Discussed earlier:<p>"NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause" (30.10.2024)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41992394">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41992394</a>
I think the Voyager probes teach us lots about what's wrong with corporate America. Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, or that isn't built by committee where they just keep shipping requirements around from one department to another. Imagine if it weren't all proprietary and if it didn't have no public or even complete documentation.<p>Think of all the problems we have instead: Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. It's like we've ceded control of our ability to do things to "methods" that corporations insist upon, even though they've been proven worse.<p>Heck - if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running?<p>It's nice to see when science takes priority to everything else, and the hardware reflects that.
I'm reading Pale Blue Dot to my kids at night currently so this is really awesome. (The Voyager missions are described in excellent detail in ways that I never appreciated fully before.)<p>It blows my mind that these are machines from the 8-track era. And they have fallbacks and redundancies that were completely ahead of their time.
Whenever such an announcement is made, I keep asking myself something along the lines: "Just how much stuff did they put on board that thing, that there is always some way of using something differently or something different, to get back a working connection???" Incredible engineering.
I didn’t realize the Voyagers relied on a once in a 175 year planetary alignment. What a lucky break technology had advanced to the point we could make use of it.
> scientists and engineers back on Earth have increasingly had to deal with age-related maintenance issues<p>There is perhaps unintended irony in that sentence, but it does evoke some Asimov stories in which human characters age while supporting technology.
It's fascinating how Voyager 1, despite my lack of space knowledge, utilizes a nuclear power source for 40+ years, offering steady and reliable power without any moving parts that could degrade over time.<p>In contrast, India's decision to rely on solar panels led vikram lander to be dead in just 14 days due to lack of sunlight (afaik).<p>I'm curious about the rationale behind this choice when nuclear power seems like a far superior option. Can someone shed light on this decision?
Would there not be some kind of benefit to send a chaser after the probes in order to act as a relay as the signal gets further away? Or is the ground based array just as good as anything we could put in space at this time?
Can we send a voyager 3 with much advance battery and sensor, and at much faster speed so that it may reach farther than voyager 1 and 2, in let’s say just couple of years ?
Worth a watch, imo:<p><i>It's Quieter in the Twilight</i><p><a href="https://www.space.com/nasa-voyager-mission-engineers-documentary" rel="nofollow">https://www.space.com/nasa-voyager-mission-engineers-documen...</a><p>Interesting trying to manage their declining power budget. And decipher docs written 40+ years ago.
Were engineers 50 years ago just much smarter than we are now? It’s pretty unbelievable that these things still work. Or is there something systemic about how they were able to achieve so much so long ago with basically no computers to help.
It's just amazing how little progress in space flight has been since then and since the Apollo missions. I was just looking at some newspapers from 1969 (saved by my mother-in-law) and it was all about the Moon mission, and what awaits us - they talked about settlements throughout the Solar system, flying cars and so on and so on. Given what happened since, it was a huge disappointment. And now ancient Voyager is our last best hope to explore the outer rim.
Now that we've got SpaceX cheap launches, it's time to launch a fleet of solar system probes and space telescopes.<p>Why isn't this happening?
Imagine 100 years from now they come up with a probe engine that can get to 10% the speed of light, it would only take a month to reach Voyager.<p>Even at only 1% it would take under a year, but lots of breakthroughs needed for even that.
For the HN ultra-nerds: is there a book that details the voyager 1 construction including sensors, PCBs, materials compositions manufacturing processes and all that? I’m looking for something so dense I’ll need a therapist to find my way back to society afterwards. Truly curious thank you.