Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

blogs.nasa.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 330 posts

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#261

Post by NKosmatos »

hujun wrote: post #217

Dark Forest Hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

Although that’s one of the many possible explanations of the Fermi paradox [0], I prefer to think that the real reason we haven’t discovered (or we haven’t been discovered) is the fact that we’re limited by the speed of light.

The distances are so vast, almost unfathomable, that we need Faster Than Light means of traveling. Perhaps I’m being naive or romantic, but I prefer to think this is the real reason :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#263

Post by shiroiushi »

_yb2s wrote: post #103
Johnie wrote: post #56

Puts your migration projects to shame.

Yep... days worth of work to get Python code I wrote 3 years ago working again from all of the 'bitrot.' Can't imagine how much work it must be for them to produce new binaries to update these old systems from modern computer hardware. Although I suppose it could actually be easier depending on how the code works- perhaps it's just simple bare metal assembly without the approx 10^99999 libraries a modern python stack…

It's probably a lot easier in a way, because they don't have to worry about external dependencies changing at all. Modern code is a real PITA that way.

What's hard about their work is 1) it's really, really slow to communicate with, so you can't iterate quickly, 2) the tech is really old and unlike today's stuff, so it's very specialized domain knowledge.

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#264

Post by noir_lord »

DeathArrow wrote: post #262

>The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. No one thought of having backup computers on the spacecraft?

Most of the computer hardware is duplicated but much of it has already failed/failed earlier - remember these are 50 year old hardware - a lot of the logic is TTL and discrete components - which are far larger than modern equivalents would be.

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#265

Post by HeckFeck »

jlaneve wrote: post #101

> The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. Talk about a slow feedback loop! And I get frustrated when I need t…

So there is something with a worse ping than IP over Avian Carriers.

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#266

Post by chungy »

kibwen wrote: post #62
anotherhue wrote: post #2

Incredible to see the same faces in that photo as in the excellent documentary: https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/ Voyager might make it to 2027.

> Voyager might make it to 2027. With some amount of luck, Voyager might last ten more years beyond that: "Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to E…

> With some amount of luck, Voyager might last ten more years beyond that:

Oh, good, it won't have to suffer a year 2038 problem :)

Also: what's with that last link? Definitely didn't expect something to make my browser slow to a crawl.

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#267

Post by nuccy »

somenameforme wrote: post #229
T-A wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voyager 1 is currently 2.4e10 km from Earth. Trisolaris - sorry, I mean Proxima Centauri - is 4e13 km away [2], so in the (almost) 47 years since its launch, Voyager 1 has covered a whopping 0.06% of the distance. And it's not even headed that way. Meanwhile, radio, TV and radar have been advertising the presence of a new technological civilization on Earth for more than a century. That means any entity worth worryin…

Inverse square law. With the power we're transmitting at, signals become just background noise relatively quickly. They're nowhere near strong enough to be detectable at e.g. Proxima Centauri. This is what makes the radio signals we do detect, like fast radio bursts, so interesting. So for instance, the furthest signal we've detected is called FRB (fast radio burst) 20220610A, and that millisecond length signal came…

This "law" is only for point (or spherical) sources, i.e. those emitting evenly in all direction - the area is increasing as a square of distance and thus signal power drops accordingly. With lasers, directional antennas, phased array antennas [1] the signal won't decay that fast. For instance with lasers it will be just a matter of alignment of internal elements to obtain a parallel light beam which doesn't lose power over distance (obviously there are other factors - atmosphere, particles in the vacuum, et al which will result in diveregence anyway).

In fact some billionaires [2] invest into using telescopes with fast sampling cameras (in this case IACT [3] telescopes used normally to detect gamma-rays by their interaction with the atmosphere) to detect flashed of extraterrestrial lasers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array (see the animation of the radiation pattern)

[2] https://www.space.com/are-aliens-flashing-laser-beams.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IACT

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#268

Post by rob74 »

boffinAudio wrote: post #245
hnlmorg wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was Voyager 6, a fictional probe based on the real life probes of the same name. Earth probe gone bad is a common trope in Sci-Fi. Star Trek alone has a few episodes: - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Friendship_1 Also the Doomsday machine was a very different type of probe to V’ger https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Doomsday_Machine_(e...

My favourite, the ANDROMEDA STRAIN .. the idea that the US government would experiment with weaponizing upper-atmosphere organisms is just too real .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain

Ah yes, the first Michael Crichton novel I read - and also the book that first introduced me to binary code (https://imgur.com/N4IjIYq)! And after watching (and then reading) Jurassic Park some 10 years later, it took a while until I realized that it was from the same author...

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#269

Post by boffinAudio »

rob74 wrote: post #268
boffinAudio wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favourite, the ANDROMEDA STRAIN .. the idea that the US government would experiment with weaponizing upper-atmosphere organisms is just too real .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain

Ah yes, the first Michael Crichton novel I read - and also the book that first introduced me to binary code ( https://imgur.com/N4IjIYq )! And after watching (and then reading) Jurassic Park some 10 years later, it took a while until I realized that it was from the same author...

Yes, I too had the same disparity in recognizing the author as a young 'un, reading CONGO and SPHERE and so on .. Mr. Crichton sure had his finger on the pulse of the technological world we live in. What a wild series of stories he has created .. he was my favourite author until Messrs. Stephenson and Gibson came along ..

Staying on subject, I wonder if we will see a new adaptation of ANDROMEDA STRAIN some time. As a story it seems topical and relevant.

Re: NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

#270

Post by shiroiushi »

dekhn wrote: post #187
treesknees wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you're getting at, but the 'average' vape pen is essentially a disposable battery and temperature sensor with no additional inputs or features. After reading some details about the Voyager, I have my doubts that a disposable vape has more computation power [1]. Maybe the higher end devices with programable displays and temperature settings? [1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/voyagers-1-and-2-take…

A Pinecil (digital soldering pen) is probably a better example. BL706 MCU, "a low-power, high-performance IoT chip that supports BLE/Zigbee wireless networking, ... BL702 has built-in RISC-V 32-bit single-core processor with FPU, the clock frequency can reach 144MHz, has 132KB RAM / 192KB ROM / 1Kb eFuse storage resources, supports external Flash, and optional embedded pSRAM." The Voyager had a custom-designed proces…

>The Voyager had a custom-designed processor (well, several) that were basically computers made out of basic logic chips (74xx series);

This was not unusual at the time: many early arcade games were made exactly the same way. They've even been emulated by the MAME project.

Post reply on HN