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Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

cnn.com

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Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#541

Post by mzs »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #532
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…

I made this about 7 years ago: http://voyager.damninteresting.com/

thank you for creating this

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#542

Post by phatfish »

mlrtime wrote: post #516
iAMkenough wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re both right. They’re cornering a market with little competition because of the high cost barrier, with the hopes of personally owning/controlling space travel and any future colonization of other planets. I believe their primary motivation is monopolization and money, even if the science community experiences a benefit.

I disagree, I think it's the opposite. Men have lofty dreams, they're also realists. How can you realistically get a man on Mars? Use all their talents to work with a government? Or use it to create enough capital to do it yourself (And piss off some people at the same time for fun)?

It's just the whims of the rich and powerful, sometimes we are lucky and their mood aligns with needs of society as a whole.

Sometimes the only way to for a billionaire to differentiate themselves from your run-of-the-mill middle-eastern oil billionaire is a vanity project to Mars.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#543

Post by mitsu_at »

pndy wrote: post #442
nonethewiser wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Voyager benefitted from a particular alignment of the planets to get multiple slingshot boosts from gravity wells. What exactly does that get us? It gets further into space faster? It travels faster? Cheaper to launch? I mean if it just means it leaves the solar system 20 years faster or something then it seems like cheaper launches far outweigh those favorable conditions.

This is the Project Lyra [1], where a UK-registered not-for-profit company suggest sending a spacecraft to catch-up with ʻOumuamua object that pass thru solar system in 2017, by using orbital mechanic. Spacecraft set off at right window would speed up using gravity assist maneuver [2] around objects in the solar system and save a lot of fuel to hopefully reach 'Oumuamua in 26 years [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38598284

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#544

Post by apitman »

guenthert wrote: post #482
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.

> even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it I'm not sure what is meant by that. Not fast enough to decode in real time? There is/was no need to do that. The transmissions would have gone to tape in any case. Here is a link describing how to decode such a tape : https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

I called it a legend deliberately. One of the things I love about this anecdote is that it makes less sense the older and more experienced I get. It was told to me 12 years ago as a young, starry-eyed junior developer by my supervisor who had a PhD in RF research, while we were working on what we considered to be a world-changing wireless technology at a startup in San Francisco (it wasn't).

Who knows how many of the details I misinterpreted or am misremembering, or that he was. Where did he hear it originally? Maybe a grizzled old professor who worked directly on the project? Maybe a TA who made up the whole thing?

Whether true or not, it inspired me then as it does now to strive to be a better engineer, to think outside the box, to attempt hard things.

I continue sharing it hoping that one day Cunningham's Law will take effect and someone will share the correct details. But there's also a part of me that hopes that never happens.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#546

Post by devnullbrain »

shiroiuma wrote: post #403
smudgy wrote: post #135

If NASA can't contact it again and it has bravely gone into the great darkness alone with a piece of us, let's hope it's eventually found by a race capable of understanding the fragment of memory it carries. If you're lost V'ger, safe travels.

>let's hope it's eventually found by a race capable of understanding the fragment of memory it carries. Star Trek: The Motion Picture showed the danger posed by your wish.

Movies aren't real

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#547

Post by HardDaysKnight »

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…

I don't understand the Golden Record. Even assuming other advanced civilizations, "there’s an infinitesimally small chance that the Golden Record will be picked up."[0] So, at some (considerable?) cost and time, something meaningless and ineffective (from the perspective of its ostensible purpose, communicating with alien civilizations) was undertaken. So what was the point? Why was it done? Note, I'm not questioning sending out probes, gathering data, space exploration, etc.

[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/voyager-golden-record-...

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#548

Post by 93po »

mnd999 wrote: post #435
lebed2045 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wallet by definition has private key within it. Without key is just an address.

I think ‘readily accessible’ was the important bit.

I don't follow. The wallet is the private key, along with some other info.

Re: Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

#549

Post by NohatCoder »

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.

This is about error correction. The probes add a redundant convolutional code to their signal. Decoding this is easy as long as the error rate is low, a computer program can simply guess what bits have flipped. The issue becomes harder with a higher error rate, and a Viterbi decoder is computationally expensive, but can correct higher error rates than other constructions.

Since the signal strength degrades with distance to Earth, error correction naturally becomes much more of an issue later in the mission. I guess that the probes may have switched between different levels of redundancy through the mission, as the transmission error rate rises. But there was never a point where the convolutional code wasn't useful, it just became slightly more useful with a better decoder.

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