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NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

space.com

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Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#11

Post by petterroea »

xingped wrote: post #6
dnw wrote: post #4

It would be fun to hand over these spacecrafts to a couple of frontier models to see what they can do with them. If I had the money I'd fund it :-)

...did you seriously just say that? These spacecraft were developed with increidble expertise and intentionality. Give it to a "frontier model" and they'll destroy it faster than you can blink.

"Oops, you are right. I shut down the spacecraft, and now it will never boot again. Here's how it happened:"

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#14

Post by magicalhippo »

dnw wrote: post #4

It would be fun to hand over these spacecrafts to a couple of frontier models to see what they can do with them. If I had the money I'd fund it :-)

There's not a lot to do. They have enough hydrazine left to keep them pointing back at earth until 2040 or so[1]. So you could perhaps make them point in different directions for a bit, but that is risky as if something goes wrong we might lose contact. And there wouldn't be much point, since there's not enough power to use any of the cameras or other fancy instruments.

[1]: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/36009

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#15

Post by sailingparrot »

dnw wrote: post #4

It would be fun to hand over these spacecrafts to a couple of frontier models to see what they can do with them. If I had the money I'd fund it :-)

Is this what AI psychosis looks like ? What are LLMs going to do? Flap the antenna at a specific frequency to achieve faster than light travel?

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#16

Post by stringfood »

jvanderbot wrote: post #2

I ran a few research tasks at JPL, small dollar studies. We'd often recruit part time work from engineers around the lab through informal networks, (instead of the official channels that segment by "specialization"). One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago).…

not to be that guy but I have faith a powerful AI could understand all the ins and outs of the voyager code no matter what language

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#17

Post by golem14 »

stringfood wrote: post #16
jvanderbot wrote: post #2

I ran a few research tasks at JPL, small dollar studies. We'd often recruit part time work from engineers around the lab through informal networks, (instead of the official channels that segment by "specialization"). One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago).…

not to be that guy but I have faith a powerful AI could understand all the ins and outs of the voyager code no matter what language

Not to be that other guy, but AI might take a few tries, and you really might not get a 2nd try with these probes.

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#18

Post by wanderingmind »

A slight tangent here is a technical deep dive on Voyager 1 fixing a memory corruption error in 2023 by hand 15 billion miles away. Blows my mind of the reverse engineering done to achieve this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#19

Post by gjkood »

Just the other day I heard about the heroic effort[0] to restore communication with Voyager 2 after they inadvertently changed the antenna to point in the wrong direction due to some planned manoeuvres.

Definitely worth a listen if you get the time.

For me personally, I feel this project is the greatest engineering effort in human history bringing together the work of Newton, Kepler, the mathematics of the celestial navigation, gravitational assist techniques[1], etc. necessary to keep a little probe on its route accurately over 50 years in space.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1191341035/nasa-voyager-2-spa...

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

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#20

Post by mrkpdl »

stringfood wrote: post #16
jvanderbot wrote: post #2

I ran a few research tasks at JPL, small dollar studies. We'd often recruit part time work from engineers around the lab through informal networks, (instead of the official channels that segment by "specialization"). One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago).…

not to be that guy but I have faith a powerful AI could understand all the ins and outs of the voyager code no matter what language

Based on what documentation?
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