You can agree with me or not, but Voyager 1/2 is a top technological achievement of the humankind. A piece of hardware so good that it survived working correctly 47 years in a hostile environment, driven by a computer with the power of modern car key. Amazing.
A radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1. And it would take the same to get a response back. Incredible. And imagine the patience needed to send commands and wait for the outcome on the part of the engineering team. You can't afford to send a wrong command and have the luxury of undo. Also, I wonder how many generations of engineers must have worked on the project by now.
I've often thought that simpler technology tends to be more robust because it has fewer moving parts.<p>This might be an apples-to-oranges comparison, but I've noticed that writing vanilla PHP or JavaScript code, while harder at first, results in more robust and easier-to-debug applications. On the other hand, using frameworks, ORMs, and other abstractions can make the codebase feel brittle and harder to maintain.
I'm so surprised it needs so many puffs per day (40?!) to keep the aircraft oriented at earth in space the vacuum of space where there's so much... vacuum.<p>When I started the article I figured they'd correct for orientation once every 2 weeks or so.
This is great, I love following the Voyagers.<p>>When Voyager 1 lifted off to space on September 5, 1977, no one expected that the probe would still be operating today.<p>This is kind of an odd statement :) When launched, I remember brief news broadcasts and articles in the local newspaper stating the engineers added abilities that were not approved hoping for a much longer life time. It never stated if they got in trouble. But lasting this long is quite an achievement.
Wow. The thrusters are part of the Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem(AACS) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1</a> for more great detail.
Does anyone know what the reference points are for the rotation manoeuvres? The text does not provide any information on how the probe knows that it is off. It needs some kind of reference, no?
Whenever I throw out to the trash any electronic equipment sitting in my attic, sooner more than later is that I will need that equipment. It's Murphy's law.