The substance of this news release is incredible, but its style is also admirable. The authors managed to convey in seven paragraphs a concise and comprehensible explanation of how the team resolved the technical issue.
Ha! Thank you for mentioning it. I thought the same as well while reading it. It was terse but not skimping on details while maintaining a certain style.
I really wish most other websites were like this. SEO and Google has really made the world a worse place.
That's what happens when you're freed from "SEO-optimized content".
It's also a culture thing I'd probably put under military philosophy.
I've worked with ex-military engineers, and you can tell from how they communicate. Writing technical reports and memos is a skill.
There's something very beautiful about Voyager's journey so far.
I hope one day when we're a true interstellar species we'll still keep tabs on it. The data may not be useful anymore, but it would be cool to imagine a year 3000 society with a little "Look at where Voyager is now :)" tool that you can see its path and where humans have colonized by comparison.
I think a 19 year old yobbo, whose dad is a successful interstellar logistics businessman, who out of a guilty conscience for never having had time for his son and having bought him an overpowered spacecraft, will either put grafitti on it or misjudge his afterburner and half burn it while trying to fly a very tight corner around it, in order to impress the 2 girls he has on board.
I’ve imagined a scene playing out, in sci-fi or for real in the distant future, where astronauts test out a new propulsion system by flying out towards Voyager 1 and catch up to it with ease. As they approach, they see the ancient probe grow larger and larger in their window until…
If my math is correct, we would already need to build a spaceship that can travel at 1/10th the speed of light to reach Voyager 1 within one week. It will be quite an engineering challenge for the future.
There was a Star Trek: Voyager episode in which Voyager finds one of the original Voyager probes on a planet. The episode is called Friendship One [0].
The plutonium 238 decays according to a curve, and the thermocouples are degraded as well by heat and radiation according to a curve. So the power output drops rather predictably: "The radioisotope thermoelectric generator on each spacecraft puts out 4 watts less each year." [1]
The Voyagers will soon no longer have enough power to operate any of their instruments. They'll have enough power to continue operating the transmitter (which serves as a science experiment of its own) into the 2030s. The power of the signal will drop before the electronics and control brown out (if it works as designed), and it the signal might become too weak to detect before the probe completely stops operating. Such a fate befell Pioneer 11, who may yet still be warbling away at low power no longer pointed at Earth; its carrier was last detected in 2003.
If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics.
Maybe we don't need to go anywhere at all. Maybe we [1] have all we need right here to become literal gods.
[1] Our digital descendants. Humans are very much fit to the gas exchange and metabolism envelope of our gravity well.
> compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans
Unfortunately the simulated classical humans in your Matrioshka Brain will want to mine Bitcoin, which means that our digital descendants will have to become a true interstellar species anyway in order to convert the Laniakea Supercluster into coin-mining computronium.
> If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics.
I grant that. But why would that keep us from pressing on?
If we have more resources in general, we will also have more resources for interstellar adventures.
How they manage to squeeze all the resources of the probe and keep it working year after year is an astounding achievement, pleasantly mind-blowing.
It is important that all the know-how about this type of maintenance never disappear. I hope the designs in electronics that this team would have wanted to have available in the probe are implemented in the new designs.
I should see whether there's documentation of what they moved and what they replaced. I imagine there's "plenty" of room to do that (in the sense that there's probably some programs that are no longer mission-relevant because they controlled systems that have been shut down), but I'd love to know what got tossed.
Voyager has been an inspiration for generations of engineers.
Bless you all that worked on it. Thank you.
Recently I designed in a Voyager inspired secret Easter egg into the surgical robot I designed. I put a gold (plated) plate with everyone's signature engraved on it. Gave everyone one as a surprise Christmas gift.
It's the Maestro from Moon Surgical, it's done over 200 surgeries, all successful. So far (no whammy) its had 100% reliability with the first 6 systems we built. We designed it (hardware wise) with only 3 engineers, including me, and we hand built the first ones right here in San Carlos, CA. The company is based in Paris and has a whole interesting history there as well.
With some amount of luck, Voyager might last ten more years beyond that:
"Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth."
What a sweet film. Thank you for the link. This whole time when I heard about work on the Voyager mission I assumed there was a larger team, with fewer single points of failure.
> The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth.
Talk about a slow feedback loop! And I get frustrated when I need to push code to a repo to test things in CI...
Downlink from Voyager to Earth is currently 40 bits/s but can be up to 160 bits/s. The signal is received at -160dBm or around 100 _zeptowatts_ (1e-22 kW).
Have you investigated this or are you just asking? I imagine if you wish to learn the answer it is a few simple searches away. And by “imagine” I mean, it is.
> A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth.
It has taken 46 years to get 22.5 light hours away from Earth!
Yes, this is why I always liked 'planet walks' like this [1]
If you see Images the planets in the solar system, the solar system itself etc. are mostly not to scale. If you walk such path one get a bit of a feel how large everything is, I think especially if the plantes on the walk are to scale too.
Even our solar system is mostly empty. And the distances to moon a microscopic.
Walking such a path is is not the same, but a bit like [3] if one is patient (which is difficult on the internet) and doesn't scroll manually but only via the little "c" in the lower right corner, wich scrolls with light speed.
Readit News
I really wish most other websites were like this. SEO and Google has really made the world a worse place.
Dead Comment
I hope one day when we're a true interstellar species we'll still keep tabs on it. The data may not be useful anymore, but it would be cool to imagine a year 3000 society with a little "Look at where Voyager is now :)" tool that you can see its path and where humans have colonized by comparison.
It was the surprise ending for the first Star Trek film...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur...
[0]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Friendship_One_(episode...
The Voyagers will soon no longer have enough power to operate any of their instruments. They'll have enough power to continue operating the transmitter (which serves as a science experiment of its own) into the 2030s. The power of the signal will drop before the electronics and control brown out (if it works as designed), and it the signal might become too weak to detect before the probe completely stops operating. Such a fate befell Pioneer 11, who may yet still be warbling away at low power no longer pointed at Earth; its carrier was last detected in 2003.
[1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/
Supposed to run out in the 2020s
If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics.
Maybe we don't need to go anywhere at all. Maybe we [1] have all we need right here to become literal gods.
[1] Our digital descendants. Humans are very much fit to the gas exchange and metabolism envelope of our gravity well.
Unfortunately the simulated classical humans in your Matrioshka Brain will want to mine Bitcoin, which means that our digital descendants will have to become a true interstellar species anyway in order to convert the Laniakea Supercluster into coin-mining computronium.
I grant that. But why would that keep us from pressing on?
If we have more resources in general, we will also have more resources for interstellar adventures.
It is important that all the know-how about this type of maintenance never disappear. I hope the designs in electronics that this team would have wanted to have available in the probe are implemented in the new designs.
Heck of a job.
Bless you all that worked on it. Thank you.
Recently I designed in a Voyager inspired secret Easter egg into the surgical robot I designed. I put a gold (plated) plate with everyone's signature engraved on it. Gave everyone one as a surprise Christmas gift.
Voyager might make it to 2027.
With some amount of luck, Voyager might last ten more years beyond that:
"Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth."
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/
(And then, 15,000 years later, maybe this happens: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football )
Oh, good, it won't have to suffer a year 2038 problem :)
Also: what's with that last link? Definitely didn't expect something to make my browser slow to a crawl.
Deleted Comment
Talk about a slow feedback loop! And I get frustrated when I need to push code to a repo to test things in CI...
16/18-bit custom architecture, 4k/8k words (around 9/18KB total). Other sources I could find indicate a 250kHz clock frequency and around 8KIPS.
It has taken 46 years to get 22.5 light hours away from Earth!
Walking such a path is is not the same, but a bit like [3] if one is patient (which is difficult on the internet) and doesn't scroll manually but only via the little "c" in the lower right corner, wich scrolls with light speed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_Planet_Walk (there are several other listed at the bottom of the page)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model
[3] https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....