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Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

#131

Post by TylerE »

ethagknight wrote: post #128

Would there not be some kind of benefit to send a chaser after the probes in order to act as a relay as the signal gets further away? Or is the ground based array just as good as anything we could put in space at this time?

The voyager probes were built in an incredible hurry to take advantage of a once-in-a-few hundred years optimal gravitational boosting path. Something launched later would never have been able to keep up, plus the antenna would be so, so much worse. The ground reptilian networks have effective antenna lengrhs of miles.

Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

#132

Post by shagie »

pupppet wrote: post #13

I didn’t realize the Voyagers relied on a once in a 175 year planetary alignment. What a lucky break technology had advanced to the point we could make use of it.

The paper for it is readable - Fast Reconnaissance Missions to the Outer Solar System Derived from the Gravitational Field of Jupiter http://www.gravityassist.com/IAF3-2/Ref.%203-143.pdf (1966)

Also fun to play with is: https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/index.php (example query with multiple flybys of outer planets - https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NE... )

Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

#133

Post by pvaldes »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #127
sumeno wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the guy who helped launch the two manmade objects furthest from earth knows more about how to build space probes than you

Shhhh, this is HN, where just like on reddit, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than a professional in said professional's field.

> this is HN, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than

And they are correct

At least on the programming part, having in mind the huge advances in computers since the Voyager was built.

Any professional computer programmer here knows more in their field than a programmer from 70's. A Voyager built today with similar resources would be much better, 100% guaranteed.

Voyager 1 was a fantastic machine done by a terrific team, but lets not pretend that the state of the art hasn't changed. Anybody with computer skills polished towards building a machine in 1977 would be basically unemployable for building a machine in 2024.

Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

#134

Post by noselasd »

jonas21 wrote: post #126
noselasd wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single digit dollar sounds more like the Appollo program. I think it's been a long time since the entire NASA budget was more than a penny per tax dollar. NASA says the voyager mission cost 865 million dollars from the start in 1972 to Neptune encounter in 1989, and currently runs at 7 mllion dollars per year.

So that would be $7.72 per taxpayer, a single-digit dollar amount. (based on number of taxpayers in 1989 -- using the numbers from 1972, it would be a low double-digit amount).

Totalled up, yes - fair enough.

Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

#135

Post by dylan604 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #125
bigiain wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still a huge amount of luck involved. If that planetary alignment had happened even 10 years earlier NASA probably wouldn't have had the capability to do anything with it. If it had been sometime recently, say after the Challenger disaster, I doubt it would have got funding...

There's no way that a disaster on a manned mission would affect a satellite launch. They share nothing in common.

if they used the same booster, say something like a Falcon 9, that was the cause of the disaster, anything using that booster would be put on hold until it was cleared. it just so happens the examples used very different systems, but that's not what you were referring to with your self assured declarative that just doesn't have as much weight as you want it to in modern launch systems.

Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

#136

Post by thowawatp302 »

jfengel wrote: post #33
mannykannot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this quote: “We didn’t design them to last 30 years or 40 years, we designed them not to fail,” John Casani, Voyager project manager from 1975 to 1977, says in a NASA statement.

That doesn't seem helpful. Nothing lasts forever, and if you don't figure out when it's going to fail, it's going to be sooner rather than later.

You don’t do it that way. You figure out the how it’s gong to fail, when that failure is likely, and then engineer it not to do that in the relevant timeframe.

The original engineer was right and you are not.

Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

#137

Post by lostlogin »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #125
bigiain wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still a huge amount of luck involved. If that planetary alignment had happened even 10 years earlier NASA probably wouldn't have had the capability to do anything with it. If it had been sometime recently, say after the Challenger disaster, I doubt it would have got funding...

There's no way that a disaster on a manned mission would affect a satellite launch. They share nothing in common.

I’m not sure that level of confidence is warranted. What’s going to happen with NASAs funding over the next few years? Or even SpaceX?

Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

#138

Post by yodon »

pvaldes wrote: post #133
KennyBlanken wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shhhh, this is HN, where just like on reddit, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than a professional in said professional's field.

> this is HN, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than And they are correct At least on the programming part, having in mind the huge advances in computers since the Voyager was built. Any professional computer programmer here knows more in their field than a programmer from 70's. A Voyager built today with similar resources would be much better, 100% guaranteed. Voyager 1 was a fantastic machine don…

You might be surprised to read the papers written by those early software developers. They were writing in the late 1960's and early 1970's about fundamental issues most developers of today don't fully grasp.

You might think, for example "waterfall, ewwww", but if you go back and re-read the first paper on waterfall development, it makes clear that waterfall development is in fact an anti-pattern. How many here are stuck on "modern" teams that think waterfall is a good idea, and yet those clueless old folks had figured out it was a dead end 50+ years ago.

One of the most critical aspects of managing software development is Conway's law. For distributed scalable systems, if you aren't thinking about Amdahl's law you're just a hacker and not actually an engineer. Check the dates on those papers.

They built incredibly sophisticated systems using incredibly primitive building blocks. If you honestly think they couldn't ramp up on PHP or Python or k8s, you need to spend a bit more time around some actual badasses.

Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

#139

Post by jvanderbot »

pvaldes wrote: post #133
KennyBlanken wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shhhh, this is HN, where just like on reddit, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than a professional in said professional's field.

> this is HN, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than And they are correct At least on the programming part, having in mind the huge advances in computers since the Voyager was built. Any professional computer programmer here knows more in their field than a programmer from 70's. A Voyager built today with similar resources would be much better, 100% guaranteed. Voyager 1 was a fantastic machine don…

The longevity of Voyager has only a little to do with software engineering, and latest software engineering has even less to do with building spacecraft like Voyager.

Re: Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

#140

Post by picture »

pvaldes wrote: post #133
KennyBlanken wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shhhh, this is HN, where just like on reddit, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than a professional in said professional's field.

> this is HN, a bunch of computer programmers think they know more than And they are correct At least on the programming part, having in mind the huge advances in computers since the Voyager was built. Any professional computer programmer here knows more in their field than a programmer from 70's. A Voyager built today with similar resources would be much better, 100% guaranteed. Voyager 1 was a fantastic machine don…

But this is about the overall engineering of Voyager, not just the programming. Also, I'm skeptical how much better modern hardware will fare in deep space conditions, considering the use of finer and more fragile electronics. Since you're talking about general people instead of specialists, also consider how the median software developer seem to focus less on correctness, reliability, and optimization, compared to the standards of spacecraft engineering.
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