I was born in the early 70's and the Voyager's have been travelling most of my life. In some ways they're like a touch-stone, something I always click on when I see an article.
One day, like me, they'll finally die, but until then may they travel onwards and outwards.
A tip of the hat to folks at NASA and JPL that built this marvel, with 70's tech, that still continues to amaze and delight us.
The worst that could have happened is that the spacecraft would have kept the dish in the wrong position until October, at which point it would have re established contact. This isn’t even the last time the Voyager program has had similar outages, IIRC they had to shut down the dish for maintenance for several months and when they re established contact the spacecraft was fine. They should review their MOPS procedures so this doesn’t happen again (it’s generally standard practice to run commands against a simulated version of the spacecraft in a similar operating condition or a replica to make sure it won’t do something destructive) but from the first time I saw the headline for this my first thought was “lmao” and I was never really worried this would cause lasting problems for the spacecraft.
Is there by any chance literature you'd recommend about this kind of tech? Maybe more on the lighter side?
Here’s a good article specific to Voyager https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-annive...
I can’t find it but there was a slide deck online for Curiosity with an explanation of all the stuff I was talking about above
in case anyone got confused like me - receiver dish _on Earth_ was shut down
Some of the risks involved are - we don't have a good model of the flying hardware. The telemetry is extremely limited and engineers who made / understand it are scarce. Current situation of messing up commands is one of the consequences of that. There is a number of faults that are isolated and recovered via software workarounds, any kind of reset could default you in a non functional configuration. This is aging hardware that is slowly deteriorating, severed comms stop your ability to react to the events.
The overall risk of permanent contact loss was probably low, but due to all the unknowns the error bars are quite high.
I thought mostly of "wow". They had a plan for a case when this "shout" didn't work. So they had at least two plans what could be done and the first one worked all right.
Half a century and 20 billion of kilometres from Earth and it still works.