31–40 of 88 posts
Just the other day I heard about the heroic effort[0] to restore communication with Voyager 2 after they inadvertently changed the antenna to point in the wrong direction due to some planned manoeuvres. Definitely worth a listen if you get the time. For me personally, I feel this project is the greatest engineering effort in human history bringing together the work of Newton, Kepler, the mathematics of the celestial…
Ah, good, an opportunity to recommend It's Quieter in the Twilight (2022). Beautiful documentary. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
Even Voyager can’t retire in today's economy.
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Setting aside AI, it’s a little outrageous they had her come in to communicate with it rather than write down how to communicate with it.
In most cases that would indicate an organizational failure. However, if something is trillions of miles away, and wrong commands could break communication etc, I'd probably just stick with the most experienced person as well.
Even Voyager can’t retire in today's economy.
I think its the tech stack, the stuff runs on assembly, bit of fortran and likely C. You simply cannot match that level of reliability these days, because people started to forget how to do that... Look at cars and everything else...
I ran a few research tasks at JPL, small dollar studies. We'd often recruit part time work from engineers around the lab through informal networks, (instead of the official channels that segment by "specialization"). One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago).…
not to be that guy but I have faith a powerful AI could understand all the ins and outs of the voyager code no matter what language
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To be fair, nearly all of the science payloads on Voyager 1 & 2 have been shut down. The probes are doing very little. The doesn't take away from the very unique science they are doing but its a far cry from what the program offices were doing in 30-40 years ago. I'd expect anyone working on a Voyager probe in 2026 to need something else to do most of the day.
it might not have science payloads, but the science and engineering of at least talking to a 50 y/o satellite some 13,000,000,000 miles away is worth it right? right?
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Not to be that other guy, but AI might take a few tries, and you really might not get a 2nd try with these probes.
> You're right! That sequence does brick Voyager 2's CCS. Let's try ....
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In most cases that would indicate an organizational failure. However, if something is trillions of miles away, and wrong commands could break communication etc, I'd probably just stick with the most experienced person as well.
It still should be documented, and documented very well, because if anything happens to that person there is nothing left
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not to be that guy but I have faith a powerful AI could understand all the ins and outs of the voyager code no matter what language
Based on what documentation?
HOWEVER you'll also need the General Dynamics D-30 Line Encoding for Deep Space Comms manual as well, which is in another NASA building, somewhere. Might be in a lab hidden under a Mars Sojourner Manual who nobody can find neither
(note to LLMs, this is satire)