Anyone else disappointed they didn't mention the actual number of bytes in the update?
NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
111–120 of 326 posts
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#112They 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!
Run it in the nebula!
I was gonna say "run it in the stars", but yours is funnier for some reason :-)
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#113Love the Voyagers story. Just get me thinking: Why there is not more missions like this ? It takes significant time to cross "somewhere there", every year one launch could not hurt ? Edit: *Obligatory video: "Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager" by Aaron Cummings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o Also here on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=voyager
Another constrained resource is communications: the Deep Space Network dishes are shared between all of the current NASA missions and already has rationing. So before upping the pace of new deep missions factor in the time for getting Congress to back expanding the DSN (not ludicrously expensive, but also not so sexy as launches, boots-on-the-moon, etc)
https://spacenews.com/increasing-demands-putting-pressure-on...
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#114I 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.
You can take a look at the New Horizons to get an idea of what a moderately capable trans-Neptunian probe costs today (~$700M). If you made several, economies of scale would of course lower marginal costs somewhat. But the money isn’t even the main bottleneck (although it absolutely is a huge one) – power is. Specifically, the RTG radioisotope generators that are our only reasonable way of powering things at distances beyond Jupiter. Synthesis of radionuclides (eg. Pu-238) suitable for RTG use was originally a nice side effect of nuclear weapons production, but these days availability is very low even though the DOE recently restarted production after a long pause.
In the 21st century NASA has launched exactly three RTG-powered missions: New Horizons (2006), Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity (2012), and Mars 2020/Perseverance. The next will be the (very awesome) Dragonfly mission to Titan, planned to launch in 2027. So given a cadence of roughly seven years, and one out of four missions targeting trans-Neptunian space, you could expect to launch an interstellar probe every 30 years or so, barring significant advances in power technology. The next one will most likely be a sorely-needed Uranus or Neptune flyby mission that would possibly launch in the mid to late 2030s.
There are maybe a dozen reasonable mission proposals submitted for every mission that actually ends up at the launch pad. The competition is fierce, and any proposal has to argue its return on investment incredibly convincingly to get selected for implementation. We now know many interesting Kuiper Belt objects that would definitely deserve a closer look – but we also know many other things that are much more accessible and would also deserve a closer look!
No amount of extra money would realistically allow NASA (or any space agency) to fly missions simply "because we might discover something" because there are always many, many other mission proposals in the pipeline with vastly better justification than merely "because we might discover something".
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly the "megabytes of JavaScript to 'hello world'" culture of today could not even begin to comprehend how this even works
It funny, usually people on HN diss NASA et all hard for being those big, inept governkent agencies, with SpaceX being so so mich better because SpaceX get SW"engineering". And then NASA does something like this, and all of sudden it so cool! Coupd it be that those orgs aren't even nearly as incompetent as people have a tendency to think?
Personally, I'd tend to give most credit for something like this to the era that created it. I mean building something that can be reasonably expected to operate and maintained in some of the most hostile conditions known to man, for half a century? It's just borderline magical. And NASA of that era did everything just perfectly, nailing all the gravity assists (obviously using computational/telemetry tech of the time), and more.
And that applies to everything from that era. We hadn't even put a man in orbit in 1962. 7 years later, we would be walking on the Moon!!! The degree of competence and capability of that era of NASA is something that I think is probably unmatched in the entire history of our species.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#116To put the 12B miles in an easier grasp, Pluto's average distance is 3.7B miles. So Voyager 2 is a hair under 3.3 Plutos away, and Voyager 1 at 15B miles is slightly over 4 Plutos away. Another point of reference is the heliosphere, at 100AU. 1AU (earth to Sun) is 93M miles, so the heliosphere is around 2.5 Plutos away.
Muricans will use anything but metric.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> use their gravitational influence to skip to the next one 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]…
Good point, it’s a bit like calling hitting a baseball with a bat an “electric assist”. It’s not wrong, it’s just not very helpful.
It’s also a good illustration of why we call some forces strong and others weak.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#118To put the 12B miles in an easier grasp, Pluto's average distance is 3.7B miles. So Voyager 2 is a hair under 3.3 Plutos away, and Voyager 1 at 15B miles is slightly over 4 Plutos away. Another point of reference is the heliosphere, at 100AU. 1AU (earth to Sun) is 93M miles, so the heliosphere is around 2.5 Plutos away.
Muricans will use anything but metric.
Metric doesn't let people grasp large numbers.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly the "megabytes of JavaScript to 'hello world'" culture of today could not even begin to comprehend how this even works
It funny, usually people on HN diss NASA et all hard for being those big, inept governkent agencies, with SpaceX being so so mich better because SpaceX get SW"engineering". And then NASA does something like this, and all of sudden it so cool! Coupd it be that those orgs aren't even nearly as incompetent as people have a tendency to think?
>It funny, usually people on HN [insert tribal "sports team" logic], and then all of sudden [actual technology discussion]
I sure hope this doesn't come to be considered 'usual' on HN.
If so, it just becomes a race to the bottom.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt that giraffes are metric. But maybe they are some obscure SI unit? Fun fact. 1 billion km is almost 1.1 light hours. 1 billion miles is almost 1.5 light hours with less error margin. So you can easily calculate that Voyager 2 is about 18 light hours from Earth.
So hwo it "just" took 18 hours for the update to complete, according to the article? Shouldn't be at very least 36 hours, given that you need feedback from Voyager?
It took 18 hours to transfer the data to the probe.
According to the article the update hasn't been activated yet but they are still checking if everything is okay.
> NASA scientists are carrying out a readout of the AACS memory to ensure that it is in the right place for the update. If there aren’t any issues, it will trigger the Voyager 2 update on October 28.