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.
My favorite graph of all time is the one that demonstrate Voyager 1 had left the solar system. I was a high school math and science teacher at the time, and I spent the whole day sharing this graph with students. It was so much fun watching everyone's faces and seeing the moment they realized what it really meant.<p><a href="https://phys.org/news/2012-10-voyager-left-solar.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://phys.org/news/2012-10-voyager-left-solar.html</a>
One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written:<p><i>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><p>I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this event and restablish communication.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record</a>
I was just a tad young to care when the voyager spacecraft were first launched, but I have followed the adventures of these spacecraft since the mid 80s. I remember being a little disappointed in the “Neptune all night” TV special during the flyby as the whole night they only received one photo and didn’t have time to colorize it :-D<p>But I have always been inspired by the ingenuity of the engineers in first designing spacecraft that have lasted so long and gone so far beyond their original mission parameters, and secondly keeping these two machines operational across so much time and distance in such a hostile environment.<p>Thank you Voyager team present and past; you’ve helped inspire so many young people to STEM careers, and you’ve done so with a project that shows the very best of the curious and inventive side of humanity.
I always have a sense of pride and a feeling of respect for us as a human race when reading about V'ger. It's astonishing that we were able to send a space probe, designed and built to be so robust that it's still doing its thing and sending us postcards after 46 years(!!!) of flying away from us in an extremely harmful environment, while we still fuck simple stuff up back home.
Always enjoyed this bit below about Voyager 1 a good reminder of how vast the universe is not too mention just to the oort cloud!<p>"Even though Voyager 1 travels about a million miles per day, the spacecraft will take about 300 years to reach the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the far side."<p>I have to hope that in the distant future we will hopefully have spaceships that will pass voyager still traveling along in space, doing its thing as a relic to us early space traveling humans.
Tangentially related, just watched Star Trek the Motion Picture (director's cut) for first time as an adult. One of the best tie-ins between NASA and scifi I can think of.<p><a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_P...</a>
The time to think of replacements has long passed, not to fly by the outer planets, but to achieve a greater velocity than the Voyagers and continue exploring the interstellar medium.<p>Some other comments here mentioned the tech to do that:<p>- ion propulsion<p>- light sail<p>And also nuclear fission might be an option, I like the fission fragment idea for its simplicity. [1][2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core-fission-fragment-rocket-engine/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nasa.gov/general/aerogel-core-fission-fragment-r...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket</a>
@dang - could you change the title of this? It is factually wrong. The spacecraft is still communicating with Earth.<p>This gives information (and may be a better link anyway):<p>"Engineers Working to Resolve Issue With Voyager 1 Computer" (Dec. 12, 2023)<p><a href="https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-to-resolve-issue-with-voyager-1-computer/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...</a>
There's a nice recent documentary about the team that keeps these spacecraft working and developing software updates, "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022):<p><a href="https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/</a>
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.<p>If you're lost V'ger, safe travels.
How is it possible to still be able to get a signal from a spacecraft that's so far away? How can the antenna be directional enough while still being pointed right at the Earth? How do we remove the noise?
> While the spacecraft can still receive and carry out commands transmitted from the mission team, a problem with that telecommunications unit means no science or engineering data from Voyager 1 is being returned to Earth.<p>A probe going further in space than any other that suddenly starts sending back incomprehensible science data is a pretty killer start to a sci-fi movie if you ask me.
A less alarmist and clickbait article can be found here: <a href="https://www.popsci.com/science/voyager-computer-issue/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.popsci.com/science/voyager-computer-issue/</a><p>NASA press release here: <a href="https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-to-resolve-issue-with-voyager-1-computer/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/12/12/engineers-working-...</a><p>TL;DR - Voyager is sending back bad data, they're working on it.
This is an absolutely terrible headline. Voyager is communicating with Earth, full stop. The data from it's scientific instruments is coming back in a fixed, repeating pattern, meaning we aren't getting anything meaningful from it, but it is absolutely still communicating with Earth.
Alternate link if you get a "browser blocked" error message.
<a href="https://archive.is/YnzAR" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.is/YnzAR</a>
>The last time Voyager 1 experienced a similar, but not identical, issue with the flight data system was in 1981<p>I would love to read about specifically what went wrong in 1981.<p>The closest I could find was this old article from 1981: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-still-misbehaving.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-stil...</a><p>But there isn't nearly enough detail in it. Is there an analysis anywhere online of that event?
In case anyone was curious<p>Both Voyager probes power themselves with radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. The continual decay process means the generator produces slightly less power each year<p><a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-will-do-more-science-with-new-power-strategy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-will-do-more-sci...</a>
Among my increasingly prized possessions is an original copy of Nasa's "Voyager Encounters Jupiter* report, detailing mission findings, and featuring some of the image highlights.<p>Internet Archive, bless them, have this online:<p><<a href="https://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19800025809/mode/2up" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.org/details/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19800025809/mo...</a>>
How sad to lose contact, but how wonderful that we seized our opportunity to send out this beautiful messenger into the great unknown.<p>This reminds me of something I have been curious about for some time now. The Voyager Golden record depicts the world at 1.5b years, 4.5b years, and 4.51b years. The image of the continents at 1.5b seems realistic with Pangea, 4.5b looks to be the world accurately today, but 4.51 is unrecognizable- with Oceania featuring many new islands, new islands around Madagascar, and a large gap between Northern Africa and Eurasia. What is this image? It’s especially confusing given that the earth is 4.54B years old and the ten million years time between the two images isn’t enough for any continental drift of that magnitude in any projections I’m aware of.<p>See Diagram 39 here: <a href="https://www.lost-painters.nl/atlas/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.lost-painters.nl/atlas/</a>
Interesting article from the launch in 1977 and some gyroscope problems they had early on<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/21/archives/voyager-heads-toward-planets-despite-snags-after-its-liftoff.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/21/archives/voyager-heads-to...</a>
> The Voyager team sent commands over the weekend for the spacecraft to restart the flight data system, but no usable data has come back yet, according to NASA.<p>I like how their attempted solution is to restart it
> Initially designed to last five years.<p>I imagine that it was only sold like this in order to be able to call the mission a success after 5 years. I imagine that the engineers that created the probes, designed them to last as long as possible and were targeting a much longer lifespan from the get go.
In a nice coincidence: The end of vger.kernel.org (<a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/954783/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://lwn.net/Articles/954783/</a>)
I was curious how Voyager 1 is powered. The answer is radioisotope thermoelectric generators (nuclear batteries):<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...</a><p>Seems we believe that they will last until 2025:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power</a>
<i>But Voyager 1’s flight data system now appears to be stuck on auto-repeat, in a scenario reminiscent of the film “Groundhog Day.”</i><p><i>A long-distance glitch
The mission team first noticed the issue November 14, when the flight data system’s telecommunications unit began sending back a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, like it was trapped in a loop</i><p>Poor little guy voyager! must’ve hit the age of our little historical diorama. Very Truman show.
Hey, if there's any NASA folk here or if you can drop a line to them... I'm kind of MIFFED at the regularity with which this issue is reported in the press as a "repeating pattern of ones and zeroes" and no one it seems, has any desire to divulge the <i>actual pattern that is being received.</i><p>If we're not in the Cold War surrounded by State Secrets, it is time to crowd-source this mystery and that means provide actual dumps of the repeating data along with examples of recent correct data... and perhaps a complete dump of instruction and data memory to the extent of which it is known... so armchair enthusiasts (who aren't all 'armchair' as some of them might have actually worked on Voyager or be familiar with its instruction set) can spot any real pattern or peg the origin of the repeated data. Of course the objective is to create a fault in emulation that at least partly mirrors reality, so we can devise strategies against it.<p>When I was a tech fixing S-100 bus memory cards and to a great extent today for some systems, identifying faulty chips from diagnostics or observed behavior was the same as fixing the problem, because they were in sockets and could easily be replaced. I even had a hilarious fault in memory-map days where spelling of a word processing document was flipping on the display (bit 1) but printed properly.<p>This sounds as if a conditional instruction has suffered a bit flip changing the condition and trapping it in a loop from which it should escape. The nature of the 'gibberish' (contemptible term in this context) might yield clues to the nature of the problem or to knowledgeable persons, where the data came from if it is a bit flip in a pointer. Whether crowd sourced persons are capable to actually solve the mystery or not, they might at least offer good suggestions for devising diagnostics to narrow down the cause.<p>We owe Voyager all our efforts, as the most inaccessible computer system in human history.
I feel like the voyager spacecraft are a part of me, growing up in the 80s marvelling at all the images they sent back it was a magical time. The idea of voyager going dark feels like losing a part of myself.<p>It's proven to be a hardy spacecraft and has defied a lot of seemingly terminal problems before, fingers crossed she can overcome this one too.<p>God speed Voyager.
I imagine being born, growing up, falling in love with science and engineering and space, going to college, getting a job at NASA, joining the Voyager team, and remotely troubleshooting a spacecraft that had left the Earth before being born.
This is one of the things that makes me full of wonder and awe! When we humans put our heads to something we can kick ass. Unfortunately, off late our heads have been into kicking each other instead of building something.
I was wondering, if at this moment an "alien" probe similar to Voyager passes by our solar system in close proximity to earth, how likely is it that with our radio telescope arrays etc (as they are currently set up), we, a "sufficiently advanced civilization", will be able to detect it? How much radio power do the probes emit? Will our scanning radio telescopes be able to pick up any trace of the signal, given the tx antennas are oriented away from the earth?
Voyager is the highest technical achievement of humankind to this day. Amount of knowledge we gained from that shuttle, run by a computer having a power of the computer that we have today in our car keys, is invaluable.<p>Let it fly in peace, maybe, some day, it will be only reminiscence of our civilization and planet Earth, crossing the universe...<p>There is a great documentary about Voyager- The Farthest - highly recommended.
> Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.<p>It's like when you write a program and you have to wait for almost two days to compile the code, run the program, and see its output. Meanwhile programmers these days complain when the build time is more than a few minutes.
For up to the minute information.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/nascom1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/nascom1</a>
I find it interesting how they use “aging spacecraft” and “exceptionally long lifespans” of these devices. In terms of the age of the universe, or the time that light from a star has travelled to us, it’s minute. Aging in relation to human life maybe.
Ok so it says online it’s going at almost 40,000 mph so what is stopping us from sending one at say 400,000 mph, then couldn’t we catch up with it eventually? and travel the same distance in like 5 years?
It's a shame deep space probe budgets aren't useful towards war on other countries or population-wide domestic surveillance or we'd have spacecraft at 10% the speed of light already.
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?
Voyager 1 idea dead. Long live, V'ger!<p>"V'ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve." – Spock
I mean, even if they can't recover it at this point, it's still been far more reliable and useful than any program I've ever written or hobby electronics project I've built. Along with Apollo it's really a testament to the phenomenal productivity of American science in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
> Initially designed to last five years<p>NASA tech often seems to outlive its initial mission length by a massive margin. The Mars rovers spring to mind. It's incredibly impressive, and almost embarrassing! Surely this isn't accidental. Is the kit massively over-specced? Do the uncertainties and risks necessitate such a depth of redundancy that when stuff goes kinda smoothly the thing lasts 9 times longer than it was designed to? Is it a political thing: they set their success criteria low just in case something goes wrong, but actually intend a much longer lifespan?<p>Sorry if this seems an incredibly cynical way of looking at the world. I actually love all this stuff - I'm just curious if there is a pattern here and what the reason is if so.
<p><pre><code> Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.
</code></pre>
I’m guessing “hotfix” commits don’t exist in this domain
LOL @ CNN blocking Firefox! "Browser Blocked<p>We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region.<p>We recommend you use a different browser or disable the “EasyList Cookie” filter from your “Content Filtering” settings (found under “Settings” -> “Shields” in the Brave Browser)."