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Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

scienceclock.com

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Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#361

Post by arealaccount »

leo_e wrote: post #355

It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective. We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone. It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more…

I mean entirely different use cases, right?

Borking a space mission vs someone’s breakfast status update can be optimized differently

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#362

Post by chucksmash »

thenthenthen wrote: post #331
ianburrell wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Light year is 63,241 AU. That means tens of thousands of relays. It would super expensive and super unreliable. The other problem is that achievable speeds are super slow, Voyager is 25,000 years per light year which means that would wait 100,000 years for relays to Alpha Centauri to be possible. Much easier just to send probe with large antenna or laser, and make a large antenna at Earth.

Starlink has 10k satellites as per this Month. 60k doesnt seem unreasonable?

Starlink has a use case.

At Voyager 1 speeds, it'll take 70,000 years for a probe to reach Proxima Centauri. So you'd just be launching a probe a year for the next 70,000 years to create a temporary chain on a course to fly by one particular star. And for what purpose? Okay, in 70,000 years, if everything works out as expected, we have a chain of probes on a course to fly by Proxima Centauri. What problem does that solve for us ("us" here being whatever is kicking around on Earth after a period of time 5x that of recorded human history thus far).

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#363

Post by nick238 »

leo_e wrote: post #355

It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective. We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone. It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more…

You're breezing past the labor cost quite deftly. I'm reasonably sure that developing the Voyager probes required a few more people and hours than your average microservice.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#364

Post by conradev »

leo_e wrote: post #355

It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective. We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone. It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more…

Spacecraft require more 9s of reliability than microservices. Their engineering processes are very different, even today. We still build new spacecraft today, even though we don’t launch them into interstellar space.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#365

Post by bearjaws »

leo_e wrote: post #355

It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective. We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone. It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more…

I am certain if I had the estimated $4,000,000,000 it took to get Voyager 1 launched, I could get some microservices to function regardless of all scenarios.

The reality is, its only worth it to build to 99.9999% uptime for very specific missions... There is no take-backsies in space. Your company will survive a microservice outage.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#366

Post by harrall »

leo_e wrote: post #355

It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective. We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone. It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more…

It’s a testament to product planning. It has nothing to do with engineering.

If it’s Photoshop and formally verified and can’t crash but it has only 5 tools, I would be pissed.

If it’s a remote monitoring station with a cool GUI but crashes daily I would be pissed.

Know the product that you are building.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#367

Post by keepamovin »

keepamovin wrote: post #67
nntwozz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the probes carry smaller probes left behind at specific intervals that act as repeaters? These baby probes could unfold a larger spiderweb antenna the size of a tennis court.

We need quantum entanglement based communication. Maybe without full collapse, using weak measurements, like Alice continuously broadcasts a "retrocausal carrier wave" by sequencing planned future post-selection measurements on her entangled qubits, which backward-propagates through time-symmetric quantum evolution to create detectable perturbations in the present states, biasing Bob's qubits away from pure randomnes…

I put something together: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/quacomms?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#368

Post by _wire_ »

chistev wrote: post #97
chistev wrote: post #11

Wrote about the Voyager probes two days ago in my blog - The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void. Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the f…

Extended piece from my blog. The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void. Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of…

> - 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record

To learn to play the record you've gotta play the record?

That thing is such a D/K pop-sci manifestation.

The writers of the Star Trek movie understood that Sagan's extra-solar artifact is merely a time capsule; humanity talking to its future self.

Some great grandchild of a millennial vinyl nerd, who lives and loves on the engineering deck of some Hyatt Regency in space, will have kept a perfectly maintained Technics, handed down across the generations, leading to a future crowd in ""Ten Forward"" being regaled by Sagan's Cosmos on a similarly well-maintained Magnavox 32-inch tube TV and VHS. "Billions of fucks were given for V'Ger to come back to us..." The meetup will be hosted by a curiously bald supermodel, a hunky but demure mensch, and an AI Carl Sagan.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#369

Post by exomonk »

harrall wrote: post #366
leo_e wrote: post #355

It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective. We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone. It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more…

It’s a testament to product planning. It has nothing to do with engineering. If it’s Photoshop and formally verified and can’t crash but it has only 5 tools, I would be pissed. If it’s a remote monitoring station with a cool GUI but crashes daily I would be pissed. Know the product that you are building.

That sounds like a product manager's perspective, but I think the falls apart in deep space. When the feedback loop is 2 light-days long and hardware is irreplaceable. The original planned lifespan of Voyager was just 5 years.

Re: Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth

#370

Post by lazide »

noduerme wrote: post #341
Fargren wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any mass that it fires would have a starting velocity equal to that of the probe, and would need to be accelerated an equal velocity in the opposite direction. It would be a smaller mass, so it would require less fuel than decelerating the whole probe; but it's still a hard problem. Be careful with the word "just". It often makes something hard sound simple.

Not trying to oversimplify. But suppose 95% of the probe's mass was intended to be jettisoned ahead of it on arrival by an explosive charge, and would then serve as a reflector. That might give enough time for the probe to be captured by the star's gravity...?

You’re just talking about a very inefficient rocket (bad ISP).

A rocket works the same way (accelerating mass to provide thrust), just far more efficiently and in a more controlled fashion.

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