Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bgr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 326 posts

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

#281

Post by tivert »

Rallen89 wrote: post #33
withinboredom wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they can’t. It is quite possible security was not on anyone’s mind back then and the last thing they want are rouge signals from some amateur fucking up generations worth of work.

Sure if u have a 70 meter dish laying around and this is near peak cold War tensions so I'd say security was on people's minds then. >Because of their distances, the Voyagers can only communicate through the largest 230-foot (70-meter) dish antennas in NASA's Deep Space Network, or by arraying multiple smaller antennas together to detect the faint signals coming from the spacecraft

> I suspect they can’t. It is quite possible security was not on anyone’s mind back then and the last thing they want are rouge signals from some amateur fucking up generations worth of work.

> Sure if u have a 70 meter dish laying around and this is near peak cold War tensions so I'd say security was on people's minds then.

Don't just think it's amateurs, nation states aren't above mischief either. If Russia has one of those laying around, there's a reasonably high chance they'd use it to send a big "fuck you" to America in today's geopolitical climate (e.g. command each Voyager to burn all its remaining fuel to spin on an axis perpendicular to Earth.

Edit: and it looks like Russia does have a dish like that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevpatoria_RT-70_radio_telesco...:

> The Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope (P-2500, RT-70) is an RT-70 radio telescope and planetary radar at the Center for Deep Space Communications, Yevpatoria, Crimea. ... It has an advantage in comparison with other large radio telescopes in the fact that the complex includes powerful transmitters that allow active space experiments.

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

#282

Post by noaoh »

0xDEF wrote: post #183
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?

Carp is a statically-typed Lisp: https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp

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

#283

Post by pipe01 »

js2 wrote: post #236

How do either of these still have any propellent left? If they were originally scheduled to last only four years, how did they manage to get launched with enough propellent to last decades and billions of miles past their original mission? According to this article from 2003, the probes have enough hydrazine to last until 2034 and 2040: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/11/what-voyager-1-u... Edit: this "Voyag…

They usually have the mindset of "let's put enough propellant so that even if our estimates are orders of magnitude off the mission will live long enough", and normally their estimates are correct so they end up with tons of fuel

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

#284

Post by skissane »

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…

> But it is not the goal of a government to be profitable, nor is it to hand technologocal monopolies to eratic billionaires.

So instead it should award contracts - without any competition even - to big established aerospace firms such as Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and Aerojet? SpaceX, by contrast, won its most important NASA contracts (ISS cargo and crew, HLS) by open competition.

> Supporting alternatives is always good, and it maintains know-how and technology at different companies, which is also a good thing.

If NASA wanted to do that, they would have spread the SLS/Orion money around newer and more innovative players (not just SpaceX-Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Axiom, Relativity, etc), rather than giving billions to Boeing/Lockheed/Aerojet/etc to keep alive technologies from the 1970s. Of course, Congress wouldn’t let NASA do that

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

#285

Post by KyleBerezin »

js2 wrote: post #236

How do either of these still have any propellent left? If they were originally scheduled to last only four years, how did they manage to get launched with enough propellent to last decades and billions of miles past their original mission? According to this article from 2003, the probes have enough hydrazine to last until 2034 and 2040: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/11/what-voyager-1-u... Edit: this "Voyag…

I believe the mission length is just how long it takes to complete the mission goals. It isn't necessarily an estimation of the spacecraft's lifespan.

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

#286

Post by throwaway888abc »

psunavy03 wrote: post #17
throwaway888abc wrote: post #4

Love 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

Because the program literally depended on the planets aligning a certain way that they won't align again until about 2150. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#History

Make sense, thanks, fuel, gravity, not easy feat

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

#287

Post by somenameforme »

kylecordes wrote: post #260
somenameforme wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship's a red herring. The SLS is already so far behind the game (before even being finished) that it lacks any rational argument even against the Falcon Heavy, which has been in service for years. And nobody's being handed monopolies. Government space contracts have a competitive bidding process. If Boeing/Lockheed, Blue Origin, or any of the other less known aerospace startups can come up with something that can…

Assuming Starship succeeds, hopefully at that point other players will adopt the basic design, iterate and improve, then forcefully compete. I'm still surprised that, all these years after Falcon 9 obviously works, there isn't a "clone" on the market. (I am aware there are couple of small "new space" companies working on something similar.)

Agreed. I think you can even take it further than other new small space companies. Boeing and China would both absolutely love to replicate SpaceX's tech, and both have (relative to SpaceX) practically unlimited resources to do so, yet both are still nowhere near them yet, and not for lack of trying.

From an outsider's perspective it's quite difficult to understand what the big barrier is.

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

#288

Post by jzwinck »

HappyDaoDude wrote: post #11
withinboredom wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they can’t. It is quite possible security was not on anyone’s mind back then and the last thing they want are rouge signals from some amateur fucking up generations worth of work.

That is true now, but maybe once the probes go completely dead with no chance of revival and there is no risk of tampering?

NASA have a history of reusing bits and pieces when they develop new vehicles and systems. If someone learns how to control Voyager there may not be much left to figure out if they want to control New Horizons etc.

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

#289

Post by mattkrause »

rrdharan wrote: post #200
zrail wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI and universal healthcare would enable _so_ many people to take risks that they can't today. We would see an explosion in the arts, in fundamental science, in passion projects like this. It would be absolutely incredible. Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money and all they would do is buy drugs. And that's why we can't have nice things.

Is this about the US specifically? There are many countries with universal healthcare and a decent social safety net (Scandinavia comes to mind). Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them?

Sweden and Norway have about 50 Nobel Laureates between them out of 15M people.

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

#290

Post by xattt »

tivert wrote: post #277
xattt wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start getting the probes designed now.

> Start getting the probes designed now. That makes absolutely no sense. Even someone who thinks technological progress will slow greatly in the future would acknowledge that something designed today will likely be obsolete and unbuildable in 127 years . I mean, probably *every* *single* electronic component in a design made today will almost certainly have been EOL for over a century by the time 2150 rolls around.

I say it in jest, but I am speaking to the experience of the JWST. Initial designs were proposed starting in 1996 and didn’t get completed until mid-2010s after many, many delays.

It would be no surprise to anyone to say the 2150 probes will have technologies that haven’t been invented yet, and won’t for some time.

Post reply on HN