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Comment by h43k3r | Hacker News Reader

I love the engineering behind Voyager 2. Is there a good book or documentary that folks here on HN recommend to go deep on the various engineering pieces behind Voyager ?

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These three videos by EEVblog detail the ground based antennas and how it is contacted:

EEVblog 1547 (Part 1) - Contacting the Voyager 2 Space Probe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=586Zn1ct-QA

EEVblog 1547 (Part 2) - PINGing the Voyager 2 Space Probe!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUvzgZt1Vug

EEVblog 1547 (Part 3) - Tour of the NASA Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfZz4EnhJBE

The following document describes how the Voyager spacecraft communicate with the NASA Deep Space Network. https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_n...

This is part of a larger series of publications that may be of interest. https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/summary.html

Very interesting stuff - I had to go do my homework after reading that on how the radio ranging modulation works.

There's a book on the computers used at NASA from the beginning through to when it was written - late 80s, I think. Whole thing is available online [1]

It has a chapter titled "Voyager - The Flying Computer Center". [2] It gives a high-level overview of the computers and software. Three different processors, each dual redundant. 18 and 16 bit machines. Comparable to early 1970s minicomputers.

There's a good talk about the computers on the Voyagers available online here. [3]

As far as I know, beyond what's available between those two sources, very little otherwise is available publicly on the computer hardware itself - no detailed architecture descriptions, instruction sets, electronics details, etc. And no software listings. Though if I had to guess the 18-bit machines are a lot like - but not the same as - the OBP/AOP/NSSC series [4].

A bit of Voyager trivia: the computers were reprogrammed in-flight to give new abilities the Voyagers didn't have at launch, such as new image compression algorithms to allow more images to be returned than originally anticipated.

[1] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html

[2] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSSC-1

It's not particularly "deep", but The Farthest [1] is a nicely constructed documentary of the Voyager program featuring interviews with many of the relevant people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farthest

A book instead, the Haynes NASA Voyager Workshop Manual goes into plenty of technical detail.

https://www.amazon.com/NASA-Voyager-Owners-Workshop-Manual/d...

I had no idea Haynes was doing this. Hysterical and wonderful. Thank you!

Pretty sure it's just selling the brand, ha ha. They're very in-depth though.

there's this conference talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o

“The Farthest” by PBS has interviews with the people who built the probes, it’s a pretty great watch https://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/

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