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NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

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Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

#31

Post by GuB-42 »

piokoch wrote: post #7

Voyagers are the greatest technical achievement of human kind. Keeping in the space a piece of hardware run by a computer with power of today's car keys, in the hostile environment, outside freaking solar system is something that is the most amazing thing we have witnessed so far. Kudos to all the people who made it happen and kept going this project, we owe them, as a humanity, really a lot. Voyagers will keep flyin…

> Voyagers will keep flying across Milky Way, maybe they will last longer the the Earth itself

Will they? Good thing I am tired and going to sleep right now, you almost nerd-sniped me. What will happen on the scale of millions to billions of years? Will it collide with something? Will it be slowly eroded by particles? Will it lose material by outgasing?

Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

#32

Post by krisoft »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #15
gzer0 wrote: post #6

Every time this topic comes up on HN, I always like to remind readers about the following: One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may liv…

The Golden Records [1] seem like astonishing, singular undertakings to me. Like the Svalbard seed bank, or the LHC, or the Prado. Their existence inspires me because they remind me of what we're capable of. The book Murmours of Earth by Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and Ann Druyan is an interesting commentary on the ideas and choices behind the production of the Golden Records. Published in 1978, but there are copies avai…

Genuine question: what is so great about the Golden Record?

I understand the Svalbard seed bank. That can come very handy in a bad situation. May we never need it. I have visited the LHC and it is seriously impressive. Works in the Prado are amazing.

But the Golden Record feel just like someone made a mixtape and then chucked it far away. The music on it of course is great. But will anyone ever find it? And even if anyone ever finds it, will they have the anatomy to listen to it? If we received a similar record could we do anything with it?

For example the recorded greatings. A few sentences in many languages. There is something there. Presumably an interested alien could use it kind of like a Rosetta Stone to learn the structure of our languages. But for that to realistically work they would need a lot more recording in each language and the speakers should be saying the same thing!

Similarly the “brain recording”. An hour long recording, “compressed” somehow and then bandwidth gated so it can be etched into a disk. How is that supposed to contain any usefull information? It is like you want to transmit the content of a book, so you take a blurry underexposed image of the book’s spine as it is reflected in a foggy mirror. Even if the aliens are brilliant there is not much they can do with that “brain recording”.

The whole thing is so vibes based, but on the rational level it doesn’t add up to much.

Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

#33

Post by gzer0 »

krisoft wrote: post #32
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Golden Records [1] seem like astonishing, singular undertakings to me. Like the Svalbard seed bank, or the LHC, or the Prado. Their existence inspires me because they remind me of what we're capable of. The book Murmours of Earth by Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and Ann Druyan is an interesting commentary on the ideas and choices behind the production of the Golden Records. Published in 1978, but there are copies avai…

Genuine question: what is so great about the Golden Record? I understand the Svalbard seed bank. That can come very handy in a bad situation. May we never need it. I have visited the LHC and it is seriously impressive. Works in the Prado are amazing. But the Golden Record feel just like someone made a mixtape and then chucked it far away. The music on it of course is great. But will anyone ever find it? And even if a…

Your skepticism about the Golden Record is understandable, but its value goes beyond mere practicality—it's a powerful symbol of humanity's hopes, dreams, and curiosity.

Sure, the odds of another civilization discovering and fully decoding it are slim. But the Record was never simply meant as a practical tool, like the Svalbard seed bank or the LHC. Instead, it's an intentional gesture of optimism, an attempt to capture and communicate the essence of who we are at this unique moment in our history.

Importantly, the Golden Record was carefully designed using universal scientific principles—binary notation, hydrogen atom properties, and pulsar maps—ensuring that any intelligent civilization might realistically decode it. The instructions etched onto its cover rely on fundamental concepts universally understandable across the cosmos.

The greetings, music, and even brainwave recordings aren't strict instructions but rather snapshots showcasing humanity’s diversity, creativity, and complexity. Even partial understanding by an advanced civilization would provide profound insights into human emotion, ingenuity, and our deep desire for connection.

In the end, the Golden Record is NOT just about practical outcomes; it's about reflecting humanity’s best qualities back to ourselves and inspiring us to strive toward the ideals we've shared with the universe.

Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

#34

Post by skissane »

gcp123 wrote: post #5

I've been following Voyager since the late 70s when my dad (who worked at Ames) would bring home printouts of the Jupiter images. This interview captures something profound about these missions that non-space folks often miss. The most striking part isn't the technical achievement of keeping 1970s hardware alive for half a century. It's the human infrastructure behind it - the institutional knowledge passed through g…

> We're teaching 2020s engineers to understand machine code written before MS-DOS existed

It has three on-board computers. Two of them (the CCS and AACS) are 18-bit word-oriented machines with 4096 words of memory – so in 8 bit bytes thats 9KB of RAM. Although 18-bit machines were reasonably common in the 1960s and 1970s (especially the DEC PDP-7 which was the birthplace of both UNIX and MUMPS, its predecessor the PDP-4 and its successors the PDP-9 and PDP-15), you'd never encounter them nowadays except in retrocomputing or ultra-legacy systems like this. The other one (FDS) is a 16-bit word oriented machine with 8198 words of memory – so a bit less esoteric, although the 16-bit systems most people would be familiar with (e.g. the Intel 8086/8088 used by MS-DOS) are byte-oriented not word-oriented. So yeah, even for people used to doing assembly programming, might take a bit of time to get your head around it.

Both computer architectures are NASA custom, not industry standard – although they were reused from the Viking Mars landers, so weren't a brand new thing to NASA at the time. Rather than a single chip CPU, their CPUs were built out of a large number of 7400 series TTL ICs – so essentially early third generation computers (small scale integration, SSI, became available in mid-1960s), as opposed to fourth generation computers (1970s, with LSI/VLSI, transistor counts on integrated circuits had become high enough that the whole CPU could fit on a whole microprocessor).

(There is this widely repeated legend that the Voyagers used RCA 1802 CPUs, but that appears to be mixing up Viking/Voyager which used NASA custom CPU architectures, with the Galileo probe launched in 1989, which used RCA 1802 CPUs for its main computer, plus Itek ATAC CPUs for the attitude control computers. The ATACs were also used by some US naval aircraft – and whereas the Voyager was all assembler, the Galileo ATAC CPUs were programmed using HAL/S, the same language used for the Space Shuttle flight software.)

Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

#35

Post by brazzy »

gzer0 wrote: post #33
krisoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: what is so great about the Golden Record? I understand the Svalbard seed bank. That can come very handy in a bad situation. May we never need it. I have visited the LHC and it is seriously impressive. Works in the Prado are amazing. But the Golden Record feel just like someone made a mixtape and then chucked it far away. The music on it of course is great. But will anyone ever find it? And even if a…

Your skepticism about the Golden Record is understandable, but its value goes beyond mere practicality—it's a powerful symbol of humanity's hopes, dreams, and curiosity. Sure, the odds of another civilization discovering and fully decoding it are slim. But the Record was never simply meant as a practical tool, like the Svalbard seed bank or the LHC. Instead, it's an intentional gesture of optimism, an attempt to capt…

> Importantly, the Golden Record was carefully designed using universal scientific principles—binary notation, hydrogen atom properties, and pulsar maps—ensuring that any intelligent civilization might realistically decode it. The instructions etched onto its cover rely on fundamental concepts universally understandable across the cosmos.

You're describing the Pioneer Plaque, not the Golden Record: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

#36

Post by pfdietz »

Bud wrote: post #20
davidwritesbugs wrote: post #3

It's stunning to think how well these missions have done and what we've learnt. I'd love to see new missions aimed at much greater longevity with more modern instruments. I wonder how long one could make the mission? 100 years? 200? Would new generators reduce the power loss to less than 4W/year, or would it just need more/much bigger ones?

The power loss is due to the fact that the power source is plutonium. Which decays over time. So, your lump of plutonium contains less and less plutonium over time, and thus generates less power. A more modern generator doesn't really change this basic fact; the power source would still likely be plutonium, and would have the same issue. But yes, you could send up a larger lump of plutonium so that your power budget…

IIRC the output has decayed faster than that, due to degradation of the solid state generators.

Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

#37

Post by pfdietz »

GuB-42 wrote: post #31
piokoch wrote: post #7

Voyagers are the greatest technical achievement of human kind. Keeping in the space a piece of hardware run by a computer with power of today's car keys, in the hostile environment, outside freaking solar system is something that is the most amazing thing we have witnessed so far. Kudos to all the people who made it happen and kept going this project, we owe them, as a humanity, really a lot. Voyagers will keep flyin…

> Voyagers will keep flying across Milky Way, maybe they will last longer the the Earth itself Will they? Good thing I am tired and going to sleep right now, you almost nerd-sniped me. What will happen on the scale of millions to billions of years? Will it collide with something? Will it be slowly eroded by particles? Will it lose material by outgasing?

If I understand correctly, dust particles with a size of 0.1 microns are estimated to survive against sputtering or collisions with other grains for ~ 10^8 years. This suggests the spacecraft could survive trillions of years before substantial erosion, or more if the rate of supernovas in the galaxy declines with age.

A competing process over the very long term is repeated close encounters with stars and stellar remnants. This tends to add kinetic energy to lighter objects. So, one would expect the spacecraft to gradually acquire more kinetic energy by random close encounters and eventually be ejected from the galaxy.

Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

#38

Post by gzer0 »

brazzy wrote: post #35
gzer0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your skepticism about the Golden Record is understandable, but its value goes beyond mere practicality—it's a powerful symbol of humanity's hopes, dreams, and curiosity. Sure, the odds of another civilization discovering and fully decoding it are slim. But the Record was never simply meant as a practical tool, like the Svalbard seed bank or the LHC. Instead, it's an intentional gesture of optimism, an attempt to capt…

> Importantly, the Golden Record was carefully designed using universal scientific principles—binary notation, hydrogen atom properties, and pulsar maps—ensuring that any intelligent civilization might realistically decode it. The instructions etched onto its cover rely on fundamental concepts universally understandable across the cosmos. You're describing the Pioneer Plaque, not the Golden Record: https://en.m.wikip…

Both the Golden Record and the Pioneer Plaque were carefully crafted with universality in mind, drawing on fundamental scientific principles understandable by any intelligent civilization. They both shared many similarities. [1][2]

  > Some images contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are defined in the first few images using physical references that are likely to be consistent anywhere in the universe.

  > The pulsar map and hydrogen molecule diagram are shared in common with the Pioneer plaque.
[1] Explanation of the Voyager record cover diagram, as provided by NASA

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ed/Vo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

#39

Post by skissane »

skissane wrote: post #34
gcp123 wrote: post #5

I've been following Voyager since the late 70s when my dad (who worked at Ames) would bring home printouts of the Jupiter images. This interview captures something profound about these missions that non-space folks often miss. The most striking part isn't the technical achievement of keeping 1970s hardware alive for half a century. It's the human infrastructure behind it - the institutional knowledge passed through g…

> We're teaching 2020s engineers to understand machine code written before MS-DOS existed It has three on-board computers. Two of them (the CCS and AACS) are 18-bit word-oriented machines with 4096 words of memory – so in 8 bit bytes thats 9KB of RAM. Although 18-bit machines were reasonably common in the 1960s and 1970s (especially the DEC PDP-7 which was the birthplace of both UNIX and MUMPS, its predecessor the PD…

> although they were reused from the Viking Mars landers

Correction: the 18-bit computers used on the Voyagers were reused from the Viking orbiters. The Viking landers used a different computer architecture, the Honeywell HDC 402, which used a 24-bit word, and was not reused by Voyager

Re: NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End

#40

Post by ForOldHack »

gzer0 wrote: post #6

Every time this topic comes up on HN, I always like to remind readers about the following: One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may liv…

In my very first Astronomy class, just a few years after voyager, I did a report on that record, based on a cartoon: "Send more Chuck Berry."

It is an extraordinary piece of work of human history: THank you Astronomer Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, Jon Lomberg, and others.

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