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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
371–380 of 649 posts
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#372One of my favorite tech legends is that apparently Voyager 1 launched with a Viterbi encoder, even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it. After a number of years Moore's Law caught up and they remotely switched over to Viterbi for more efficient transmissions.
I don’t know how well it holds today but for some time it was known that running certain computations on existing hardware would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running when available.
I wonder if this same law applies to distance satellites like Voyager get away from earth. Like we sent out voyager 46 years ago, but in 100 years, we will send out another satellite that will very quickly catch up to Voyager and outpace it
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know how well it holds today but for some time it was known that running certain computations on existing hardware would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running when available.
My life archive is available to my heirs and successors as long as they know the LUKS password for any of the numerous storage devices I leave behind. It’s risky though — the passwords aren’t known to them yet and one logistical slip up means the disk may be unusable. That is, however, until some point in the future when they will have a computer powerful enough to just break the key and feast upon my cat photos, tax…
Using what kind of media?
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#374Maybe our simulation has not been implemented so robustly at that distance...
The simulation is fine, we just hit the 'Truman sphere' surrounding the solar system.
The Crystal Spheres by David Brin - https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-crystal-spher...
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#375> Voyager 1 is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object from Earth.
> farthest man-made object that we know about and actively track
It's almost certainly the farthest one, period. Voyager utilized multiple "gravity slingshots" to accelerate to a vastly faster velocity than we could achieve with rockets alone.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry but you're still wrong. You're assuming the spacecraft isn't receiving the commands. You don't know that. Nobody really does. All that is necessary for this to be "communication" is for the transmitter to send and the receiver to receive, and the receiver may well be working but the transmitter on the spacecraft may not be working, making that scenario one-way communication . It takes far less power to receive…
> You're assuming the spacecraft isn't receiving the commands. I didn't say that. The article even mentions that they feel the spacecraft is receiving and processing the commands. There's just no response. The article title and intro are correct. For all intents and purposes, the spacecraft has stopped communicating. Broke down, used in the intro, is better than stopped. Discussing this is pedantic and pointless, whi…
>The article even mentions that they feel the spacecraft is receiving and processing the commands. There's just no response.
That is by definition "one way communication".
You're saying it's not communication, but it absolutely is. I'm not sure why you can't accept that.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#377A less alarmist and clickbait article can be found here: https://www.popsci.com/science/voyager-computer-issue/ NASA press release here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-... TL;DR - Voyager is sending back bad data, they're working on it.
Bad data or alien-inputted data?
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#378Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
The notion that encoding/transmitting could be simpler than decoding/receiving is interesting. It reminds me of the way optical drives for many years could write at, say, 48x but read at 8x, such that the majority of time spent was the verification step (if enabled) rather than the burn step. Just speculating, I assume it's because of things like error correction, filtering out noise/degradation. Producing the extra…
CD drive speeds were written like 48/8/8, which stands for 48x for reading, 8x for writing CD-Rs, and 8x for re-writing CD-RWs.
I'd always assumed that was due to differences in power levels needed for reading versus writing, and because writing onto disc is more error prone at higher speeds. Not necessarily anything to do with a difference in the algorithm for encoding versus decoding the bits on the disc itself.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#380I always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we were able to send a space probe, designed and built to be so robust that it's still doing its thing and sending us postcards after 46 years(!!!) of flying away from us in an extremely harmful environment, while we still fuck simple stuff up back home.
That was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.
Even if your cynical doom porn is true you’re wrong because both of those people, 1 in particular, are pushing space exploration forward.