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NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year
91–93 of 93 posts
Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
The AI slop readme is a real turn off. Makes me question the quality/accuracy of the rest of the project.
FWIW, that project appears to be a passion project from someone who has gathered materials. It is NOT real JPL simulator code.
I can't edit, but realize GP said 'project', so my comment would've been more helpful to the parent of that comment.
Re: NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year
#93I 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).…
Some would call that an organizational failure. I suppose it depends on the budgets.
One problem with these kinds of organizations, is that there effectively is no "budget" other than what the various contracted work declares. A subcontractor like, say, Raytheon gets to charge a fixed % "burden"/overhead and spend that largely however they want. These "burden" funded tasks at JPL were the exclusive use of new research tasks (ostensibely), or pet projects of political superstars (like the mars copter). At any rate, they were highly scrutinized and could not be used to offset mission costs (otherwise JPL would have an unfair advantage when bidding for missions vs other NASA centers, simply b/c JPL had many more sources of funding vs other centers).
So, those who would do less ostentatious work like encoding command sequences for aging spacecraft had to find a day job.