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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#351

Post by jzombie »

mike_d wrote: post #339
gzer0 wrote: post #282

One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this ev…

The Golden Record was supposed to include the Beetles "Here Comes The Sun" but the label wanted more in licensing fees than the whole thing cost to produce.

> the label wanted more in licensing fees than the whole thing cost to produce.

Hopefully this message was sent instead.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#352

Post by hunter2_ »

apitman wrote: post #308

One of my favorite tech legends is that apparently Voyager 1 launched with a Viterbi encoder, even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it. After a number of years Moore's Law caught up and they remotely switched over to Viterbi for more efficient transmissions.

The notion that encoding/transmitting could be simpler than decoding/receiving is interesting. It reminds me of the way optical drives for many years could write at, say, 48x but read at 8x, such that the majority of time spent was the verification step (if enabled) rather than the burn step. Just speculating, I assume it's because of things like error correction, filtering out noise/degradation. Producing the extra bits that facilitate error correction is one trivial calculation, while actually performing error correction on damaged media is potentially many complex calculations. Yeah?

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#353

Post by deadbabe »

nerdbert wrote: post #252
deadbabe wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Very large improbabilities require a lot more time than what the universe has been around for.

From our limited sampling, it happens with some measurable frequency. Going from zero to one of something tends to be a lot less likely than going from one to two or more.

Yea but we don’t know how many failed attempts there were that got stuck at zero. We only know our one existence. Could be trillions of dead universes before ours.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#354

Post by gorgoiler »

nemo44x wrote: post #316
apitman wrote: post #308

One of my favorite tech legends is that apparently Voyager 1 launched with a Viterbi encoder, even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it. After a number of years Moore's Law caught up and they remotely switched over to Viterbi for more efficient transmissions.

I don’t know how well it holds today but for some time it was known that running certain computations on existing hardware would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running when available.

My life archive is available to my heirs and successors as long as they know the LUKS password for any of the numerous storage devices I leave behind. It’s risky though — the passwords aren’t known to them yet and one logistical slip up means the disk may be unusable. That is, however, until some point in the future when they will have a computer powerful enough to just break the key and feast upon my cat photos, tax returns, and other exciting ephemera.

Similarly my encrypted internet traffic might be private today but if it’s being logged then it’s only a matter of time before it will be completely visible to the authorities. I probably average ~10Mbps of traffic which is ~50TB/year, or $100 of storage. You could cut that price by 10% if you blacklisted the Netflix traffic, and drop it to 1% if you whitelisted only the email and IM traffic.

Either way, one day they’ll know everything.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#355

Post by bmitc »

leptons wrote: post #314
bmitc wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry but you're still wrong. You're assuming the spacecraft isn't receiving the commands. You don't know that. Nobody really does. All that is necessary for this to be "communication" is for the transmitter to send and the receiver to receive, and the receiver may well be working but the transmitter on the spacecraft may not be working, making that scenario one-way communication . It takes far less power to receive…

> You're assuming the spacecraft isn't receiving the commands.

I didn't say that. The article even mentions that they feel the spacecraft is receiving and processing the commands. There's just no response.

The article title and intro are correct. For all intents and purposes, the spacecraft has stopped communicating. Broke down, used in the intro, is better than stopped. Discussing this is pedantic and pointless, which is why the guidelines state not to make comments like the original one. As we can all see. It has led nowhere interesting.

And you and everyone keep bouncing around all these side definitions. The definition of communication between earth and a spacecraft like Voyager 1 and 2 is implied and assumed to be standard two-way communication.

> It takes far less power to receive than it does to transmit, so it would be no wonder if the spacecraft were still receiving commands but unable to send responses.

I don't follow. The spacecraft is known to still be transmitting a signal.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#356

Post by LegionMammal978 »

seeknotfind wrote: post #327
nemo44x wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know how well it holds today but for some time it was known that running certain computations on existing hardware would take longer than waiting for new hardware and running when available.

If hardware next year is X times better (e.g. even 1.01 or 1% better) than this year, and you have a computation that takes T time today, then next year, it'll take T/X time. So waiting will take 1 + T/X years if time unit is years. So the condition you want is 1+T/X Though even faster will be doing part of the computation now and then switching to new hardware later, so it's a false dichotomy.

> This equation has solutions for given X where X is an improvement, so as long as there is any improvement, it's always true waiting to start large enough computations will be faster.

Though this does assume that X is a constant, or at least bounded below by a constant. If hardware performance improved up to an asymptote, then there would still be nonzero improvement, but it might not be enough for waiting to ever be worth it.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#357

Post by grey-area »

lazide wrote: post #317
cshimmin wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are traveling at velocities far exceeding the gravitational escape velocity of the sun. There is no meaningful sense in which they are orbiting.

Except they aren’t, which is why they are there and there is a heliopause instead of them being in interstellar space and there not being a heliopause. If they had greater than escape velocity, they’d be escaping and we’d not see the graph we see.

Orbit means going very fast around something in a circular motion. These particles are heading directly streaming out from the sun, not going round it.

As I understand it it’s where these particles reach equilibrium with the stellar medium. The sun is like a comet at a large enough scale, with a long tail of particles as it moves through the galaxy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#358

Post by [deleted] »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #348
FredPret wrote: post #341

Is there any chance we can zap its general direction with a radio beam and then listen with a huge radio telescope to get an accurate radar fix on where it is?

No. It's simply too far away for that, because d*4 gets you. Now, if the zapper were Big Enough, when received it didn't destroy the probe, AND that there was a big enough receiver, they maybe...

[deleted]

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#360

Post by nomilk »

jzombie wrote: post #351
mike_d wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Golden Record was supposed to include the Beetles "Here Comes The Sun" but the label wanted more in licensing fees than the whole thing cost to produce.

> the label wanted more in licensing fees than the whole thing cost to produce. Hopefully this message was sent instead.

Humourously and sadly, it would be informative of aspects of human nature.
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