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47-year-old Voyager 1 fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades

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Re: 47-year-old Voyager 1 fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades

#31

Post by Rinzler89 »

quesera wrote: post #25
yashg wrote: post #6

A radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1. And it would take the same to get a response back. Incredible. And imagine the patience needed to send commands and wait for the outcome on the part of the engineering team. You can't afford to send a wrong command and have the luxury of undo. Also, I wonder how many generations of engineers must have worked on the project by now.

> A radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1 Voyager has a 23 watt radio and a 14 foot parabolic dish antenna, pointed directly at Earth which is presently 15 billion miles away. The corresponding earth ground station has a 100 foot dish and transmits at thousands of watts. It's astonishing to me that Voyager knows where Earth is at all. I imagine it uses Sol as a reference? Or maybe the high powered…

>It's astonishing to me that Voyager knows where Earth is at all

It's not that astonishing when you realize astral navigation is what sailors hundreds of years ago did to navigate the seas. Just look at the stars with a sextant and with some basic trigonometry you'll know where you are exactly. The Apollo space crew had to do that by hand and eyes using a sextant too when the astral navigation computer failed.

Re: 47-year-old Voyager 1 fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades

#33

Post by tannhaeuser »

virtue3 wrote: post #21
tannhaeuser wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, I wonder how many generations of engineers must have worked on the project by now. Would've expected the generation raised on punch cards to be ideally suited for this kind of stunt, having learnt the hard way about the turnaround time for a bug (Donald Knuth quote about proving programs correct comes to mind), so I'd expect mission control, operators, and coders to be well in their 70s at least? Whereas tida…

Not as old as you might think: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26275-voyager-team-celebr...

With respect, most people sitting around the table on that photo sure look like 70+ don't they? Not there's anything wrong with it ...

Re: 47-year-old Voyager 1 fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades

#34

Post by Rinzler89 »

b112 wrote: post #8
yashg wrote: post #6

A radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1. And it would take the same to get a response back. Incredible. And imagine the patience needed to send commands and wait for the outcome on the part of the engineering team. You can't afford to send a wrong command and have the luxury of undo. Also, I wonder how many generations of engineers must have worked on the project by now.

You can't afford to send a wrong command and have the luxury of undo. Indeed. We used to do this all the time. Cars without OTA updates, games and software shipped on disk or floppy or cd, all very make or break.

That's when QA and SW testing was still a job, before the age of cargo cults like Agile, Scrum and SV's "move fast and break things" took over.

Re: 47-year-old Voyager 1 fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades

#35

Post by exe34 »

quesera wrote: post #25
yashg wrote: post #6

A radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1. And it would take the same to get a response back. Incredible. And imagine the patience needed to send commands and wait for the outcome on the part of the engineering team. You can't afford to send a wrong command and have the luxury of undo. Also, I wonder how many generations of engineers must have worked on the project by now.

> A radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1 Voyager has a 23 watt radio and a 14 foot parabolic dish antenna, pointed directly at Earth which is presently 15 billion miles away. The corresponding earth ground station has a 100 foot dish and transmits at thousands of watts. It's astonishing to me that Voyager knows where Earth is at all. I imagine it uses Sol as a reference? Or maybe the high powered…

I know trident uses the stars to avoid gps jammers, so presumably voyager can do something similar.

Re: 47-year-old Voyager 1 fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades

#37

Post by dcl »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #31
quesera wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1 Voyager has a 23 watt radio and a 14 foot parabolic dish antenna, pointed directly at Earth which is presently 15 billion miles away. The corresponding earth ground station has a 100 foot dish and transmits at thousands of watts. It's astonishing to me that Voyager knows where Earth is at all. I imagine it uses Sol as a reference? Or maybe the high powered…

>It's astonishing to me that Voyager knows where Earth is at all It's not that astonishing when you realize astral navigation is what sailors hundreds of years ago did to navigate the seas. Just look at the stars with a sextant and with some basic trigonometry you'll know where you are exactly. The Apollo space crew had to do that by hand and eyes using a sextant too when the astral navigation computer failed.

Knowing your longitude is very difficult without a clock... Can't do it with just stars iirc.

Re: 47-year-old Voyager 1 fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades

#39

Post by gambiting »

DaoVeles wrote: post #9
b112 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't afford to send a wrong command and have the luxury of undo. Indeed. We used to do this all the time. Cars without OTA updates, games and software shipped on disk or floppy or cd, all very make or break.

An aside but this is why I was blown away by Mario Odyssey on the Switch. While it did get patches to add a few new games modes and bonuses, there was nothing done to fix anything broken with the title because there wasn't anything. If you buy a physical copy from the last few years, there is no additional patch to download. They had all the issues sorted out before release, very rare nowadays.

Oh it definitely has bugs and glitches - tonnes of them in fact. It's just that Nintendo chooses not to fix them(not that they should, 90% of them are basically people actively trying to break stuff, although some I can see how you could do it accidentally).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWYmV0bs15w

https://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_Super_Mario_Odyssey_glitch...

And issues have been fixed in patches too, like the first glitch on that list that would lock your camera so you couldn't turn it - that was fixed in a patch.

"If Mario performs a Cap Throw at Talkatoo and talks to him at the same time, the camera will lock into place.[...] As of the February 21, 2018 update, this glitch is fixed"

But there are situations that will literally crash the game to the OS too:

"In the Bowser's Moon Wedding objective, if Mario falls into the lava just as he is about to capture Bowser, the game immediately crashes."

Re: 47-year-old Voyager 1 fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades

#40

Post by minkles »

bigiain wrote: post #10
yashg wrote: post #6

A radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1. And it would take the same to get a response back. Incredible. And imagine the patience needed to send commands and wait for the outcome on the part of the engineering team. You can't afford to send a wrong command and have the luxury of undo. Also, I wonder how many generations of engineers must have worked on the project by now.

I suspect most people who've ever been responsible for colo-ed unix-ish servers have learned to do something like: > ufw reset | at now +5 minutes When doing "dangerous" things like updating firewall rules. I wonder if they have a way to send commands saying something like: Switch to thruster set 1, wriggle the antenna aim away and back to earth, wait 46 hours, if you do not receive "all clear" from earth switch back…

I still fuck them up after 20 years.

Fortunately we have ILO / RAS cards in everything.

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