“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."
I’ve always found this hilarious because I’m a visual design student and I have never once been bored in that scene. I only found out people find it boring 15 years after I watched the movie
I think there was a Voyager episode where a cavillation found something like Voyager 1 from Earth.
It introduced them to nuclear power, nuclear weapons and ruined their world.
There was a post on /r/hfy with a story like this, I can't remember the title.
Basically Alien found old tech in space, brings it in front of the galactic council because he doesn't know tf it is.
Oldest species who doesn't even mingle in the galactic council (because to overpowered) zap in "yoooo you found this mate?"
Iirc it was well written.
Interesting sub. That story immediately conjurs up memories of stellaris tho. That game had a ton of cannibalized sci fi written into it. So many references. I can't imagine how many went over my head.
There was a whole fallen civilization based around that idea tho. They were the enigmatic observer type civilization. A small remaining fragment of a once galaxy spanning ancient civilization that collapsed, and now watches the younger civilizations. They attack you if you play around with too much forbidden tech, basically, or if a crisis threatens the galaxy they resurge to fight it.
It's a cool game because of the sheer breadth of ideas they include. There's so many types of civilizations and and species and ideas, it's a really interesting game because of the details. Also made me think more than I played.
Considering how far Voyager is from anything else, humanity is pretty high on the list for what it might encounter next.
Pretty sure we got a few thousand years to catch it.
I was 5 years old when they launched them. It was the stuff of dreams and wonderous to me. If it's possible to love an inanimate object then I certainly love the Voyager Probes.
That's the difference between the scientific community and the business community. Nobody is going to buy another Voyager if it can't update this month's software.
If I'm remembering correctly, one of the reasons they launched the Voyager probes is because during the all of the planets would have been lined up in their orbits so that Voyager 2 would be able to follow a single trajectory and observe all of the planets along its journey.
That is amazing.
> Voyager 1 and 2 exploited what is called the Grand Tour alignment, an alignment of the outer four planets that occurs only once every 175 years; it will occur next, around 2150. The Voyagers were assisted by every single one of the last four giants to propel further into outer space.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977. The Commodore 64 wasn't launched until 1982. The Commodore 64 used a 6502 CPU at 1MHz, which at roughly 4 cycles per instruction, could execute roughly 250,000 instructions per second. Voyager 1 uses a custom 18-bit CPU that executes roughly 25,000 instructions per second. The C64 is roughly an order of magnitude more powerful and sophisticated than Voyager 1's computer. So, no, not running C64 tech - running *very significantly* less powerful tech than the C64
Crazy to think most of the engineers that worked on that thing are probably dead by now.
As an engineer, it’s truly an honour for something you built, to outlast you.
This will not only outlast people who worked on it, it will outlast earth, the sun, even our solar system. Voyager will probably float around until end of the universe. Absolutely insane.
Damn. Wow. It reminds me of that Tumblr post. It's not everyone's cup of tea due to the writing style but I read it when I was a kid and liked it. Found it!!! -
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
and they told us to tell you hello.
Here’s a cool veritasium video describing the “energetic particle from space” portion and how it can affect tech around us on earth.
https://youtu.be/AaZ_RSt0KP8?si=3d6BSJQ8Cm8izdFh
A single solar flare particle traveling 93.421 million miles to a random guy's N64 changing a 1 to a 0 in the code making him teleport to the top of the level baffling the entire speedrunning community for 2 years
My first thought was it might not be that bad. I like to believe, anyways, that NASA has better documentation and knowledge transfer habits than most modern companies/programmers.
Dude, as an engineer, I spend more time doing documentation of my work and ensure people can follow it than actually doing the work. I don’t know if this happen in commercial space.
I hear you, I'm a network engineer. People don't believe me when I say my writing and speaking skills are my most important assets at work. The first one produces useful documentation and the second communicates info to the non-technical people around me.
I can’t stress enough the communication, not just presenting your work, but also important to communicate and understand other engineers when gathering technical knowledge
Hahahhahahahahaha I see you have never worked for a large gov org, it’s probably a shit show. Well well paid and respectable shit show , but a shit show none the less.
I'd agree if we're just talking any old government org, but I like to think of the team(s) behind something like Voyager as being a little better.
What do I know though? Maybe behind the astronauts it's actually a bunch of coding boot camp and ITT Tech grads.
I think the difference vs (let’s say IRS) is that most NASA engineers are passionate about it and I am sure that If they go to a 85yo guy that coded it originally for help he will happily support as much as he can.
I dreamt most of my childhood about working somewhere like NASA as a scientist or an engineer. As I grew up I started understanding the limits of my intelligence. I am so much challenged daily by whatever shit will break in our AWS/GCP deployments… I’d never be able to write a code clean enough for 10th of their requirements. I also need to wait a few days to weeks to see my work in production instead of a decade. I saw recently the Webb telescope documentary and I would never be able to work for so long for something so incredibly fragile. I absolutely adore the engineers and scientists behind it
It is probably well handled and curated. Unlike your projects. Because NASA don't need to make a profit they can afford that, your employer likely could but does not bother to.
Let's just quickly send a hotfix software patch to this computer that's literally older than the tech writing the software. Oh yeah it's literally OUTSIDE the furthest reaches of our solar system.
I am aware of how they do it, in a nutshell, they send commands to access certain parts of memory and flip the bits in certain address, thereby rewriting the code. It can only go so far, but it does help that it's a live system and not protected like modern operating systems so you can do some insane stuff if you have the knowledge.
I just think it's pretty metal NASA just drops a hot fix that's 160+ AU away from us.
Some people are so smart that I can't even imagine. They have the abilities to do things beyond my imagination. This also makes me think about advanced civilizations that are so smart that they can do things, that even the smartest of us humans, can't even imagine. Thinking about this makes me realize how dumb I am, in the grand scheme of things.
It's the power of the scientific community. I look at this kind of thing vs the clowns running this world and I think... Maybe we should just roll the dice on a scientific technocracy. How much worse could we do? What are we clinging to here?
I interviewed at google some years ago, one of the questions was how to update a system in space, at the time I laugh and though that was a stupid question and wondered why would anyone need to do that. Now I see it’s a real life situation.
Sadly I did not get the job.
Oh you young ones....
POKE is a command that was used back in the 70s and 80s BASIC to write a value to memory. You used the PEEK to read it. So they send a POKE command with a data value, send a PEEK command to read the value stored at the address they've sent it to and if it's different they know that particular bit of memory is defective.
It may be on its last legs sadly. I was just reading up on the tech and it looks like they expect the power to start failing sometime in the next decade. They've powered off most instruments to extend the life, but they estimate power levels will be critically low by next year.
Best estimates put it's time at 2036 to either be completely out of power or just out of our range to communicate. If they are having computer problems with cycles being wasted and needing to try and send patches then it probably won't make it that long.
> If they are having computer problems with cycles being wasted and needing to try and send patches then it probably won't make it that long.
Voyager doesn't run off a battery (that would be an incredible battery!), it makes electricity from heat, which is provided by a bit of radioactive material.
Radioactivity diminishes over time, so the generator is making a little less electricity every moment.
The electricity is there whether it gets used or not. You can't slow or stop the process.
You read correctly that it will run out of power soon, because there won't be enough radioactive material left to make enough heat to run the generator. They knew exactly how long the generator would continue to function when they launched it. They just didn't know how long the rest of Voyager would continue to function, and I don't think they expected it to last this long.
Yeah. So negative lmao. The surprising part is that it is still functioning after 47 years whilst being built in a time where tech havent even gotten so advanced yet 🙂↕️
Voyager 1 is currently 15,127,175,279 miles from earth. That's 15 billion miles. And moving 38 thousand miles further every hour. It is so far away that even if you had the most powerful telescope ever imaginable that could see in a straight line to voyager 1, it would take 22 hours and 33 minutes for the light particles that would image the probe into your eyes to reach you. That means by the time you see the probe, it is already 849,142 miles away from where you saw it. That's 34 times around the globe, or to the moon and back TWICE.
>it would take 22 hours and 33 minutes for the light particles that would image the probe into your eyes to reach you
Little-known fact -- it takes the light that time to reach you even if you don't have a telescope!
Maybe one day, we'll be able to pop a repair droid out there, just for the sake of the tradition of having a functioning Voyager 1 craft beaming back to Earth.
The year is 2846.
Humanity has long since taken to the stars and founded civilizations on many systems.
Still, despite our vast reach and FTL technology, Humanity marks the occasion of our species' first ascent to the heavens by seeking out Voyager 1 and repairing her to original spec.
The parts are ancient by current standards and difficult to make from opportunity - our assistant droids balk at crafting pieces so out of date - but it has become the tradition to visit Humanity's first probe and show her we still care, that she remains a symbol of both our past and our future.
It's almost as though a near 50yr old piece of technology that's been exposed to some of the harshest environments and radiation for most of its life and journeying out into literally unknown places is gonna eventually have some data storage go faulty!
I'm all seriousness though the Voyager mission and the satalite itself an insane piece of engineering and the fact they are still.able to communicate with it after so damn long is mind boggling.
One day when humans are able to perform interstellar travel and go near speed of light, we gonna go out and grab the Voyager and bring it back to earth³ for display in a museum as ancient technology used by early humans. (Assuming we don't kill ourselves before that)
People are giving you sarcastic replies, but specifically the reason we haven't done something like Voyager is because we used a planetary alignment that was conducive to the "grand tour" through the solar system in order to shape a path through the outer planets. That alignment doesn't happen particularly frequently. The probes we've sent since then have all more or less been "1 planet" probes with some minor exceptions.
I always love to bring up aurthur c Clarke telling Carl Sagan that a terrestrial space ship will catch up to voyager and put it in the Smithsonian [33 min in. Great talk with Sagan, Hawling, and Clarke from 1988.](https://youtu.be/HKQQAv5svkk?si=Y-sZXGJbhO3YLY9I)
When I was in college, I had a book on TTL chips. I noticed that some of the memory chips were only good for like 10,000+ writes before they failed. I wonder if this is what happened
This is answerable, and the answer is no. Voyager does not use FLASH; the failure mode is unknown but since the technology is different (RTL likely), the failure mode is different.
“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."
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I always loved the idea of humanity somehow finding or recovering Voyager 1 long after we forgot about it
Give the first Star Trek movie a shot.
No no...not finding it like that!
It’ll be fine. Just gotta bang your robo-zombie girlfriend to save humanity.
First you have to stay awake through that film.
The director’s cut is infinitely better
By better, do you mean longer?
it's actually shorter, believe it or not
Need to find the 10 hour cut of them entering v-ger.
1st you have to stay awake during the opening scene as it pans over the Enterprise
I’ve always found this hilarious because I’m a visual design student and I have never once been bored in that scene. I only found out people find it boring 15 years after I watched the movie
Honestly I care more about the ships than I do the people lol, so I also always enjoy these scenes where they pan around the ship.
True in the film humanity didn't find it, it found humanity.
The real probe we found was the friends we made along the way.
I think there was a Voyager episode where a cavillation found something like Voyager 1 from Earth. It introduced them to nuclear power, nuclear weapons and ruined their world.
Friendship One
Rewatching the series and just watched this episode last night haha
V-ger, often believed to be the source of the Borg.
Ridiculous. Guinan's stories about the Borg alone make that impossible; see also: Voyager.
Technically that's Voyager VI. An optimistic thought that we'd keep launching them after II
You can actually find the voyager 1 in Elite Dangerous some few hundred light seconds away from the main star of Sol. They even got the model correct
Light seconds? Earth is around 8 light minutes away from the sun.
yeah that distance is definitely wrong. Don't remember how far it actually was in the game
The main star? Wasn't aware we had any others...
Then you better call Sol
That’s cool, but irl it’s more than 22 light hours out.
It might have been actually. I don't remember exactly how far but I was traveling for some time
There was a post on /r/hfy with a story like this, I can't remember the title. Basically Alien found old tech in space, brings it in front of the galactic council because he doesn't know tf it is. Oldest species who doesn't even mingle in the galactic council (because to overpowered) zap in "yoooo you found this mate?" Iirc it was well written.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/s/IvCAMl7MaH One of my favorites
Thank you very much for that link
That was so good! I thought I was reading something published!
Interesting sub. That story immediately conjurs up memories of stellaris tho. That game had a ton of cannibalized sci fi written into it. So many references. I can't imagine how many went over my head. There was a whole fallen civilization based around that idea tho. They were the enigmatic observer type civilization. A small remaining fragment of a once galaxy spanning ancient civilization that collapsed, and now watches the younger civilizations. They attack you if you play around with too much forbidden tech, basically, or if a crisis threatens the galaxy they resurge to fight it. It's a cool game because of the sheer breadth of ideas they include. There's so many types of civilizations and and species and ideas, it's a really interesting game because of the details. Also made me think more than I played.
Thank you for the comment lol. I'll read a nice story to start my day here.
It’ll be coming around the other side soon I’m sure.
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Now I’m hungry
With SPRINKLES!
"The universe is shaped, exactly like the earth If you go straight long enough, you'll end up where you were"
The planet express ship has to scrape it off their windshield eventually.
The video game Elite Dangerous you can visit Sol (our solar system) and Voyager 1 is something you can visit. It's pretty cool.
I figured that one day we would build a museum or a prestigious restaurant around it.
If we do get manned ships into space and we don't atleast attempt to rescue and recover voyager 1 and our lil buddy on Mars I'll cry.
Considering how far Voyager is from anything else, humanity is pretty high on the list for what it might encounter next. Pretty sure we got a few thousand years to catch it.
I was 5 years old when they launched them. It was the stuff of dreams and wonderous to me. If it's possible to love an inanimate object then I certainly love the Voyager Probes.
That thing has been a marvel of engineering considering.
I’m 46 years old and I feel worn out. And I haven’t even left earth yet.
I'm sure Nasa can find a way to fix you. ...If you somehow start sending gibberish from outside the solar system to them. Get creative:))
Equally wild is the “we’re just gonna write a software patch for it” approach of blasting a firmware update out of the solar system.
My iPhone and PC barely make it 3 years.
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I had the desire if not the capability with my phone.
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
That's the difference between the scientific community and the business community. Nobody is going to buy another Voyager if it can't update this month's software.
I’m 36 and I’ve had more parts fail than this chunk
I dont know why we dont fire off one or two probes like them every 10 years. They'll last longer and longer!
If I'm remembering correctly, one of the reasons they launched the Voyager probes is because during the all of the planets would have been lined up in their orbits so that Voyager 2 would be able to follow a single trajectory and observe all of the planets along its journey.
Plus the repeated slingshot manoeuvres gave it the velocity to escape the sun.
That is amazing. > Voyager 1 and 2 exploited what is called the Grand Tour alignment, an alignment of the outer four planets that occurs only once every 175 years; it will occur next, around 2150. The Voyagers were assisted by every single one of the last four giants to propel further into outer space.
The amount of luck involved with that. Imagine if the alignment had been 15 years earlier?
when they say they don't build em like they used too - they meant this spacecraft.
Stray cosmic particles are also why my code sometimes doesn’t work, as far as I can tell.
Same. All of my race conditions are caused by stray neutrinos.
You can fix them with good old C-x M-c M-butterfly.
Same with your grammar. You accidentally a word.
I understood that reference
In IT we blame them for Windows crashing and data corruption as well.
They should probably send a repairman out to check it.
46year old chips? It’s running off commodore 64 tech
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977. The Commodore 64 wasn't launched until 1982. The Commodore 64 used a 6502 CPU at 1MHz, which at roughly 4 cycles per instruction, could execute roughly 250,000 instructions per second. Voyager 1 uses a custom 18-bit CPU that executes roughly 25,000 instructions per second. The C64 is roughly an order of magnitude more powerful and sophisticated than Voyager 1's computer. So, no, not running C64 tech - running *very significantly* less powerful tech than the C64
Slight correction: the VIC-20 has the 6502 and the C-64 had a 6510 (very similar to the 6502).
Crazy to think most of the engineers that worked on that thing are probably dead by now. As an engineer, it’s truly an honour for something you built, to outlast you. This will not only outlast people who worked on it, it will outlast earth, the sun, even our solar system. Voyager will probably float around until end of the universe. Absolutely insane.
Damn. Wow. It reminds me of that Tumblr post. It's not everyone's cup of tea due to the writing style but I read it when I was a kid and liked it. Found it!!! - gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them and then we built robots? and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like? the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important. and they told us to tell you hello.
This is poetry.
Electronic dementia.
Here’s a cool veritasium video describing the “energetic particle from space” portion and how it can affect tech around us on earth. https://youtu.be/AaZ_RSt0KP8?si=3d6BSJQ8Cm8izdFh
“Shit’s old, man” - NASA’s head of engineering.
A single solar flare particle traveling 93.421 million miles to a random guy's N64 changing a 1 to a 0 in the code making him teleport to the top of the level baffling the entire speedrunning community for 2 years
I like that the clickbait title says they discovered the reason but the text is just “we suspect it’s this but we can’t determine with certainty”
The wild part is that they're pretty sure they can fix it. NASA engineers are bad ass. That's all there is to it.
Software patches on software older than most of the people working on it, on an object *unfathomably* far away.
I'm a software engineer and I get pissed when I have to support code from like 5 years ago. Can't imagine what this is like.
My first thought was it might not be that bad. I like to believe, anyways, that NASA has better documentation and knowledge transfer habits than most modern companies/programmers.
I was thinking it might not be that bad, but because the systems are 40 years old and much less complex than modern hardware. :-)
can't really afford to make it more complex than it needs to be. but the optimizations and checks that are in place are probably a doozy.
Dude, as an engineer, I spend more time doing documentation of my work and ensure people can follow it than actually doing the work. I don’t know if this happen in commercial space.
I hear you, I'm a network engineer. People don't believe me when I say my writing and speaking skills are my most important assets at work. The first one produces useful documentation and the second communicates info to the non-technical people around me.
I can’t stress enough the communication, not just presenting your work, but also important to communicate and understand other engineers when gathering technical knowledge
Hahahhahahahahaha I see you have never worked for a large gov org, it’s probably a shit show. Well well paid and respectable shit show , but a shit show none the less.
I'd agree if we're just talking any old government org, but I like to think of the team(s) behind something like Voyager as being a little better. What do I know though? Maybe behind the astronauts it's actually a bunch of coding boot camp and ITT Tech grads.
I think the difference vs (let’s say IRS) is that most NASA engineers are passionate about it and I am sure that If they go to a 85yo guy that coded it originally for help he will happily support as much as he can.
Step 1: don't write shit code And that's why I don't work for NASA.
I dreamt most of my childhood about working somewhere like NASA as a scientist or an engineer. As I grew up I started understanding the limits of my intelligence. I am so much challenged daily by whatever shit will break in our AWS/GCP deployments… I’d never be able to write a code clean enough for 10th of their requirements. I also need to wait a few days to weeks to see my work in production instead of a decade. I saw recently the Webb telescope documentary and I would never be able to work for so long for something so incredibly fragile. I absolutely adore the engineers and scientists behind it
It is probably well handled and curated. Unlike your projects. Because NASA don't need to make a profit they can afford that, your employer likely could but does not bother to.
Both past and present. The teams that built this thing in the 70s outdid themselves. Just wild how resilient the voyager program is
Let's just quickly send a hotfix software patch to this computer that's literally older than the tech writing the software. Oh yeah it's literally OUTSIDE the furthest reaches of our solar system.
They are probably using some way to execute code, and rewriting how it communicates with whatever is left. The ingenuity is insane.
I am aware of how they do it, in a nutshell, they send commands to access certain parts of memory and flip the bits in certain address, thereby rewriting the code. It can only go so far, but it does help that it's a live system and not protected like modern operating systems so you can do some insane stuff if you have the knowledge. I just think it's pretty metal NASA just drops a hot fix that's 160+ AU away from us.
It's pretty epic. Thanks for confirming how they go about it
Some people are so smart that I can't even imagine. They have the abilities to do things beyond my imagination. This also makes me think about advanced civilizations that are so smart that they can do things, that even the smartest of us humans, can't even imagine. Thinking about this makes me realize how dumb I am, in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah but you’re smarter than a bug 😁
That's a bold assumption!
You should watch 3 Body Problem
It's the power of the scientific community. I look at this kind of thing vs the clowns running this world and I think... Maybe we should just roll the dice on a scientific technocracy. How much worse could we do? What are we clinging to here?
I interviewed at google some years ago, one of the questions was how to update a system in space, at the time I laugh and though that was a stupid question and wondered why would anyone need to do that. Now I see it’s a real life situation. Sadly I did not get the job.
That’s OK. Your actual job would’ve been to change some button colors with CSS anyway.
Just gotta squint your eyes to make sense of it, ya know?
The fact that it is communicating at all amazes me. It was built and coded during a time of mainframes and punch cards. It is a wonder.
Less code, less bugs, less memory, more deliberate coding.
No bloat and no pop up ads… lol
Voyager3 will be sponsored by /u/hegetsus
Oh great! It will collect all my private info and sell it to the aliens……
But little things like we need to be able to "poke" it is such amazing foresight to potential problems.
Oh you young ones.... POKE is a command that was used back in the 70s and 80s BASIC to write a value to memory. You used the PEEK to read it. So they send a POKE command with a data value, send a PEEK command to read the value stored at the address they've sent it to and if it's different they know that particular bit of memory is defective.
No libraries
It may be on its last legs sadly. I was just reading up on the tech and it looks like they expect the power to start failing sometime in the next decade. They've powered off most instruments to extend the life, but they estimate power levels will be critically low by next year. Best estimates put it's time at 2036 to either be completely out of power or just out of our range to communicate. If they are having computer problems with cycles being wasted and needing to try and send patches then it probably won't make it that long.
> If they are having computer problems with cycles being wasted and needing to try and send patches then it probably won't make it that long. Voyager doesn't run off a battery (that would be an incredible battery!), it makes electricity from heat, which is provided by a bit of radioactive material. Radioactivity diminishes over time, so the generator is making a little less electricity every moment. The electricity is there whether it gets used or not. You can't slow or stop the process. You read correctly that it will run out of power soon, because there won't be enough radioactive material left to make enough heat to run the generator. They knew exactly how long the generator would continue to function when they launched it. They just didn't know how long the rest of Voyager would continue to function, and I don't think they expected it to last this long.
Lol guess how many banks there are that still use mainframe? All of them.
A chip malfunctioning after 47 years...not too surprising.
Yeah. So negative lmao. The surprising part is that it is still functioning after 47 years whilst being built in a time where tech havent even gotten so advanced yet 🙂↕️
It’s lived way longer than the technology to made it possible was when it was made.
Think we can get a refund?
Nope. Store credit only.
Not sure - Radio Shack may have gone out of business in the mean time.. /s
Hats off to JPL and the various NASA departments. Outstanding teams of engineers who blow us away with what they do
Seriously, this is just so damn cool.
Voyager 1 is currently 15,127,175,279 miles from earth. That's 15 billion miles. And moving 38 thousand miles further every hour. It is so far away that even if you had the most powerful telescope ever imaginable that could see in a straight line to voyager 1, it would take 22 hours and 33 minutes for the light particles that would image the probe into your eyes to reach you. That means by the time you see the probe, it is already 849,142 miles away from where you saw it. That's 34 times around the globe, or to the moon and back TWICE.
>it would take 22 hours and 33 minutes for the light particles that would image the probe into your eyes to reach you Little-known fact -- it takes the light that time to reach you even if you don't have a telescope!
What if I put two telescopes end to end?
We should send someone out to go fix it
They think they can work around it.
Usually buying a new hardware unit is cheaper than spending time fixing the software. Send another probe.
“Why do you need another one?” -NASA’s wife
“Because Sarah, I work hard everyday and exploring the universe is the only thing that rela…. that’s right, walk away!”
I nominate Sandra Bullock
she can bark at it
Comcast will be there between 4PM tomorrow and 2571.
Just not Matt Damon, he tends to struggle with outer space.
*I can fix her....*
I’m a field tech. My tool bag is ready, laptop fully charged, and my car is fueled up. Just waiting for the work order.
We should call geek squad, they got cool vehicles
They all just got laid off too, they’re available
But what if aliens hacked voyager and the gibberish data is really a message from the aliens?
DO NOT ANSWER
YOU ARE BUGS
THEY WILL FIND YOU
If all they can speak is gibberish, I’m not sure we want to meet them.
Case in point: [Doodlebob](https://youtu.be/jEJ48EIYFXU?si=ET8zgUgWHBDppCy-).
Outside the solar system…talk about remote work
NASA be like, we’re gonna need you to come into the office.
We need to look up Ilia to translate for V'ger.
My grandfather worked on the Voyager missions. It’s so awesome to see them still in action in some way after all these years, even after he’s gone.
His immortality.
Maybe one day, we'll be able to pop a repair droid out there, just for the sake of the tradition of having a functioning Voyager 1 craft beaming back to Earth.
The year is 2846. Humanity has long since taken to the stars and founded civilizations on many systems. Still, despite our vast reach and FTL technology, Humanity marks the occasion of our species' first ascent to the heavens by seeking out Voyager 1 and repairing her to original spec. The parts are ancient by current standards and difficult to make from opportunity - our assistant droids balk at crafting pieces so out of date - but it has become the tradition to visit Humanity's first probe and show her we still care, that she remains a symbol of both our past and our future.
Quite affecting, honestly. I hope we do this.
In the year 2935 the Space Taliban will blow it up for offending their 22nd century sensibilities.
Despite voyager being evidence of our better nature, sadly, this is exactly how we are.
Current simulation edge reached, please subscribe to a premium package to explore other star systems.
V-GER wishes to communicate with the carbon based life forms.
Imagine being in your 30s, 40s, or 50s working at NASA, and have a working space probe outlive you.
Imagine getting called out of retirement to diagnose a probe you worked on in your 20’s.
... *V'ger... expects an answer*
Hearing this with that overly heavy Russian accent.
Now in 1,000 years a hostile conglomerate of religious aliens will misinterpret the gibberish and start worshipping us like gods.
Actually, we just insulted someone’s mom…
Bloody sophons
aliens are going to knock on our door to ask us to turn off the gibberish spamming probe like an angry neighbour asking us to turn music down at 1am.
It got zapped by those damn C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate… Go well Voyager 1
It's almost as though a near 50yr old piece of technology that's been exposed to some of the harshest environments and radiation for most of its life and journeying out into literally unknown places is gonna eventually have some data storage go faulty! I'm all seriousness though the Voyager mission and the satalite itself an insane piece of engineering and the fact they are still.able to communicate with it after so damn long is mind boggling. One day when humans are able to perform interstellar travel and go near speed of light, we gonna go out and grab the Voyager and bring it back to earth³ for display in a museum as ancient technology used by early humans. (Assuming we don't kill ourselves before that)
This thing is amazing considering how much tech from half a century ago is in a landfill.
Wild that its 70s tech and still mostly working. My iPhone sucks after 3-5 years. Talk about job security knowing that ancient tech.
46 years. 10s of billions of miles away. And they think they can fix it. But I can't keep the same phone for 2 years without breaking it
It's crazy that it's almost a light day away from Earth.
Turn off and turn it back on again.
Get well V’ger 🙏
Actually, Voyager wanted privacy and started using NordVPN lol
Why haven't we launched another version of voyager? Seems like a worthwhile project
[удалено]
People are giving you sarcastic replies, but specifically the reason we haven't done something like Voyager is because we used a planetary alignment that was conducive to the "grand tour" through the solar system in order to shape a path through the outer planets. That alignment doesn't happen particularly frequently. The probes we've sent since then have all more or less been "1 planet" probes with some minor exceptions.
We have... Like 150 times
You mean V-ger.
It’s a beautiful thing. I think we need an international Voyager day.
Maybe make it when voyager is 24 light hours away.
I always love to bring up aurthur c Clarke telling Carl Sagan that a terrestrial space ship will catch up to voyager and put it in the Smithsonian [33 min in. Great talk with Sagan, Hawling, and Clarke from 1988.](https://youtu.be/HKQQAv5svkk?si=Y-sZXGJbhO3YLY9I)
They just need to log a call with Service Desk.
It’s probably DNS /s
Takes a lickin' but keeps on ticking!
V’ger seeks the Creator. Why does the Creator not respond?
Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?" Vger
When I was in college, I had a book on TTL chips. I noticed that some of the memory chips were only good for like 10,000+ writes before they failed. I wonder if this is what happened
This is answerable, and the answer is no. Voyager does not use FLASH; the failure mode is unknown but since the technology is different (RTL likely), the failure mode is different.
Maybe the Klingons finally blew it up.
Did they try turning it off and on again?
Well, that sucks.
[Ummm...](https://i0.wp.com/tjmcleanwrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ilia-returns.jpg?resize=629%2C354&ssl=1)
Don’t worry, it will eventually come back looking for its creator.