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NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

science.nasa.gov

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Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

#111

Post by estimator7292 »

peteforde wrote: post #58

I would love to better understand how a device launched the year before I was born could be so flexible in its configuration and operation. I can't update the code running on a microcontroller on my desk in front of me without it triggering a reboot. When they talk about rerouting power and performing a "big bang" reconfiguration with a 23 hour lag on equipment that was underpowered when the 8088 came out... it kind…

With sufficient motivation and effort, you could have a self-updating microcontroller. You could, if you really wanted to, write firmware just as robust, reliable, and flexible as the Voyager system.

It's just that in most cases, the amount of effort required is orders of magnitude higher than is really justifiable.

Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

#112

Post by estimator7292 »

wpollock wrote: post #24
bluedino wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An old timer once told me about how he would read his printouts, make new punch cards, send them over to the main office, someone would put the new cards into the system the next morning, and then read the printouts on the day after that to see if his code worked or not.

This. Except worse, during busy days you had to stand on line for an hour or more for a turn on the machines. I believe the skill of debugging by mentally stepping through a program's execution came from such long run times, a useful skill many younger programmers lack.

The computer can single-step through the program far more accurately than you can. You can inspect the full state of the CPU and memory at any moment of execution. The debugger can tell you the real, exact value of a variable at runtime.

There is simply no reason to try doing this in your head. You're worse at it than the debugger is. And I say this as someone who does have the skill. It's just not necessary.

Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

#113

Post by anigbrowl »

dylan604 wrote: post #100
smackeyacky wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best time to plant a tree is 50 years ago. The second best time is now.

The best time to plant is when the conditions are right for the planting. If you've never planted seeds in less than ideal conditions, it'll be hard to understand. At the time of Voyagers, the conditions were right in a way that only happens every 175ish years. Anything now and since would have been less than ideal conditions to the point the newly launched craft would not be as performant as Voyagers.

If we're waiting around on planetary alignments to do missions things we could do in decades will end up taking centuries. Speed isn't the only metric that matters; in the meantime we could be testing alternate forms of propulsion from lightsails to nuclear propulsion.

Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

#114

Post by anigbrowl »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #92
dylan604 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else are you looking to see from such deep space? Nothing we launch will ever reach anything anything interesting in probably the life of humanity. Just to get to Pluto in our life times meant going so fast that it could only fly by. Maybe flying around in the Oort cloud might, unlikely though, be interesting.

It's the same notion that has us going "back to the moon" right now. The US did something impressive and interesting several times. In the absence of anything else impressive and interesting now, we're trying to pull the same trick again. As if we're going to arrive on the Moon's surface and suddenly discover it isn't a barren sphere with a rocky surface, no atmosphere & tiny amounts of water on it. There's a reason…

BS. We've discovered there's significant amounts of water on the Moon, we could be investigating that. We could be setting up real time cameras there to observe earth 24/7. We could be doing experiments with atomic clocks to check how orbital periods vary, and many more. We could be building launch infrastructure there. we could be investigating lunar geology, such as underground lava tubes whose existence has been confirmed but about whose interiors we can currently only theorize. It's absolutely absurd that we have several active rovers tootling around Mars and non on the Moon.

This argument that 'we went there already, there no reason to go back' just demonstrates a lack of imagination, at best.

Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.

No, that'd be talking about how much we achieved with the moon landings while doing little else since.

Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

#115

Post by johnbarron »

johnbarron wrote: post #103
dylan604 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Veeger is currently less that 200 AU, and it's dying. For us to build a craft that could stay alive long enough to make it to 550AU and still be functioning would take an incredible leap in technology. This plan also has a fatal flaw in that you can only ever hope to look at one thing. You can't just slew that craft to be able to line up the next target.

You mean V'ger

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger

Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

#116

Post by mek6800d2 »

ndiddy wrote: post #9

If anybody wants further context, here's an excellent paper on the status of the Voyager mission as of 2016, written by one of the engineers at JPL. It has an overview of what all the instruments on Voyager do and everything the team had done to keep the mission going as of that point. https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf I also highly recommend the documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" which…

For others, this truly excellent 2016 paper is "Voyager Interstellar Mission: Challenges of Flying a Very Old Spacecraft on a Very Long Mission" by Sun Kang Matsumoto. She was/is a Voyager Fault Protection and CCS Flight Software Systems Engineer (CCS was the onboard command computer) and she was also one of the "stars" in It's Quieter in the Twilight.

Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

#117

Post by mek6800d2 »

ndiddy wrote: post #91
peteforde wrote: post #58

I would love to better understand how a device launched the year before I was born could be so flexible in its configuration and operation. I can't update the code running on a microcontroller on my desk in front of me without it triggering a reboot. When they talk about rerouting power and performing a "big bang" reconfiguration with a 23 hour lag on equipment that was underpowered when the 8088 came out... it kind…

Here's a talk about how the Voyager team fixed the flight data computer on Voyager 1 when a memory chip went bad on it a few years ago. It goes over how the flight computer works and he walks through a few assembly routines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg Some of the challenges they had to deal with while developing the fix: - The only source code they had for the flight data software was an OCR'd Micros…

The 2025 YouTube video is "How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away" by David Cummings of JPL.

There is a Vimeo video of the Voyager team reacting when data first began trickling in from Voyager 1 after the fix in April 2024. "Voyager 1 Team Reacts to Receiving Engineering Data From Spacecraft" (JPLraw channel): https://vimeo.com/939376171

Cummings is the one against the back wall who shoots his two arms up in the air in celebration. He and Armen Arslanian (in the blue shirt to his left, right in the image) developed the software fix.

The slides from Cummings' presentation can be downloaded as a PDF from the Flight Software Workshop Day 2 page, first entry: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BXSBUgEJExsLSE-m585I...

Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

#118

Post by aag »

tedd4u wrote: post #76
tavavex wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA pioneered a lot of what underpins modern design of critical computer systems. Voyager's systems are impressively robust. As far as I know, they can patch it by directly sending up new assembly instructions that are written into its memory, and doing a warm reboot to get it to start executing new instructions without powering down anything. They had the foresight to make their software highly editable, while also…

Watch the documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" to find out how the people responsible for Voyager 1 & 2 feel about it. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/

I second your recommendation. I watched it last night, and loved it. It was beautiful to see the level of competence and devotion of the tiny group running the spacecraft.

Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

#119

Post by karlgkk »

dylan604 wrote: post #98
karlgkk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that was Parker? Parker and new horizons often get lumped together for some reason

By who? The Parker is doing everything it can to get closer to the sun by dipping into the sun's atmosphere while New Horizons went to Pluto and is getting further and further away from the sun. I don't think you could have a more opposite mission than these two.

IDK a lot of media. I think they’re two surface level similar missions.

It’s not so much about what they’re doing, but rather how they’re built and represented to the public

IDK, my point is I can see how some people might get confused about the more Guinness book style factoid around these missions

Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

#120

Post by peteforde »

aag wrote: post #118
tedd4u wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch the documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" to find out how the people responsible for Voyager 1 & 2 feel about it. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/

I second your recommendation. I watched it last night, and loved it. It was beautiful to see the level of competence and devotion of the tiny group running the spacecraft.

Yep! If there was ever a solid recommendation for a movie to recommend to your dad...
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