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NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
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Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#182[flagged]
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#183[flagged]
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#184[flagged]
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
rip centennial bulb I hope the 3rd installment comes out someday. Seems to be on permanent hiatus.
That bulb in Livermore is still lit. Or are you talking about something else?
Referencing 17776 by Jon Bois when the bulb (spoiler alert?) meets its demise. A tragic day for sentient satellites and immortal football fans alike.
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#186Incredible to see the same faces in that photo as in the excellent documentary: https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/ Voyager might make it to 2027.
What a sweet film. Thank you for the link. This whole time when I heard about work on the Voyager mission I assumed there was a larger team, with fewer single points of failure.
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average vape has more processing power than Voyager, and the iPhone is orders of magnitude more complex. With that said, it takes skilled engineers to squeeze perfectly crafted code into such a tiny platform from the 70s.
I understand what you're getting at, but the 'average' vape pen is essentially a disposable battery and temperature sensor with no additional inputs or features. After reading some details about the Voyager, I have my doubts that a disposable vape has more computation power [1]. Maybe the higher end devices with programable displays and temperature settings? [1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/voyagers-1-and-2-take…
A Pinecil (digital soldering pen) is probably a better example. BL706 MCU,
"a low-power, high-performance IoT chip that supports BLE/Zigbee wireless networking, ...
BL702 has built-in RISC-V 32-bit single-core processor with FPU, the clock frequency can reach 144MHz, has 132KB RAM / 192KB ROM / 1Kb eFuse storage resources, supports external Flash, and optional embedded pSRAM."
The Voyager had a custom-designed processor (well, several) that were basically computers made out of basic logic chips (74xx series); see details here https://www.eejournal.com/article/voyagers-1-and-2-take-embe...
Either way, it's clear that we (well, JPL) can build extremely powerful and sophisticated systems with relatively small computers, suggesting that resource constraints can sometimes be a source of stability and creativity.
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#188[dead]
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#189Voyager has been an inspiration for generations of engineers.
Bless you all that worked on it. Thank you.
Recently I designed in a Voyager inspired secret Easter egg into the surgical robot I designed. I put a gold (plated) plate with everyone's signature engraved on it. Gave everyone one as a surprise Christmas gift.
Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
#190"The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory."
Just another proof that we may have gained a lot, but also lost something in our pursuit of modernity: on modern systems direct memory access is discouraged if not prevented by the underlying OSes, and this hack would not have been possible.