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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

#61
They are doing it all wrong. Who runs on-prem hardware these days??? They should put it all in the cloud, they can replicate and have many instances of virtual Voyagers, not the measly 2. CDN should help with latency too, I hear their latency is measured in many hours, and is getting worse every day! Also, software update, big deal - use CI/CD!

They probably don't have a Kanban board either... Dinosaurs!

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

#62
post #28

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.

Pluto is 3.7 billion miles away, not "light years". New Horizons probe wouldn't have taken "only" 11 years to reach Pluto otherwise.

Yup, effect of late night posting.

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

#64
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.

The only reason why we got these probes as far and as fast as we did was because we were able to fly by each planet and use their gravitational influence to skip to the next one, increasing velocity after each slingshot.

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

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equivalent of about 4 billion dollars in modern day money for both of them. That, plus waiting for some very opportune launch times so that we can gravity boost off of everything.

Those gravitational boosts are vital. The closest in speed so far would be 'New Horizons'. But even then NH is going at 14.5KM/sec compared with Voyagers 18KM/sec. There are no probes currently that would catch up to Voyager.

18km/s is almost understated in terms of speed, so I looked it up to more familiar measures of speed: 65,000kph or 40,000mph. The only thing I really learned here was how even in the thousands of miles or km per hour, it’s just inconceivable how fast that is. Km per second was a better measure after all.

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

#66
post #31

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 som…

Also the fact that this CPU is still running at all, after such long time in such hostile environment (radiation, temperatures)!

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

#68

They are doing it all wrong. Who runs on-prem hardware these days??? They should put it all in the cloud, they can replicate and have many instances of virtual Voyagers, not the measly 2. CDN should help with latency too, I hear their latency is measured in many hours, and is getting worse every day! Also, software update, big deal - use CI/CD! They probably don't have a Kanban board either... Dinosaurs!

I both love and hate it at the same time, well done.

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

#69

They are doing it all wrong. Who runs on-prem hardware these days??? They should put it all in the cloud, they can replicate and have many instances of virtual Voyagers, not the measly 2. CDN should help with latency too, I hear their latency is measured in many hours, and is getting worse every day! Also, software update, big deal - use CI/CD! They probably don't have a Kanban board either... Dinosaurs!

Their latest patch was actually converting the entire app to use npm. Let's hope the poor probe has enough memory.

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

#70

They are doing it all wrong. Who runs on-prem hardware these days??? They should put it all in the cloud, they can replicate and have many instances of virtual Voyagers, not the measly 2. CDN should help with latency too, I hear their latency is measured in many hours, and is getting worse every day! Also, software update, big deal - use CI/CD! They probably don't have a Kanban board either... Dinosaurs!

They are hard at work putting it in the Oort cloud.
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