NASA detects 'heartbeat' signal from Voyager 2 after losing contact | Hacker News Reader

NASA detects 'heartbeat' signal from Voyager 2 after losing contact

theguardian.com

46 pointswhycome14 comments

> While the heartbeat signal has reassured Nasa that the probe is still working, it is not yet responding to new commands. The next hope of making contact with the spacecraft will come this week when the Canberra dish, part of Nasa’s deep space network, beams the correct command in the direction of Voyager 2 in the hope of reaching the probe’s antenna, according to the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

> Nasa concedes that the attempt to make contact through the huge dish antenna in Canberra is a long shot. If that effort comes to nothing, as engineers expect, mission controllers will have to wait until October, when the spacecraft should reset automatically and restore communications.

Also, signals take more than 18 hours to travel one-way.

"Though state-of-the art in the 1970s, the Voyager spacecraft have only four kilobytes of storage onboard …”

Love this factoid. I wonder who manufactured the memory chips.

There are actually three separate computer systems in the probe: two with 4K and one with 8K memory. Each computer system is a fully redundant pair, so in total there's actually 32K of memory in the probe.

During certain parts of the mission they ran some systems in a non-redundant mode so they could double their processing and get more science done.

What they did with the Voyager 1 & 2 probes was amazing.

Edit: actually I am mistaken. Each probe had around 69KB of memory. I confused word capacity with kilobytes when looking it up.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/multimedia/vgrmem...

Agreed. I was about 10 years old at the time they launched, and they still capture my imagination today.

Factoid means myth does it not?

Yes and no. It appears they are using it correctly but it was initially used more specifically as "unverified at best". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

> A factoid is either an invented or assumed statement presented as a fact, or a true but brief or trivial item of news or information.

It's apparently all "Plated wire memory" which was a Bell Labs invention, so quite possibly Bell themselves.

Edit: more likely made by Honeywell, since they seem to have made the other plated wire memory used in the shuttle.

Voyager 2 had several megabytes of tape storage, but I'm guessing it's no longer in use. And according to [1] each of its computers has more than four kilobytes of memory. Though I honestly don't know if Wired is a more reliable source...

1. https://www.wired.com/2013/09/vintage-voyager-probes/

I can only imagine a 31st century being complaining about sourcing belts to restore their vintage voyager probe for their retro tech YouTube channel.

    And believe me I am still alive
    I'm doing science and I'm still alive
    I feel fantastic and I'm still alive
    And while you're dying I'll be still alive...

The Canberra antenna they will use is one of the last of its kind. Apparently many of the original dishes were made specifically for tracking the Apollo missions and then repurposed or retired after. Interesting tidbit: "The antenna weighs more than 3000 tonnes and rotates on a film of oil approximately 0.17mm thick."

Is there any sience they still so on this thing? As I understood it they are running out of power to run instruments?

A small amount due to how far away it is so it can observe extrasolar space. Not very well since a lot of the instruments don’t work but still useful information.

As recently as 2018, Voyager 2 provided a very interesting bit of data in the form of leaving the heliosphere[1], indicating the spacecraft has officially left the neighborhood.

[1] https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12670

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