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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

#241

Post by brigadier132 »

slingnow wrote: post #229
simpaticoder wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Half a century of operation. The stability of society (specifically American, specifically California/Caltech/JPL/Pasadena) must also be marveled at. That's 2 or 3 generations of engineers and scientists that were trained well enough to actually get things done. This is a marvel of teaching, technical communication, and societal infrastructure. Notably, NASA/JPL has maintained its prestige and funding for that entir…

You're going to be blown away when you discover people have been reliably passing down information to future generations for many many centuries.

"Reliably" passing down information for future generations is a recent phenomenon. Just go and look at the history of mathematics and there were multiple periods where information was lost and rediscovered.

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

#242

Post by leptons »

seydor wrote: post #133

People jest the quality of our current software, but it's a real concern. The programmer of the '2023 update' is conditioned to bundle too much unneccesary bloat to the update that could eventually slow down and obsolete the device.

You don't know that. And this is one device that it really isn't possible to "bloat". Every byte and every bit in the voyager system needs absolute awareness. Bloat happens when programmers are unaware.

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

#243

Post by wutwutwat »

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…

Shared this with my son who really enjoyed reading that others share his optimism about our species. Very well said, thank you. You've impacted the outlook of a young man trying to figure out his place in the universe, who often times struggles with noticing the rare opportunity it is to be gold dust peppering a radio telescope.

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

#244

Post by johnnyAghands »

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 for summing up what I couldn't find the words for!

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

#245

Post by Rebelgecko »

simpaticoder wrote: post #198
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…

>Half a century of operation. The stability of society (specifically American, specifically California/Caltech/JPL/Pasadena) must also be marveled at. That's 2 or 3 generations of engineers and scientists that were trained well enough to actually get things done. This is a marvel of teaching, technical communication, and societal infrastructure. Notably, NASA/JPL has maintained its prestige and funding for that entir…

IIRC a good chunk of the voyager team is "first generation"

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

#246

Post by leptons »

randomdata wrote: post #132
saberdancer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In your scenario there also needs to only be 2 iPhones in existence and making more would cost significantly more than the first 2 did, and you would have to wait decades for them to do anything noteworthy that the first 2 units aren't doing right now.

Instead, iPhones are like the basic bitch of devices and are mass produced to the point they are ubiquitous and still 99.999% of use of the device is pointless drivel.

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

#247

Post by jwells89 »

hef19898 wrote: post #74
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #36

Earlier 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?

Most of the discontent I see aimed in NASA’s direction has little to do with their autonomous missions (which have been consistently excellent) and more to do with how Congress has misused NASA’s crewed efforts as yet another cash pipeline for traditional aerospace companies, which has for decades prevented crewed spaceflight from becoming progressively cheaper, more sustainable, and more common, instead keeping it artificially suspended in its mid-late 70s state.

I think it’s a massive error for Congress to have anything to do with any remotely technical decision. That should be at the sole discretion of NASA. Congress’ involvement should go no further than deciding what slice of the taxpayer funded pie they get yearly, and should not include the ability to attach strings of any kind to the funding.

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

#248

Post by lawlessone »

physicles wrote: post #82
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.

On some other YouTube channel, I recently saw a diagram where the width was 0.01 light-year. That’s “only” about 59 billion miles; surely we can’t be too far from the moment we can conceive of Voyager 1’s distance in light-years. Nope. At its current speed, we’ve got another 129 years. That’s an underestimate because the spacecraft will continue to decelerate a bit as it pulls farther away from the sun. That’s about…

>That’s about 60,000 years to the nearest star.

Assuming it doesn't hit a rock or eventually fall into something. How long could it physically last with cosmic rays etc hitting it? will it eventually just an unrecognizable metal lump?

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

#249

Post by SoftTalker »

ethanbond wrote: post #231
slingnow wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to be blown away when you discover people have been reliably passing down information to future generations for many many centuries.

"Reliably passing down information" includes a lot of stuff a lot less impressive than "reliably passing down the information required to keep operational a spacecraft mid-flight at the edge of our solar system."

Well the systems controlling Voyager are quite simple, being 1970s technology. Obscure by today's standards perhaps, but not terribly complicated. 70KB of memory, programmed in Fortran and probably some amount of machine or assembly code.

Edit: apparently, due to the post-Apollo budget environment in the 1970s, the Voyager program had to keep costs down so while some new systems were developed, they also reused technology from the Viking program, not even updating or enhancing it.

"The Voyager CCS and Viking CCS would ultimately have the same amount of memory (just under 70kB) despite the routines and programs for Voyager being much more complex. In-flight programming allowed for new routines and programs to be uploaded regularly in non-volatile memory and eliminated the need for large amounts of memory to be required onboard."

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-annive...

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

#250

Post by dotnet00 »

gosub100 wrote: post #235
hef19898 wrote: post #74

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 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?

the delay of James Webb 10+ years is the epitome of gov bloat and incompetence. Also the 6x or so budget bloat. Thats why NASA has a bad name.

JWST has at least justified itself with the excellent performance and better than expected predictions for its lifetime (since it is limited by the cooling and station-keeping fuel).

SLS has no such justifications forthcoming. It's too rough of a ride to launch any scientific probes on, it's too expensive for private launch, they can't make them fast enough to do more than 1 launch per year (without pouring more untold billions and decades into it), and the only reason it's even involved in Artemis is because Congress insists on it. Even putting Starship aside, between Falcon Heavy, F9, New Glenn, Vulcan, Neutron and maybe Ariane 6, the West has so much lift capacity available or coming online (mostly drastically cheaper than SLS) that SLS is kind of irrelevant.

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