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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

#181

Post by randomdata »

jabradoodle wrote: post #147
randomdata wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple made more than 100 billion on iPhone sales in the first half of 2023 and the marginal cost of an update is essentially 0, so what your saying doesn't make sense.

And the vendors who supplied the Voyager program may have made quadrillions across the entire customer base for all we know. But there is no reason for a vendor to use the income from one customer to subsidize another.

If you only pay $1,000 for an iPhone, you are going to get $1,000 worth of support. Don't be such a cheapskate if you want greater service, I guess?

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

#182

Post by croes »

mardifoufs wrote: post #158
kstenerud wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet literally the entire world aside from United States, Liberia, and Myanmar is able to grasp it perfectly. So such a statement would either insinuate that Americans are genetically inferior somehow, or you're just culturally attuned to an outdated British system.

So genetically inferior that they are the only ones with a craft that is 4 Plutos away :)

NASA uses metric

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

#183

Post by 0xDEF »

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…

What is the most Lisp-like type safe language?

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

#185

Post by dmd »

shmde wrote: post #116
fuzzythinker wrote: post #47

To 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.

I don't know how to measure things in anything but capybaras.

https://www.jpost.com/science/space/article-761322#asteroid-...

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

#186

Post by chpatrick »

quietpain wrote: post #58
pantulis wrote: post #44

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...

The missing tapes are definitely one of the saddest engineering stories for me. Such an important moment in history and we just threw it away.

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

#187

Post by mardifoufs »

croes wrote: post #182
mardifoufs wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So genetically inferior that they are the only ones with a craft that is 4 Plutos away :)

NASA uses metric

NASA are still Americans. I'm not arguing about metric or imperial being better.

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

#188

Post by hdgbkd »

ykonstant wrote: post #173
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 tha…

We just "solve" the problem by training tens of thousands of dogs. Now we have a gigantic dog circus running 24x7. What's mysterious is no matter how many shocks and surprises ever growing complexity produces it doesn't collapse.

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

#189

Post by ilyt »

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!

Actually no, they were first to have code successfully run in (space dust) cloud for so long

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

#190

Post by ianlevesque »

palijer wrote: post #171
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 dwindl…

> 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.

This problem can be attacked in a couple of ways, one way is to increase compensation sure, but another is to make it possible to have healthcare and housing on the salary they do offer. The chasm between pay and cost of living is huge and growing.

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