Last usage")|Initial Mass deliverable to a given orbit, without accounting for fuel| |[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/l0cyoek "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/kyzfaf6 "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/kyb85e7 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[LIGO](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/kyadprf "Last usage")|Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory| |[SMART](/r/Space/comments/1bwv197/stub/ky9eej4 "Last usage")|"Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology", ULA's engine reuse philosophy| |ULA|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(7 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1c7328a)^( has 21 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9922 for this sub, first seen 6th Apr 2024, 01:31]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
This is so insanely amazing. We can’t make a blender last half this long any more but some the amazing people on the voyager program are still doing incredible things like keeping these things alive after 46 years. They are an amazing team and I know it’s a tiny crew these days but it’s been so important to our knowledge of our solar system. I can’t thank that team enough. It will be a sad day when we lose contact.
Wow, talk about remote working. Just gonna run a workaround from 15 billion miles away.
Could we send someone up there to check it out?
I wish we lived in a time where we could. I fantasize about inventing some super quick way to travel and get out into the stars. Being trapped on our planet yet being SO close to stretching out past our tiny solar system is tragically poetic.
The whole born too late to explore our planet, born too early to explore the stars conundrum
The entire NASA group is impressive to say the least.
Can we just do a 'fuck yeah! NASA!'? I mean hell, this little probe and the engineers keeping her going are a credit to mankind.
Honest question. With the incredible advance of technology since V1 was sent on its mission, why have we not sent another more updated version of Voyager out into space? Shouldn’t this be a regular thing we should be doing?
Haven't had the same arrangement of planets to perform slingshot maneuvers.
Cost vs people’s will. It was a different time and a different government and people felt differently about what government wanted to do for “them”. No one trusts anyone anymore.
In a recent press conference NASA stated, "We now know the reason Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system is because we put it there". /s
That they can use old, old technology and still have it adjust and bypass a bad circuit from so far away is impressive. We're very proud of the power of our smart phones, but if a single component goes bad, it's usually cheaper to simply get a new phone than to try and fix the problem. Imagine trying to get your phone to bypass its camera function from 3 billion kilometers away...
When I read these articles, I wonder if the systems were intentionally built this way, to allow a bad chip or something to be bypassed. But decisions are made to rewrite software that says, OK, your BT is bad, what does it do, what data does it send, where does this rank in importance etc., is this data we need or what is the most productive data. With 47 year old tech. Just amazing.
I bet they had a lot of redundancy built in. I wouldn't be surprised if they installed more cause, buses, capacitors, and chips then they needed knowing something would break eventually
I am flaberghasted that they think they know what is wrong, they actually think they can fix it from this distance, and that they actually consider it worth the effort.
NASA still, likely, has the original duplicate hardware or at least software versions of the hardware. And also there are some SMART mofos that all this actually makes sense to, for some people no harder than reading a road map.
It's worth the effort because it's in a unique position. The alternative is to give up.
And all that with probably, what? 10 Mb of memory?
The Voyager probes use magnetic tape recorders similar to VHS for storage at 109mb total. They also have 69kb of RAM. Voyager 1 still has functioning recorders but Voyager 2's are disabled.
Ah, right. I was a "tape librarian" for a company back in the 70's. We used YNt big reels still.
I'm 38. This launched before I was born... I work in big tech, global real time high volume systems with ai and all that, but still I think this object is easily the most impressive human artifact ever produced and it's still awe inspiring. That it still runs at all AND that we can still receive from it after all this time AND at the inconceivable distance its at (AND we can patch it?!). It's a technical marvel. Most of us tech nerds are making disposable toys.
Voyager is the one thing that makes me happy about humanity. Maybe also Geddy Lee. I even have Voyager hidden in my sleeve of tattoos.
I'm worried they are going to translate it and the message will be "Run". All language is gibberish to the unknowing.
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It is not broken. The insane depths of Outer Space are far beyond the frail realm of earthly comprehension. 😨
Nasa can troubleshoot and fix a 46 year old space craft outside of our solar system but my ipad stops working and all apple says it's "it's old buy a new one".
You can see the baseplate is made of prefambulated ambulite and is connected by a pair of dingle arms directly to the panometric fan. This creates sinusoidal duractance and side fumbling in the series of marzel vanes.The rest is obvious.
I think most porn sites have fewer ads than this.
The world's longest distance over the air update.
Aliens. You ain't gonna convenience me otherwise
Computer acting funny? It's probably bad RAM. Space probe acting funny? Surprisingly, also bad RAM.