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NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

blogs.nasa.gov

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Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The Google Pixel 8 series receives 7 years of updates. And unlike Apple they are upfront about it, which is important. Maybe your iPhone gets 8 years of updates, maybe 6 noone knows.

I'm not sure why anyone would take Google seriously when it comes to sticking to their word, but Google is merely promising to deliver in the future what Apple has already been doing in the past, since that iPhone SE is already in it's eighth year of support.

Remember Google promising to never link your advertising profile with the other data they had about you when they bought DoubleClick?

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#283
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when we're a true interstellar species If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics. Maybe we don't need to go anywhere at all. Maybe we [1] have all we need right here to become literal gods. [1] Our digital descendants. Humans are very much fit to the gas e…

> If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics. I grant that. But why would that keep us from pressing on? If we have more resources in general, we will also have more resources for interstellar adventures.

I'm sure we will send interstellar probes of some sort. But I think that assuming we'll want to send lots of entities vast distances in space and time might be a lot like thinking we'll have flying cars.

We already have quite a lot to exploit in the region around us.

We assume we understand our future wants, needs, costs, and capabilities. (Granted, any future thinking is also subject to this, including my own.)

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#285
post #268

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Ah yes, the first Michael Crichton novel I read - and also the book that first introduced me to binary code ( https://imgur.com/N4IjIYq )! And after watching (and then reading) Jurassic Park some 10 years later, it took a while until I realized that it was from the same author...

Yes, I too had the same disparity in recognizing the author as a young 'un, reading CONGO and SPHERE and so on .. Mr. Crichton sure had his finger on the pulse of the technological world we live in. What a wild series of stories he has created .. he was my favourite author until Messrs. Stephenson and Gibson came along .. Staying on subject, I wonder if we will see a new adaptation of ANDROMEDA STRAIN some time. As a…

There was a mini-series, starring Benjamin Bratt, about fifteen years ago.

Wasn't really great, but not bad, either. Just didn't have the impact of the 1970s movie.

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#286
post #187

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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 proces…

>The Voyager had a custom-designed processor (well, several) that were basically computers made out of basic logic chips (74xx series); This was not unusual at the time: many early arcade games were made exactly the same way. They've even been emulated by the MAME project.

yep, I had fun watching the Ben Eater videos where he builds a retrocomputer out of them. I even bought some of the chips to build a simple 4-bit counter with up/down buttons. It was a real revelation to understand that concept, and I ended up looking at an Apple I motherboard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#/media/File:CopsonAppl...) and noticed the regular array of 74xx chips connected by some elegantly laid-out wires.

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[SPOILER ALERT] It was the surprise ending for the first Star Trek film... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur...

That was Voyager 6, a fictional probe based on the real life probes of the same name. Earth probe gone bad is a common trope in Sci-Fi. Star Trek alone has a few episodes: - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Friendship_1 Also the Doomsday machine was a very different type of probe to V’ger https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Doomsday_Machine_(e...

Don't forget the Venus-bound "Death Probe" that got loose on earth in the 6 Million Dollar Man. https://bionic.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Probe

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#289
I wonder if a "modern" probe from 2024 could ever have a similar lifespan.

With systems hundred times more complex and build by a NASA that is a fraction of what it was 50 years ago, i guess a modern day Voyager will not even make it to the edge, let alone continue to function.

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