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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

#131

Post by misja111 »

From Wikipedia:

> There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft, two of each kind, sometimes used for redundancy. They are proprietary, custom-built computers built from CMOS and TTL medium-scale CMOS integrated circuits and discrete components, mostly from the 7400 series of Texas Instruments.[34] Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K.

32K memory to manage such a complex device for 46 years .. Nowadays the size of an OS is measured in GB's.

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

#132

Post by randomdata »

saberdancer wrote: post #129
randomdata wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Apple would have made a lot more money if you spent the equivalent of Voyager 2's cost on your iPhone. It is just about money. Cheap out and buy a budget phone and you will also get budget support.

I think it's better to say - if your phone was 12 billion miles from Earth and used to send sensitive scientific data - it would get updates as well.

Not when you only paid on the order of $1,000 for it. For so little, nobody is going to bother to support your device for decades, no matter how near or far away it is from you or what you happen to be doing with it.

The original Voyager budget was $865 million (~$5 billion today), and has paid out even more for maintenance and operation since. Spend that much money on an iPhone and not only will updates be available for decades, but someone from Apple will come and personally install the updates for you.

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

#134

Post by jdblair »

If you want to learn about how the Voyager flight data system is designed, read Nasa's historical document Chapter 6: Distributed Computing On Board Voyager and Galileo [1].

The whole read is gripping, but the most interesting part for me is the section "Developing Voyager's Flight Data System Computer " describes the choice to use CMOS memory and DMA from instruments.

[1] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html

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

#135

Post by somenameforme »

hef19898 wrote: post #108
skissane wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Many of NASA’s problems aren’t the fault of NASA, they are the fault of Congress. NASA didn’t come up with SLS+Orion all by themselves, the high-level design was dictated to them by Congress and NASA was left with the job of fleshing out the details and making it all work…

So SpaceX wants NASA to be able to spend all those billions with them instead of a competitor? Shroud business move, that says nothing about capabilities. Just one question, what will be avaiable first, FalconHeavy and a fully certified Starship (which has to launch without blowing up for that), Tesla FSD or Tesla's humanoid robot? Regarding SLS, they launched successfully last year and aim for a manned launch in 202…

Falcon Heavy has been launching commercial, government, and military payloads successfully for years now. [1] I'd strongly encourage checking out their first successful test launch of it, from 5 years ago. [2] Skip to about 29 minutes in for the money shot. Still gives me goose bumps!

So let's compare the two! Falcon Heavy was developed with completely private funding, at a cost of ~$500 million. The prices of the launches are listed in Wiki. They start at $117 million, as NASA paid in 2023 to launch their Psyche craft. The SLS has been in development for more than a decade now, fully paid by the taxpayer, at a cost just about to break the $30 billion mark. The nominal cost per launch is still unknown but will almost certainly top a billion dollars. The last NASA administration gave an estimate of $800-$900 million per launch in 2019 dollars. And SLS cost estimates only go one way.

And what do you get for $30 billion, and then another billion per launch? Ideally up to almost twice the capacity of a Falcon Heavy. The reason people are so cool on the SLS is that it's already a very poor value against existing technologies. And will be completely obsolete by the time Starship comes to pass which should not only be able to launch for a fraction of the cost of Falcon Heavy (which is already a fraction of the cost of SLS), but also launch well over the ideal launch capacity of SLS.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Launches_and_payl...

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c

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

#136

Post by jdblair »

jdblair wrote: post #134

If you want to learn about how the Voyager flight data system is designed, read Nasa's historical document Chapter 6: Distributed Computing On Board Voyager and Galileo [1]. The whole read is gripping, but the most interesting part for me is the section "Developing Voyager's Flight Data System Computer " describes the choice to use CMOS memory and DMA from instruments. [1] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.htm…

It was a different world in 1975:

  After determining requirements, Wooddell examined possible hardware and software tradeoffs. In an insightful memorandum, John Morecroft explained the concept of "soft logic" as a complement to the "hard logic" in the Flight Data System44. Writing in 1975, when the actual flight software began to be prepared, Morecroft pointed out that the program for the computer was actually a soft representation of hard-wired circuits. Conceptually, the memo stands as an explanation of the essential meaning of firmware in general.

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

#138

Post by leokennis »

kaptainscarlet wrote: post #25

I hope this update doesn't come with ads and data collection to "improve my experience"

VoyagerOS Updated yesterday 529B

Bug fixes and improvements, watered the plants, took out the trash.

Keep VoyagerOS up to date to always have the best experience!

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

#139

Post by hef19898 »

somenameforme wrote: post #135
hef19898 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So SpaceX wants NASA to be able to spend all those billions with them instead of a competitor? Shroud business move, that says nothing about capabilities. Just one question, what will be avaiable first, FalconHeavy and a fully certified Starship (which has to launch without blowing up for that), Tesla FSD or Tesla's humanoid robot? Regarding SLS, they launched successfully last year and aim for a manned launch in 202…

Falcon Heavy has been launching commercial, government, and military payloads successfully for years now. [1] I'd strongly encourage checking out their first successful test launch of it, from 5 years ago. [2] Skip to about 29 minutes in for the money shot. Still gives me goose bumps! So let's compare the two! Falcon Heavy was developed with completely private funding, at a cost of ~$500 million. The prices of the la…

We do not have any reliable financials from SpaceX, just advertized launch costs and PR releases. SLS on the other hand has, as does e.g. Ariane-6, public budgets and a lot more bureaucracy.

For Starship to make things like SLS obsolete, it has to be available first. Until then, it is just pure speculation. Is SLS more expensive than Starship development wise? Yes. But it is not the goal of a government to be profitable, nor is it to hand technologocal monopolies to eratic billionaires. Supporting alternatives is always good, and it maintains know-how and technology at different companies, which is also a good thing.

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

#140

Post by xnorswap »

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.

"Every direction" isn't what you think it is.

Even if we had a voyager travelling the "opposite" direction, once outside the solar system they'd appear to be travelling at almost the same speed with respect to the orbit of the solar system around the milky way.

The solar system is estimated to orbit ~200km/sec around the centre of the milky way.

Even with a perfect ejection, at the estimated speed of Voyager you'd end up with one probe going ~180km and the other ~220km, which isn't a huge difference.

And that's without the fact that getting Voyager to that speed required some unique planetary alignment.

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