The announcement that Voyager 1’s instruments were returning data again came two days after JPL announced the passing of Ed Stone, who served as Voyager’s project scientist from the mission’s inception in 1972 until 2022.
They’re basically rewriting the software, and if it goes horribly wrong, the probe will just stop talking forever. So no one was in a big rush to push this into production.
Incredible that we can still receive the signal after all this time over such a vast distance. I wish we made our current devices with such longevity in mind 😉😄
Voyager is the Nokia of space probes: practically obsolete, code written in ancient runes almost nobody can still decipher and read… yet still keeps on ticking.
But aren’t there like a bunch of little rocks from like asteroids and stuff? That’s what I never got even for launches from earth, why isn’t everything up there just getting peppered nonstop from debris. I guess space is really just that empty
Debris like that will tend to concentrate around a gravitational focus. There’s a lot more of the space rocks and stuff you’re worried about within the inner solar system than towards the edges where there’s little gravity to keep those objects from falling further into the solar system. That’s why JWST had micro meteor impact damage so early after its launch.
No documentation, imagine! The original designers–dead. This person had to reverse engineer every aspect of that system, though I can’t imagine that it has more than, say, 64KB of RAM. Still an enormous amount of work but not like trying to figure out how an iPhone works without any documentation.
According to the above, the software was written in FORTRAN.
There's probably at least one warehouse somewhere full of green bar sprocketed teletype / dot matrix paper with the source code on it, if not also magnetic tapes. And that assumes they haven't archived it in other places and formats in the last ~50 years.
70kB though. That's a huge amount of memory for 1977. Low-end personal computers were still selling with less than that 10 years later.
That said, the article doesn't distinguish ROM and RAM, so I wonder how much of that is ROM. ROM is and was far cheaper.
Also, that 70 might be a rounding up of 65536 bytes, which is 64k, so you might be spot on with your guess there.
Ha my sister had to learn FORTRAN for her research science work. Lot of long-term, old survey tools use it still. Apparently it was… not a pleasant experience to learn the language haha.
Yeah, I had a Sinclair spectrum with 48k ram. Later on I had a BBC B computer that iirc had 32k. It was actually a pretty powerful machine, you could do a lot with it.
This legitimately made me sad when I heard they might lose this satellite. It’s the farthest humans have ever sent anything beyond Earth, and it might always be the case. The science data coming back from this is invaluable.
We’ll surely get faster. Remember that Voyager 1 actually made a pass around one of the planets (Jupiter?) specifically to slow it down so that it could start gathering data. It would not be (relatively speaking) hard to send something out at a far greater velocity.
I’m glad they do, a lot of the missions I work around have been flying for 20 years when their original mission duration was supposed to be 5 years. The science they do is fantastic.
We can absolutely go way faster. The fastest thing we’ve ever built is currently the parker solar probe. Relative to the sun, it’s traveling so fast it could do a flyby of earths entire width in (I’m just guessing, don’t quote me) probably a couple seconds.
I just did the math. Parker’s top speed is around 430,000mph. So with the earth being a bit over 7900 miles across it would take a minute for Parker to traverse the width of the earth.
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