I imagine being born, growing up, falling in love with science and engineering and space, going to college, getting a job at NASA, joining the Voyager team, and remotely troubleshooting a spacecraft that had left the Earth before being born.
Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#162Tangentially related, just watched Star Trek the Motion Picture (director's cut) for first time as an adult. One of the best tie-ins between NASA and scifi I can think of. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_P...
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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#163Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response. I’m guessing “hotfix” commits don’t exist in this domain
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.
The NASA press release is written: "In addition, commands from mission controllers on Earth take 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, ... That means the engineering team has to wait 45 hours to get a response"
The CNN writing looks uncannily similar but without the same meaning. I'm not saying it's machine generated, but I won't say it isn't.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#164Maybe our simulation has not been implemented so robustly at that distance...
The 13the floor is a movie for you.
That movie was so good but was entirely overshadowed by the release of The Matrix, which released just 2 months earlier - I think people assumed that The 13th Floor was just a Matrix knock-off, which it wasn't. Both were great, of course, but 13th Floor just got a bum deal with it's release date I think.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#165If NASA can't contact it again and it has bravely gone into the great darkness alone with a piece of us, let's hope it's eventually found by a race capable of understanding the fragment of memory it carries. If you're lost V'ger, safe travels.
The Voyagers also carry the Golden Records, which are full of information about Earth, its species, humans, samples of different languages, and music. It also has a description of our solar system, and details how to listen to the record.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#166> 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…
I think it’s political. It’s untenable to tell the public that it will work for “15 years with a 95% confidence interval” and have it fail after 14 years. There would be congressional hearings. But you must give a number, so sandbagging makes sense. It’s the same thing with telling your wife when you’ll be home…if you say 7pm and it’s 7:05, you’re late and dinner is cold. But if you say 8:30 and it’s 7:05, you’re a h…
Tomorrow Voyager 1 shaves its head, now identifies as Vega, and is
coming home.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#167> 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…
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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Communication is exchange of information . The sun is not communicating with us, and we know its "radio" is still working. It's a pedantic, and incorrect, argument against the headline. The guidelines actually say not to do this, even when you're right.
>Communication is exchange of information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication#:~:tex... . One-way communication is a valid type of "communication".
Not in this context. They are sending commands. The spacecraft is not responding to them. This is exactly a breakdown of the communication, which is exactly what's mentioned in the first paragraph of the article.
Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#169Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
#170A less alarmist and clickbait article can be found here: https://www.popsci.com/science/voyager-computer-issue/ NASA press release here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-... TL;DR - Voyager is sending back bad data, they're working on it.
There was another incident recently with garbled data[1]. The issue then was Voyager was trying to use a processor that was supposed to have been turned off. It either turned the malfunctioning unit or thought that the disabled unit was turned on when it wasn't. But the flaw is similar to the current problem which a malfunction in managing its internal state.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-program/voyager-2/engi...