Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Go rewrite from scratch soon to follow.
A rewrite in Scratch is in the early planning stages.
then Microsoft Power Automate, basically the same thing as Scratch but we can get a support contract.
NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
151–160 of 326 posts
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Metric doesn't let people grasp large numbers.
Only the US, Liberia, and Myanmar have a complete grasp of large numbers like, for example, fifty-seven.
Damn it, internet and rage bait culture. "Americans will use anything but metric" in refernce to using pluto distance as a metric is what I replied to, not metric vs mi.
Freaking HN.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#153To put the 12B miles in an easier grasp, Pluto's average distance is 3.7B miles. So Voyager 2 is a hair under 3.3 Plutos away, and Voyager 1 at 15B miles is slightly over 4 Plutos away. Another point of reference is the heliosphere, at 100AU. 1AU (earth to Sun) is 93M miles, so the heliosphere is around 2.5 Plutos away.
Muricans will use anything but metric.
Voyager 1 will be 4 Plutos away whether we use metric or not.
Putting large numbers in context helps understand them. "Muricans" know it, and so do Europeans at the European Space Agency. Here's what they write about the International Space Station:
> At 28 800 km/h it only takes 92 minutes for the weightless laboratory to make a complete circuit of Earth. Astronauts working and living on the Station experience 16 sunrises and sunsets each day.
They could have left it at 28 800 km/h - which is metric - and call it a day. But they went an extra mile (or should I say an extra 1.6 kilometer) to put that number into perspective.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#154It takes around 22+ hours for 1 way communication to Voyager if I recall correctly. It takes 8 min for light to reach earth from the Sun. The closest star is 4.24 light years away. These kinds of distances are hard wrap your mind around.
Not distance related, but here's another terrifyingly fun fact:
The sun accounts for ~99.9% of total mass of the solar system.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#155From Wikipedia: > There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft, two of each kind, sometimes used for redundancy. They are proprietary, custom-built computers built from CMOS and TTL medium-scale CMOS integrated circuits and discrete components, mostly from the 7400 series of Texas Instruments.[34] Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K. 32K memory to manage such a complex dev…
> 32K memory to manage such a complex device for 46 years
Word size was 18 bits, so 32k words is an enormous 72 kilobytes.
Google also gives me 69.63 kilobytes, for example in https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15iaox2/nasa_ha...
https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html says the CCS had 8k words (“Along with the new chips, the memory changed with an expansion to 8K”)
I guess the confusion is because the hardware has multiple (¿3?) computers.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#156It takes around 22+ hours for 1 way communication to Voyager if I recall correctly. It takes 8 min for light to reach earth from the Sun. The closest star is 4.24 light years away. These kinds of distances are hard wrap your mind around.
Not distance related, but here's another terrifyingly fun fact: The sun accounts for ~99.9% of total mass of the solar system.
“It’s called space for a reason.”
We live on what barely qualifies as a dust particle, orbited by a much smaller dust particle. The next dust particle over, Mars, is far enough to require something like 12 minutes for light to make a round trip.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#157To put the 12B miles in an easier grasp, Pluto's average distance is 3.7B miles. So Voyager 2 is a hair under 3.3 Plutos away, and Voyager 1 at 15B miles is slightly over 4 Plutos away. Another point of reference is the heliosphere, at 100AU. 1AU (earth to Sun) is 93M miles, so the heliosphere is around 2.5 Plutos away.
Muricans will use anything but metric.
Until someone explains it to me in Olympic swimming pool volumes, I'm clueless.
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Metric doesn't let people grasp large numbers.
And yet literally the entire world aside from United States, Liberia, and Myanmar is able to grasp it perfectly. So such a statement would either insinuate that Americans are genetically inferior somehow, or you're just culturally attuned to an outdated British system.
So genetically inferior that they are the only ones with a craft that is 4 Plutos away :)
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#159Firmware update in progress, do not unplug your computer...
Re: NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only reason why we got these probes as far and as fast as we did was because we were able to fly by each planet and use their gravitational influence to skip to the next one, increasing velocity after each slingshot.
> use their gravitational influence to skip to the next one You are correct in that the Voyagers' launch window was unique. Nit pick: gravity assist doesn't fundamentally rely on gravity. It extracts energy from planets' motion about the sun [1]. If we could somehow "bounce" a spacecraft off a planet's surface, it would impart momentum similar to that of a gravity assist. (In my opinion, it's a badly-named term.) [1]…
> gravity assist doesn't fundamentally rely on gravity
I'm not sure how you can make that claim. If you were to bounce off the surface, that would likely not be considered a "gravity assist", no?