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Comment by ramshanker | Hacker News Reader

So, they have all the codes and manuals to be able to control the probe after 37 years. More than that people able to operate those manuals.

DOCUMENTATION FTW.

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From https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-310

> "The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters," said Jones, chief engineer at JPL.

I'm curious as to what they mean by 'outdated.' Is the actual language outdated or simply the architecture? I would assume the latter, but it's tough to tell. I just can't figure out how assembly could become outdated.

Each processor has its own instruction set and thus assembly. Further, there are various assembly syntax dialects that can fall in and out of use. For example, the AT&T syntax and Intel syntax used for x86: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_assembly_language#Syntax

Meanwhile, after two years my Android phone will brick itself.

A little difference in design specifications and requirements :)

And cost.

Indeed, Voyager 1 and 2 combined cost slightly more than half of an iPhone X.

With orders of magnitude less processing power. Government projects just cost more..

> Meanwhile, after two years my Android phone will brick itself.

I understand the sentiment, but your phone was not made to exit the solar system.

Samsung Galaxy was designed to simulate the end of the solar system.

If it's anything like my old Chevy Nova, it'll light up the night sky.

I would think it was meant to simulate a super nova.

Note 3 with 3 gig ram. Works great.

Neither was Voayger

That's a very good point actually. It was meant to flyby the outer planets, and its mission was extended when it refused to break down.

Officially you're correct. But from the start the people working on it had planned/designed it to go further.

Opportunity was designed to work for about 3 months. It's been going more than 13 years.

It was cheaper too.

Instead, was designed to last only as long until the next induced appetite for a new phone. Cuz otherwise, financials wouldn't look as good while another company X in the industry capitalizes on it anyways

But they should be .. or at least last as long as an old C64. You can put newer Windows on pretty old hardware, and for really old hardware you can always slap Linux on and it will still be useful. There are still Kernel forks to support 386 processors!

Cellphones are a mess because we can't even have a nice base hardware platform. ARM isn't a platform. It's a SoC spec with random shit soldered to random pins by different vendors with completely non-upstreamable kernels. Google could just mandate UEFI on OHA phones like Microsoft did with theirs, but instead we're just getting this /vendor partition in the next release.

I don't think it's unintentional either. It's an aspect of planned obsolescence. The cellphone industry wants you to upgrade every two years, when we should not be destroying the planet and creating gear that lasts 10 years. Fewer factories, less pollution, longer life .. but we're in a consumerist economy hardwired the opposite direction, where any type of profit shortfall or lack of growth is seen as a problem, not the result of a good product.

It's not the lack of a platform, SBCs share operating systems and updates because there are mechanisms to deal with this.

The problem is the lack of vendor participation in the community.

Agreed, but if a public company makes stuff to last 10 (why not 20) years then they'll go bust because capitalism requires profit and sustainable ideals are contrary to profit.

What we need is a privately held cellphone company that will forgo profit in favour of creating long lasting, repairable, maintainable devices. [I've been working on this thesis for the transition from capitalism to communism]

Meanwhile I'm wearing a 25 year old tshirt, whilst tshirts bought much more recently wear out and get holes in.

It took my Nexus 40 days

Let's not talk about iOS updates that is making 6, 6s and 6s plus deprecated by lag

This is a great article on the engineers who have spent their careers caring for the Voyagers

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engine...

Thanks for the link, a very nice article indeed.

NASA usually has a duplicate system (full mechanicals, not just a simulation) to test things on to make sure they don't create a brick. NASA can also use the dupes as a backup in case there is an accident during launch and the first system gets destroyed.

I wonder how well the 37 year old duplicate mechanicals work.

Well... as long as they work precisely as well (or badly) as the 37-year-old originals do, that's perfect, right?

They should be kept in a space-cold vacuum.

The point really isn't to make sure the valves work (the environment might have broken them after a few decades in space), the point is to make sure the code you're uploading doesn't brick the computer. It's nice to have an original computer and fully replicated signal path to make sure there aren't any unforseen bugs. Emulators have a tendency to have 99% coverage but the missing 1% is what would cause us to throw an expensive brick out of the solar system.

This assertion is correct for the more recent robotic missions (Mars Science Lander, Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), Mars Pathfinder/Sojouner) but I don’t recall seeing or hearing about spares for earlier missions or satellite/spacecraft-based missions. Earlier missions would probably have had only an empty mechanical flight spare. I worked in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL and was very familiar with the Technical Inventory Management team (the group that managed storage and logistics for reusable and non-reusable technology assets).

Generally speaking, we built at least 3 versions (4 versions depending how you count).

1) Flight. The one put in the payload.

2) Flight spare. Often used in one of the 2 or 3 Mars test facilities at (the 2 Mars yards or simulation facility) and hooked up to a spare Ground Data System (controller system) via a 6 inch thick, 100 foot long “umbilical cord”.

3) A mechanical flight spare. A usually 80-90% mechanically accurate version that we called Bubba (at least for MER) that we’d pull out for Open House, or other special events and displays.

4) Lastly, I personally worked with subsystem flight spares (44u rack of the Satellite Communication Subsystem or the Flight Control System). Way too big to fit in a spacecraft in this configuration or a mock-up of the system.

What might be a more interesting story is how we bought dozens and dozens of old SUN pizza boxes and Sparc Stations in the mid and late 2000s from eBay (literally) in order to be able maintain the Flight Ground Data System.

they have the source too I suppose? they probably created a simulator to verify that they understood everything well, and because 19h is a long time

It's a lot easier when it's literally impossible to change the functionality.

The voyagers can be upgraded remotely. It had too, as it doesn’t have enough memory to store a program for its full mission.

AFAIK, the last update was in April 2010, “to delay turning off the AP Branch 2 backup heater for one year.“ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Interstellar_mission)

> It had too, as it doesn’t have enough memory to store a program for its full mission.

Don't you just hate it when they make devices rely on cloud services... :P

Not true, the voyagers can be in-flight reprogrammed: https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html

They can not only be remotely upgraded, but remotely reprogrammed to avoid bad bits. 1970s computers were primitive by our standards, but not that primitive.

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