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NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

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Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#31

Post by qrybam »

This is incredible. Not just because of the engineering that went into such a long lived machine, but also because of the ingenuity of the teams that have looked after this mission and those currently working on it.

Half a century of operation. Bits of data, like gold dust, peppering our radio telescopes with telemetry from the edges of our protective solar shell, and beyond.

Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated, but the pushing of boundaries of our understanding is awe inspiring. It carries the symbolism of some of the best parts of humanity’s desire to explore.

This sort of news, at least for me, is an antidote to the darker side of our species. It reinvigorates my hope in what we can achieve when working together.

Thank you to NASA and the scientific community at large.

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#33

Post by Rallen89 »

withinboredom wrote: post #10
xvilka wrote: post #8

I hope they will publish firmware/source code at some point in the future. It would be definitely interesting to look into.

I suspect they can’t. It is quite possible security was not on anyone’s mind back then and the last thing they want are rouge signals from some amateur fucking up generations worth of work.

Sure if u have a 70 meter dish laying around and this is near peak cold War tensions so I'd say security was on people's minds then.

>Because of their distances, the Voyagers can only communicate through the largest 230-foot (70-meter) dish antennas in NASA's Deep Space Network, or by arraying multiple smaller antennas together to detect the faint signals coming from the spacecraft

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#35

Post by larschdk »

psunavy03 wrote: post #18
huytersd wrote: post #5

I don’t understand why we are not sending these off in every direction constantly. The price can’t possibly be that prohibitive considering what we can accomplish with 40 year old technology.

Because there are windows to visit certain planets, especially with modern rockets. You can't just point them in the direction of a planet and yeet them into space; there is physics involved.

We did yeet New Horizons at Pluto. It got an assist from Jupiter, but could have reached Pluto without, six years delayed.

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#36

Post by wannacboatmovie »

andyp-kw wrote: post #24

Were unit tests a thing back when the probes were built? I wonder how new engineers learn about the intricacies of such ancient tech, without breaking them.

Sadly the "megabytes of JavaScript to 'hello world'" culture of today could not even begin to comprehend how this even works

Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

#38

Post by robertlagrant »

nso wrote: post #23
imranhou wrote: post #19

This is simply dope! I know this comment doesn't add value, but still, Pluto is "only" 4.5 billion miles away from sun at its farthest point and it takes 247 years to loop around the sun.

Pretty sure you got one of those measurements horribly wrong

I'll have you know that commenter was units lead on the Mars Climate Orbiter[0] mission!

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

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