71–80 of 326 posts
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.
You are correct in that the Voyagers' launch window was unique.
Nit pick: gravity assist doesn't fundamentally rely on gravity. It extracts energy from planets' motion about the sun [1]. If we could somehow "bounce" a spacecraft off a planet's surface, it would impart momentum similar to that of a gravity assist. (In my opinion, it's a badly-named term.)
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/learn/basics-of-space-flight/primer...
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
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.
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)!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Computers_and_...
In 1994 JPL started working on the Remote Agent (RA), an autonomous spacecraft control system. RA was written entirely in Common Lisp despite unrelenting political pressure to move to C++. At one point an attempt was made to port one part of the system (the planner) to C++. This attempt had to be abandoned after a year. Based on this experience I think it's safe to say that if not for Lisp the Remote Agent would have failed.
We used four different Common Lisps in the course of the Remote Agent project: MCL, Allegro, Harlequin, and CLisp. These ran in various combinations on three different operating systems: MacOS, SunOS, and vxWorks. Harlequin was the Lisp that eventually flew on the spacecraft. Most of the ground development was done in MCL and Allegro. (CLisp was also ported to vxWorks, and probably would have been the flight Lisp but for the fact that it lacked threads.) We moved code effortlessly back and forth among these systems.
The Remote Agent software, running on a custom port of Harlequin Common Lisp, flew aboard Deep Space 1 (DS1), the first mission of NASA's New Millennium program. Remote Agent controlled DS1 for two days in May of 1999. During that time we were able to debug and fix a race condition that had not shown up during ground testing. (Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.)
The Remote Agent was subsequently named "NASA Software of the Year".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated Only the _documentation_ effort must be monumental.
Lets hope the _archival_ effort can match or in 50 years time we’ll have another one of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rock...