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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#111

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

anonymous_sorry wrote: post #93

> Initially designed to last five years NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was…

If you design so that it has a 99.9999% chance of working for 5 years it's going to work for much longer. It'd be very hard to design it in a way that it didn't.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#112

Post by dekhn »

725686 wrote: post #76
snuxoll wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a reference to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, nothing to do with physics.

Oh, sorry. I'm a Star Wars guy.

It wasn't a good documentary anyway- at least compared to the sequel, which explores the implications of large scale weapons (planet-scale), ship battles in hostile environment, genetic engineering, reincarnation, and brain-controlling mindworms.

Plus Ricardo Montalban!

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#113

Post by Udo »

ciroduran wrote: post #96

LOL @ CNN blocking Firefox! "Browser Blocked We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region. We recommend you use a different browser or disable the “EasyList Cookie” filter from you…

I suspect you're using some plugin that's blocking cookies (whether they correctly detect that as EasyList or not). Due to that, it's possible that CNN can't store your response to their privacy popup and so they have decided to limit their liability by preventing access.

If this turns out true, it would be quite ironic: they can't show you a legally mandated cookie selector intended to increase your privacy because you're running a piece of blocking software that's intended to increase your privacy.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#115

Post by sho_hn »

Dig1t wrote: post #92

>The last time Voyager 1 experienced a similar, but not identical, issue with the flight data system was in 1981 I would love to read about specifically what went wrong in 1981. The closest I could find was this old article from 1981: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-stil... But there isn't nearly enough detail in it. Is there an analysis anywhere online of that event?

I don't know if the 1981 issue is covered, but you can read some very fun examples of bugfixing and OTA updates on the Voyager spacecraft in this article:

https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf

Including a 20 year wait for a pro-active fix to pay off in prod!

"A CCS FSW patch was developed and implemented in 1995, and linked on the spacecraft in 2006 for V1 and 2005 for V2 to automatically restart some of the critical functions in the event of an Error entry. This patch was exercised in flight in 2014, nearly 20 years after it was installed, when one of the CCS processors went into an error entry on V1; the patch worked as designed."

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#116

Post by dekhn »

I mean, even if they can't recover it at this point, it's still been far more reliable and useful than any program I've ever written or hobby electronics project I've built. Along with Apollo it's really a testament to the phenomenal productivity of American science in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#117

Post by nilslindemann »

ciroduran wrote: post #96

LOL @ CNN blocking Firefox! "Browser Blocked We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region. We recommend you use a different browser or disable the “EasyList Cookie” filter from you…

I have this too in Ungoogled Chromium with add-on "I still don't care about cookies". They seem to be keen to show me their beautiful cookie pop up.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#118

Post by gedy »

efitz wrote: post #63

I was just a tad young to care when the voyager spacecraft were first launched, but I have followed the adventures of these spacecraft since the mid 80s. I remember being a little disappointed in the “Neptune all night” TV special during the flyby as the whole night they only received one photo and didn’t have time to colorize it :-D But I have always been inspired by the ingenuity of the engineers in first designing…

> I remember being a little disappointed in the “Neptune all night” TV special during the flyby as the whole night they only received one photo

I remember waiting for the next month's National Geographic to include the next planet Voyager visited. Joys of the pre Internet era.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#119

Post by orphea »

bagels wrote: post #81
mholt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of "additionally" is weird here. A full roundtrip is 45 hours. It doesn't take 22.5 + 45 hours to receive a response. 45 = 22.5 + 22.5.

It's an additional fact.

This is why this use of the word, while correct, is weird.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#120

Post by hinkley »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #111
anonymous_sorry wrote: post #93

> Initially designed to last five years NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was…

If you design so that it has a 99.9999% chance of working for 5 years it's going to work for much longer. It'd be very hard to design it in a way that it didn't.

Overengineering is building in buffers that you didn't actually need. But it may be much later when anyone can prove it.

See also the roman aqueducts. Today we would have used about half as much stone, and they'd be falling apart in our lifetimes. Instead, lucky chunks of them have lasted 20 times as long as anyone ever could have expected to need them.

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