Message sent back was "Is this all I am? Is there nothing more?"
Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
101–110 of 121 posts
Re: Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you say is just common sense but as you can see from the downvotes, average people do not like smart people. And the exact same thing happened before the launch, I bet. But the exceptional engineer was simply “downvoted”. Things are tested all the time in factories. For how long? Till destruction.
Ah, but of course you are one of The Smart People whereas we plebians (and the NASA scientists who designed and launched the probe) are merely average.
Thank you! now you get it!
Re: Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you say is just common sense but as you can see from the downvotes, average people do not like smart people. And the exact same thing happened before the launch, I bet. But the exceptional engineer was simply “downvoted”. Things are tested all the time in factories. For how long? Till destruction.
One of the standard examples of common sense is “everything that goes up must come down”. When it comes to space missions, common sense starts bad and rapidly gets worse — there is no down, there is no “now”, metals can contact-weld without any supply of energy, exposed fluids boil until they freeze, radiation pressure is relevant, ionising radiation doses can be enough to break things, impact damage is radically dif…
Is that your justification for not testing the actuator? Space is hard, let's not test things?
Re: Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
#104I was just reading the pale blue dot and he mentions that Voyager 2’s scan platform jammed after its encounter with Saturn. Voyager 2 emerged from behind Saturn (as seen from the Earth) in August 1981. The scan platform had been moving feverishly—pointing here and there among the rings, moons, and the planet itself during the all-too-brief moments of close approach. Suddenly, the platform jammed. A stuck scan platfor…
It's not 'hacking' it's engineering.
Re: Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
#105Lets imagine... hypothetically [1] that we could design a new kind of space oriented machines, sort of a "spatial server" or a "telephone repeater", that could be left in Pluto (or an asteroid, or orbiting Saturn, whatever...), and be designed to take this weak signals, amplify it, and resend it to the earth Would this help to increase the range of what discover can report and... hum, discover? Would help us to have…
Its useless. Most of the time Earth is closer to the Voyager spacecraft than Pluto (or Saturn or...) is! In addition, we can build and maintain much better equipment here on Earth than we can ship to Pluto. If you wanted to do this "for real", the better option is to send a train of repeaters after the Voyager spacecraft in roughly the same flightpath. More effective, and vastly easier.
Yes but that would need a similar planetary alignment I assume. Could a repeater send orders to voyager too?
Re: Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has become commonplace to solve hardware problems with software. But many times it is not for heroic reasons, it's because hardware is cost-reduced.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that at all. On the surface of this planet software is used to simulate hardware as it's much quicker to iterate on a design. In space, however, you can only run the hardware in it's destined environment once. Software is critical to the design process regardless of the HW costs.
Intel has patched hardware flaws using microcode updates before.
Re: Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
#107I was just reading the pale blue dot and he mentions that Voyager 2’s scan platform jammed after its encounter with Saturn. Voyager 2 emerged from behind Saturn (as seen from the Earth) in August 1981. The scan platform had been moving feverishly—pointing here and there among the rings, moons, and the planet itself during the all-too-brief moments of close approach. Suddenly, the platform jammed. A stuck scan platfor…
That the difference between actual engineers and software engineers.
Re: Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the standard examples of common sense is “everything that goes up must come down”. When it comes to space missions, common sense starts bad and rapidly gets worse — there is no down, there is no “now”, metals can contact-weld without any supply of energy, exposed fluids boil until they freeze, radiation pressure is relevant, ionising radiation doses can be enough to break things, impact damage is radically dif…
Is that your justification for not testing the actuator? Space is hard, let's not test things?
If you want to launch on the Grand Tour, your launch options are the 1970s and the 2140s.
You hit the date, you test what you can, within that constraint.
(They were also heavily budget limited, and I’m sure everyone here has an example of a project which became more expensive because someone decided they “couldn’t afford testing”).
Even then, even despite people who probably have PhDs in specific engineering topics I can’t even name, half the time you can’t even tell what’s important to test vs “it’s common sense this will work fine for a thousand cycles” — hence the long list of missions which failed catastrophically.
It is rocket science.
Re: Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
#109Makes me wonder about the effort put into the design of it's longevity. It must be an awesome feeling if you worked on it and so many years later there's still tangible value being extracted from it
Re: Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have thought they would run every part until it died so they know roughly what it's lifespan is. It's good if the parts lifespan is twice as long as you need. However, it's even better if you could make it four times the amount you think you need, as long as it isn't horribly expensive. I would tend to assume they've thought of that though, and stuck with this part for reasons. Maybe there werent other space-…
I don't think any of us are in a position to be too critical of the engineering done for the Voyager probes. The number of machines running continuously for longer than I've been alive with no maintenance is pretty short; the number of them out past the orbit of Pluto even smaller.
This is actually a fairly egregious oversight, but it is good to know they fixed it.