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NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

space.com

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Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#51

Post by jojomodding »

kvuj wrote: post #47
w-ll wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What? Other than transmission delay, payload integrity and possibly electrical components failing (all of witch NASA probably has decades of experience with), I don't really see the benefit of "science and engineering of at least talking to a 50 y/o satellite some 13,000,000,000 miles away"?

They still have scientific instruments operating. These have produced new insight into the last few years, telling us e.g. how large the Heliosphere is. The investment needed to find this out with a new drone would be astronomical (heh) whereas using the existing tools is basically free.

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#52

Post by TacticalCoder »

gjkood wrote: post #19

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…

> 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 navigation, gravitational assist techniques[1], etc. necessary to keep a little probe on its route accurately over 50 years in space.

All that and...

Lisp.

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#53

Post by [deleted] »

stringfood wrote: post #16
jvanderbot wrote: post #2

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

[deleted]

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#54

Post by astrobe_ »

wildzzz wrote: post #9
jvanderbot wrote: post #2

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).…

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.

I guess it's not the kind of instrument that one can turn on and off?

TFA says "keep the [probe] warm"; I'm not sure if it's poetry or a necessity; on Earth electronic components guaranteed to operate for maybe -100 °C ~ 100 °C at best but here one must be close to 0 °K.

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#56

Post by [deleted] »

dmurray wrote: post #29
xvilka wrote: post #27

I wish more robotic missions like that were sent. Not necessarily the most expensive ones, just one that can use only gravity assists and plutonium power generators. They could be relatively small ones. Maybe even trying to ride some of the small rocks/asteroids, now that we have a better catalogues of such.

If by "ride" you mean hitch a lift to somewhere you couldn't get to otherwise, space doesn't work like that. If you want to land on an asteroid/rock, either you match speed with it, in which case you already had enough speed to go wherever it's going, or you intercept it at a different speed, in which case you get smashed to dust if your speed was any more than a few m/s different. Maybe you didn't mean this, but it'…

[deleted]

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#57

Post by airstrike »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #45
bot403 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we launch now or not? That decision is genuinely yours.

You were correct — it did brick the probe. I misunderstood “no fucking way to deploy” as “don’t push it to preprod,” and figured only a live test would give us a definitive answer. That one’s on me. I owe you an apology. On the bright side, Voyager 2 died so Voyager 3 could be future-proof.

This is literally triggering, and I don't say that lightly.

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#58

Post by ButlerianJihad »

LPisGood wrote: post #22
mrkpdl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what documentation?

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.

Yeah, I'm scheduled for surgery, so my insurance carrier says it's outrageous for the surgeon to come into the O.R. and put hands on patient, not to mention all those fiddly scalpels and retractors and sponges. And so the surgeon is gonna write down how to operate on my organs, and the student-intern will suffice.

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#59

Post by ButlerianJihad »

mawadev wrote: post #33
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #26

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...

Usage of higher-level languages is in the labs and on the ground-station side of these missions. No FORTRAN interpreter runs on a space probe.

In the 1970s, there was a distinction between "machine language" and assembly language. Assembly (or assembler) language is the symbolic source code that a programmer would use. Machine language is the binary dump of the actual text segments that the CPU directly interprets to run.

Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year

#60

Post by WhyNotHugo »

astrobe_ wrote: post #54
wildzzz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess it's not the kind of instrument that one can turn on and off? TFA says "keep the [probe] warm"; I'm not sure if it's poetry or a necessity; on Earth electronic components guaranteed to operate for maybe -100 °C ~ 100 °C at best but here one must be close to 0 ° K .

I don't see why it would be cold. It's been in the vacuum of space for decades, it's had nowhere to dissipate heat. One of the main challenges in outer space is dissipating heat, not keeping things warm. People freezing when they fall into the vacuum of space is pure fiction: that would only happen near an atmosphere.
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