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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

#171

Post by palijer »

qrybam wrote: 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…

This is a great read digging into the team that I loved. I wonder how many of the core team are still there.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engine...

>Over decades, the crew members who have remained have forgone promotions, the lure of nearby Silicon Valley and, more recently, retirement, to stay with the spacecraft. NASA funding, which peaked during the Apollo program in the 1960s, has dwindled, making it next to impossible to recruit young computer-science majors away from the likes of Google and Facebook.

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

#173

Post by ykonstant »

coldtea wrote: post #78

Before: 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 wo…

There's some pretty depressing stories in the second half of that article. But more interestingly, the author articulates beautifully one of the main reasons I chose pure mathematics over a programmer career in the late 90s:

"One of the reasons I stayed at JPL for twelve years was that I was appalled at what the software industry had become. The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components. The "interface specification" for these "components" usually involves a list of tools in which an engineer has received "training." (I really detest the use of the word "training" in relation to professional activities. Training is what you do to dogs. What you should be doing with people is educating them, not training them. There is a big, big difference.)"

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

#174

Post by lmm »

hef19898 wrote: post #139
somenameforme wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 profita…

> 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.

We know how much SLS and Ariane 6 have spent, but that's not any kind of reliable indicator of how much they're going to cost.

> For Starship to make things like SLS obsolete, it has to be available first. Until then, it is just pure speculation.

Only if SLS is ever going to be available. If Starship is further along in development, that's pretty suggestive.

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

#175

Post by [deleted] »

flkenosad wrote: post #161
jdblair wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Damn, that's cool. Do you have a link to the whole document?

[deleted]

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

#176

Post by jdblair »

flkenosad wrote: post #161
jdblair wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Damn, that's cool. Do you have a link to the whole document?

To the memorandum? No! That would be fun to track down.

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

#177

Post by dctoedt »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72
samtho wrote: post #64

Earlier 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]…

> If we could somehow "bounce" a spacecraft off a planet's surface, it would impart momentum similar to that of a gravity assist.

When my kids were little, I showed them by holding a basketball in one hand and a tennis ball in the other, with the tennis ball on top of and touching the basketball. When I dropped them simultaneously, they fell together and bounced off the driveway — and the tennis ball took off like a rocket (no pun intended).

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

#178

Post by icepat »

rich_sasha wrote: post #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!

I think whatever they're running is being run far beyond our cloud infrastructure at this point. That's rather high level stuff, but this is billions of miles higher level than that.

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

#180

Post by 7373737373 »

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.

What about electrical propulsion methods?
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