NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away
bgr.com
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Half a century of operation. Bits of data, like gold dust, peppering our radio telescopes with telemetry from the edges of our protective solar shell, and beyond.
Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated, but the pushing of boundaries of our understanding is awe inspiring. It carries the symbolism of some of the best parts of humanity’s desire to explore.
This sort of news, at least for me, is an antidote to the darker side of our species. It reinvigorates my hope in what we can achieve when working together.
Thank you to NASA and the scientific community at large.
The stability of society (specifically American, specifically California/Caltech/JPL/Pasadena) must also be marveled at. That's 2 or 3 generations of engineers and scientists that were trained well enough to actually get things done. This is a marvel of teaching, technical communication, and societal infrastructure. Notably, NASA/JPL has maintained its prestige and funding for that entire time, as has Caltech.
There are many institutions (Sears), and world superpowers (USSR) from 50 years ago that seemed like they would dominate forever, but are gone.
And then, this puts me in absolute awe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_mahavihara
A residential university that ran for ~750 years. What a marvelous achievement of human culture and spirit!
It survived multiple royal dynasties.
USA gained independence 247 years ago. That puts it in a minority of countries that have been sovereign as long or longer.
This should be front-of-mind whenever someone proposes a start-up to address some long-standing social, societal, and/or political issues:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345506>
The other institutional forms which seem to tend toward durability are educational and religious institutions. Which often overlap considerably.
Governmental institutions are durable even when they are detrimental to society, as long as the government has enough police and military might to prevent insurrections. The society must put up with grossly inefficient institutions simply because the government has a monopoly on some sectors.
As to the other substance of your comment, I suspect you would benefit from reading this and its references: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366751>
We often see this in infrastructure, like train electrification, tunnel boring and so on. Trams is a good one, so many cities got ride of their tram system, 50 years later they want to build it again and many of them issues.
Edit: apparently, due to the post-Apollo budget environment in the 1970s, the Voyager program had to keep costs down so while some new systems were developed, they also reused technology from the Viking program, not even updating or enhancing it.
"The Voyager CCS and Viking CCS would ultimately have the same amount of memory (just under 70kB) despite the routines and programs for Voyager being much more complex. In-flight programming allowed for new routines and programs to be uploaded regularly in non-volatile memory and eliminated the need for large amounts of memory to be required onboard."
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-annive...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas
> The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques.
That's at least 4000 years of lossless transmission.
Also given humanity has existed for many years longer than 4000 years and 4000 years really only represents 160 generations of humans I don't consider that impressive.
And documentation to an average software project is lost in 1 year.
> 4000 years really only represents 160 generations of humans I don't consider that impressive
But 3 generations at Nasa is?
Conoaring this to 3 generations ia peak absurdity
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engine...
>Over decades, the crew members who have remained have forgone promotions, the lure of nearby Silicon Valley and, more recently, retirement, to stay with the spacecraft. NASA funding, which peaked during the Apollo program in the 1960s, has dwindled, making it next to impossible to recruit young computer-science majors away from the likes of Google and Facebook.
This problem can be attacked in a couple of ways, one way is to increase compensation sure, but another is to make it possible to have healthcare and housing on the salary they do offer. The chasm between pay and cost of living is huge and growing.
Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money and all they would do is buy drugs. And that's why we can't have nice things.
There are many countries with universal healthcare and a decent social safety net (Scandinavia comes to mind).
Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them?
You might argue that there's more tech came out of the UK (which still has some sort of healthcare, and had free education until recently) than there should considering its population and economy size. E.g. ARM, HTML, cloned sheep... Also quite a bit of popular music came from the UK. And Harry Potter was written by a person on state benefits.
The Scandinavian social safety net is excellent and I think the positive effects of that are apparent. People can take larger risks than they can in the US, but still nowhere near as large as they could with UBI
And the flip: Shouldn't Scandinavia be overrun with drug-addled do-nothings if social welfare is so bad?
> Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money ...
If you look at that 'half' as people representing the status quo power, they don't want an explosion in such things that cause change.
If you are a risk taker, especially a young one, lack of UBI or health insurance is not going to stop you. It never has in the past, when those things didn't exist.
These are your types who currently bootstrap themselves and grow slowly rather than seek explosive growth by way of external funding, and I think you’d see both see this group grow and become more bold if basics like housing weren’t something that was ever in question.
I anecdotally know a number of people, both in and out of tech, who would prefer to be independent contractors or small-business owners - in fields that they know well, and stand better than even chances of ending up with higher total compensation - but have families. Their fear of losing healthcare benefits (temporarily, whilst they get their businesses off the ground; or longer-term, should their businesses fail) keeps them working for others.
The sibling post about "calculated risk" is correct. The conclusion these folks have made (not to strike out on their own, under current circumstances) is likely the correct one, but it's a continual drag on total economic potential. Worse, this is a cost which isn't captured by calculations of what's currently spent on health-care, nor can be off-set against what a more robust social safety net would "cost". It is, nevertheless, considerable.
Only the _documentation_ effort must be monumental.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rock...
Just like the comparison to code quality I often see is any such NASA thread: it's a whole different ballgame when one is sending a spacecraft out, or carrying lives to space, than "I tried to send a Slack message and it did a sowweee,oopsiez"
Voyager Telecom: https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_n...
A lot more at the top-level site and the links on the right-hand side: https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/
Not having that failure feedback loop is daunting. I really respect that kind of work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Computers_and_...
In 1994 JPL started working on the Remote Agent (RA), an autonomous spacecraft control system. RA was written entirely in Common Lisp despite unrelenting political pressure to move to C++. At one point an attempt was made to port one part of the system (the planner) to C++. This attempt had to be abandoned after a year. Based on this experience I think it's safe to say that if not for Lisp the Remote Agent would have failed.
We used four different Common Lisps in the course of the Remote Agent project: MCL, Allegro, Harlequin, and CLisp. These ran in various combinations on three different operating systems: MacOS, SunOS, and vxWorks. Harlequin was the Lisp that eventually flew on the spacecraft. Most of the ground development was done in MCL and Allegro. (CLisp was also ported to vxWorks, and probably would have been the flight Lisp but for the fact that it lacked threads.) We moved code effortlessly back and forth among these systems.
The Remote Agent software, running on a custom port of Harlequin Common Lisp, flew aboard Deep Space 1 (DS1), the first mission of NASA's New Millennium program. Remote Agent controlled DS1 for two days in May of 1999. During that time we were able to debug and fix a race condition that had not shown up during ground testing. (Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.)
The Remote Agent was subsequently named "NASA Software of the Year".
"One of the reasons I stayed at JPL for twelve years was that I was appalled at what the software industry had become. The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components. The "interface specification" for these "components" usually involves a list of tools in which an engineer has received "training." (I really detest the use of the word "training" in relation to professional activities. Training is what you do to dogs. What you should be doing with people is educating them, not training them. There is a big, big difference.)"
This probably isn't the "most Lisp like," though, even though it does have s-expressions and cons cells. The other person who suggested Coalton is probably right, since AFAIK it's just Common Lisp with static types.
Another point of reference is the heliosphere, at 100AU. 1AU (earth to Sun) is 93M miles, so the heliosphere is around 2.5 Plutos away.
Nope. At its current speed, we’ve got another 129 years. That’s an underestimate because the spacecraft will continue to decelerate a bit as it pulls farther away from the sun.
That’s about 60,000 years to the nearest star.
Assuming it doesn't hit a rock or eventually fall into something. How long could it physically last with cosmic rays etc hitting it? will it eventually just an unrecognizable metal lump?
Likely a long, long time.
Neanderthal cave paintings have lasted upwards of 60,000 years.
So I expect Voyager to be more or less structurally similar in 60,000 years
I don't know if that makes it any easier to grasp, but I have a hard enough time relating to Pluto's distance, let alone the Voyagers.
Putting large numbers in context helps understand them. "Muricans" know it, and so do Europeans at the European Space Agency. Here's what they write about the International Space Station:
> At 28 800 km/h it only takes 92 minutes for the weightless laboratory to make a complete circuit of Earth. Astronauts working and living on the Station experience 16 sunrises and sunsets each day.
They could have left it at 28 800 km/h - which is metric - and call it a day. But they went an extra mile (or should I say an extra 1.6 kilometer) to put that number into perspective.
https://www.jpost.com/science/space/article-761322#asteroid-...
Freaking HN.
Describing a distance as "4 Plutos" isn't that helpful when Pluto is too dim to see with the naked eye, and still only a dot with a good ground-based telescope.
Even smaller distances like "AU" are too big for a human mind, with the Earth itself being less than a pixel across if the orbits were drawn to scale on an 8K monitor.
That gives a pretty good feel for how far away it is!
Most stars (and galaxies) can be described with the same words I just used for Pluto, but stars and galaxies are thousands to trillions of times further away than Pluto.
- Pluto's the size of the moon, more or less. (Or even assuming it's ~Earth-sized), but... - ... can barely be seen from Earth, even with fancy equipment, and - ...The probe is 4x farther away than that.
Gives good "distant" vibes in a way that large numbers don't.
So such a statement would either insinuate that Americans are genetically inferior somehow, or you're just culturally attuned to an outdated British system.
I was feeling so low today that I just switched to HN to tune things off of my mind, saw this headline and right off the bat, am in a better mood.
What an incredible feat of engineering !
The whole read is gripping, but the most interesting part for me is the section "Developing Voyager's Flight Data System Computer " describes the choice to use CMOS memory and DMA from instruments.
After determining requirements, Wooddell examined possible hardware and software tradeoffs. In an insightful memorandum, John Morecroft explained the concept of "soft logic" as a complement to the "hard logic" in the Flight Data System44. Writing in 1975, when the actual flight software began to be prepared, Morecroft pointed out that the program for the computer was actually a soft representation of hard-wired circuits. Conceptually, the memo stands as an explanation of the essential meaning of firmware in general.43. J. Wooddell, "Design of a CMOS Processor," pp. 2-3, files of J. Wooddell. 44)J. Morecroft to K. Frewing, "FDS Programming," January 14, 1975, files of R.J. Rice, Jet Propulsion Lab.
Part I : Manned Spacecraft Computers [1]
Part II: Computers On Board Unmanned Spacecraft [2]
Part III: Ground Based Computers for Space Flight Operations [3]
[0] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html
[1] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Part1.html
Bug fixes and improvements, watered the plants, took out the trash.
Keep VoyagerOS up to date to always have the best experience!
NASA went down to k=7 (from k=9) for convoluted coding.
Not only were Golay and Reed-Solomon ("a special subset of [Bose-Chadhuri-Hocquehem] codes" which are "a powerful class of Hamming code", Brown, Elements of Spacecraft Design) used, convolutional coding was also used.
Sources:
- Figure 3 - https://i.stack.imgur.com/z5F1p.png
> There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft, two of each kind, sometimes used for redundancy. They are proprietary, custom-built computers built from CMOS and TTL medium-scale CMOS integrated circuits and discrete components, mostly from the 7400 series of Texas Instruments.[34] Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K.
32K memory to manage such a complex device for 46 years .. Nowadays the size of an OS is measured in GB's.
Word size was 18 bits, so 32k words is an enormous 72 kilobytes.
Google also gives me 69.63 kilobytes, for example in https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15iaox2/nasa_ha...
https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html says the CCS had 8k words (“Along with the new chips, the memory changed with an expansion to 8K”)
I guess the confusion is because the hardware has multiple (¿3?) computers.
Even if we had a voyager travelling the "opposite" direction, once outside the solar system they'd appear to be travelling at almost the same speed with respect to the orbit of the solar system around the milky way.
The solar system is estimated to orbit ~200km/sec around the centre of the milky way.
Even with a perfect ejection, at the estimated speed of Voyager you'd end up with one probe going ~180km and the other ~220km, which isn't a huge difference.
And that's without the fact that getting Voyager to that speed required some unique planetary alignment.
1/(2sqrt(2) - 3) ~ 5.83
times more energy to throw an object to the center of a gravity well than it does to throw it out of orbit.
It doesn’t matter how close your initial orbit it, or whether you’re orbiting around the Sun or Sagittarius A*. The ratio is always the same, though gravitational assistance from other bodies often affects the calculations in practice.
I expect we’d send a satellite outside the Milky Way long before we get one anywhere near the center of the galaxy. Not that either mission seems particularly feasible with current technology.
The key metric is that their locations would spread by ~40km/sec. Whether that is an interesting amount of distance in an interesting amount of time is debatable, but that's the number.
In the 21st century NASA has launched exactly three RTG-powered missions: New Horizons (2006), Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity (2012), and Mars 2020/Perseverance. The next will be the (very awesome) Dragonfly mission to Titan, planned to launch in 2027. So given a cadence of roughly seven years, and one out of four missions targeting trans-Neptunian space, you could expect to launch an interstellar probe every 30 years or so, barring significant advances in power technology. The next one will most likely be a sorely-needed Uranus or Neptune flyby mission that would possibly launch in the mid to late 2030s.
There are maybe a dozen reasonable mission proposals submitted for every mission that actually ends up at the launch pad. The competition is fierce, and any proposal has to argue its return on investment incredibly convincingly to get selected for implementation. We now know many interesting Kuiper Belt objects that would definitely deserve a closer look – but we also know many other things that are much more accessible and would also deserve a closer look!
No amount of extra money would realistically allow NASA (or any space agency) to fly missions simply "because we might discover something" because there are always many, many other mission proposals in the pipeline with vastly better justification than merely "because we might discover something".
You are correct in that the Voyagers' launch window was unique.
Nit pick: gravity assist doesn't fundamentally rely on gravity. It extracts energy from planets' motion about the sun [1]. If we could somehow "bounce" a spacecraft off a planet's surface, it would impart momentum similar to that of a gravity assist. (In my opinion, it's a badly-named term.)
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/learn/basics-of-space-flight/primer...
When my kids were little, I showed them by holding a basketball in one hand and a tennis ball in the other, with the tennis ball on top of and touching the basketball. When I dropped them simultaneously, they fell together and bounced off the driveway — and the tennis ball took off like a rocket (no pun intended).
I'm not sure how you can make that claim. If you were to bounce off the surface, that would likely not be considered a "gravity assist", no?
It’s also a good illustration of why we call some forces strong and others weak.
This is a huge oversimplification by a layperson, but just as ancient seafarers had to escape the currents caused near their shore, we have to figure out how to escape our solar system first, into interstellar space. You're not safe there, but at least you've exited the wake of our sun. Just like we had to exit the graviational pull of earth to reach the moon.
For context, getting something to low earth orbit is about 9.4km/s of Delta-V. From LEO to mars is another 4.3 km/s of Delta-V. Getting from LEO to any solar escape trajectory adds is about 18km/s.
As you can see, 30km/s of fuel savings is extremely significant, and that required the 175 year Grand Tour alignment.
The closest in speed so far would be 'New Horizons'. But even then NH is going at 14.5KM/sec compared with Voyagers 18KM/sec. There are no probes currently that would catch up to Voyager.
And even more inconceivable is how slow it still is in terms of human spaceflight outside of the Solar System.
Travelling from New York to LA quicker than playing the song "From New York To LA"
The tyranny of the rocket equation is the fact that to carry more fuel to orbit, you need more fuel to get it into orbit, which itself needs more fuel. That's why gravity assists are so essential for escaping the solar system on a budget.
The planetary alignment that enabled the Voyager launch windows only occurs once every 175 years.
We should definitely be sending out more probes, but we can't just do it whenever we want, at least not without a lot more expense.
More conservative trajectories giving fewer flybyes but relying on more probes would be possible, and are in fact what we've accomplished with the Gallileo & Juno (Jupiter), Cassini-Huygens (Saturn), and New Horizons (Pluto) spacecraft. There are NASA (U.S.) and Chinese proposals for a return visit to Uranus and Neptune, though those remain in planning stages.
<https://www.space.com/nasa-uranus-orbiter-and-probe-mission-...>
The orbiter missions had a much longer time-on-station. For Gallileo, roughly 7 years 9 months, Cassini-Huygens 13 years, and Juno 7 years to date, with another 5 or more possible.
The Ulysses solar probe also flew past Jupiter, using the planet for an orbital assist to both slow it down to approach the Sun more closely and incline its orbit above and below the planetary plane so that the Sun's poles could be observed directly.
The problem with that idea is, except for a few geeks, no one wants to spend that kind of money on space probes.
We need a heavy lift platform flying for a few years before we could start making much more crude larger probes, with cheaper or even massmarket components. Then it may work.
According to this article from 2003, the probes have enough hydrazine to last until 2034 and 2040:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/11/what-voyager-1-u...
Edit: this "Voyager Backgrounder" paper from 1980 is terrific:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19810001583/downloads/19...
The probes were launched with 104 kg (230 lb) of hydrazine. But I'm still not clear why they were so obviously overbuilt for a four year mission.
The sun accounts for ~99.9% of total mass of the solar system.
We live on what barely qualifies as a dust particle, orbited by a much smaller dust particle. The next dust particle over, Mars, is far enough to require something like 12 minutes for light to make a round trip.
Don't underestimate yourself!
Also, I've had some scary deployments in my time but this would take the biscuit!
> The update, which took almost 18 hours to complete, was transmitted to help Voyager 2 avoid the same problem that its sibling, Voyager 1, experienced last year.
> …
> If there aren’t any issues, it will trigger the Voyager 2 update on October 28.
Correct me if I’m wrong. The wording is a bit confusing. I presume the first paragraph above, when it says “to complete”, refers to just transmitting the update (and acknowledgment that it has been saved). The patching with this updated code will be triggered on October 28 after some verification checks are done.
I wonder how new engineers learn about the intricacies of such ancient tech, without breaking them.
Many of NASA’s problems aren’t the fault of NASA, they are the fault of Congress. NASA didn’t come up with SLS+Orion all by themselves, the high-level design was dictated to them by Congress and NASA was left with the job of fleshing out the details and making it all work somehow. SpaceX needs NASA as a customer and a source of valuable expertise, it just wants it freed from being forced by Congress to spend billions on super-inefficient projects such as SLS+Orion, when SpaceX has a solution which can do more for less (Starship+SuperHeavy) and is likely to be available soon (bureaucratic delays due to the FAA and environmental agencies such as the FWS being under-resourced being the current biggest obstacle to that)
Just one question, what will be avaiable first, FalconHeavy and a fully certified Starship (which has to launch without blowing up for that), Tesla FSD or Tesla's humanoid robot?
Regarding SLS, they launched successfully last year and aim for a manned launch in 2024. SpaceX has to beat that timeline, assuming this whole thing being a race, which it isn't.
So let's compare the two! Falcon Heavy was developed with completely private funding, at a cost of ~$500 million. The prices of the launches are listed in Wiki. They start at $117 million, as NASA paid in 2023 to launch their Psyche craft. The SLS has been in development for more than a decade now, fully paid by the taxpayer, at a cost just about to break the $30 billion mark. The nominal cost per launch is still unknown but will almost certainly top a billion dollars. The last NASA administration gave an estimate of $800-$900 million per launch in 2019 dollars. And SLS cost estimates only go one way.
And what do you get for $30 billion, and then another billion per launch? Ideally up to almost twice the capacity of a Falcon Heavy. The reason people are so cool on the SLS is that it's already a very poor value against existing technologies. And will be completely obsolete by the time Starship comes to pass which should not only be able to launch for a fraction of the cost of Falcon Heavy (which is already a fraction of the cost of SLS), but also launch well over the ideal launch capacity of SLS.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Launches_and_payl...
In order: Falcon Heavy (because it's been around for years already), then I recon Starship, the robot, then FSD.
But this is on the pair of assumptions:
(1) that the robot will initially launch with a very limited role and set of environments it can work safely in — a lightweight mobile pick-and-place robot is much much easier than a fully general humanoid that you can drop into any role a real human would do and expect it to not accidentally dismember or decapitate itself or others.
(2) it only counts as "FSD" when they can ship the cars without including a steering wheel. If the current marketing of a nice-but-limited cruise control, lane changer, and occasional automatic break counts as "FSD", then it too is already out. (I would not count this myself).
And that applies to everything from that era. We hadn't even put a man in orbit in 1962. 7 years later, we would be walking on the Moon!!! The degree of competence and capability of that era of NASA is something that I think is probably unmatched in the entire history of our species.
I think it’s a massive error for Congress to have anything to do with any remotely technical decision. That should be at the sole discretion of NASA. Congress’ involvement should go no further than deciding what slice of the taxpayer funded pie they get yearly, and should not include the ability to attach strings of any kind to the funding.
I sure hope this doesn't come to be considered 'usual' on HN.
If so, it just becomes a race to the bottom.
For many, like me. It would be a dream to work at NASA, whatever the salary or bureaucracies it might involve.
It was my childhood dream, but given I wasn't American, that would never happen.
SLS has no such justifications forthcoming. It's too rough of a ride to launch any scientific probes on, it's too expensive for private launch, they can't make them fast enough to do more than 1 launch per year (without pouring more untold billions and decades into it), and the only reason it's even involved in Artemis is because Congress insists on it. Even putting Starship aside, between Falcon Heavy, F9, New Glenn, Vulcan, Neutron and maybe Ariane 6, the West has so much lift capacity available or coming online (mostly drastically cheaper than SLS) that SLS is kind of irrelevant.
They likely have a 'test article' though. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_article_(aerospace)
>Because of their distances, the Voyagers can only communicate through the largest 230-foot (70-meter) dish antennas in NASA's Deep Space Network, or by arraying multiple smaller antennas together to detect the faint signals coming from the spacecraft
> Sure if u have a 70 meter dish laying around and this is near peak cold War tensions so I'd say security was on people's minds then.
Don't just think it's amateurs, nation states aren't above mischief either. If Russia has one of those laying around, there's a reasonably high chance they'd use it to send a big "fuck you" to America in today's geopolitical climate (e.g. command each Voyager to burn all its remaining fuel to spin on an axis perpendicular to Earth.
Edit: and it looks like Russia does have a dish like that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevpatoria_RT-70_radio_telesco...:
> The Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope (P-2500, RT-70) is an RT-70 radio telescope and planetary radar at the Center for Deep Space Communications, Yevpatoria, Crimea. ... It has an advantage in comparison with other large radio telescopes in the fact that the complex includes powerful transmitters that allow active space experiments.
I'm not a RF engineer, but it's a fair guess that synthesizing the signal isn't going to be the problem, having the probes receiving it is another story.
And it should beg the question: why do you think DirecTV managed to use the smaller antennas ;)
Aha! Now you'll have to wait another 40 years to collect information from deep space! Take THAT, Americans!
It's called the Space Race for a reason.
Deep space is quite literally as far away from that as it gets. There's no realistic mission that far out in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our great grand children that will have any realistic return for a nation beyond pure exploratory interest.
If Russia or China are really interested in objects far outside our solar system, they're probably better off sitting back and letting NASA do it, given that they don't have to wait decades to do so. Something tells me that neither of them actually cares, though.
NASA's Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963826 - Oct 2023 (48 comments)
Fun fact. 1 billion km is almost 1.1 light hours. 1 billion miles is almost 1.5 light hours with less error margin. So you can easily calculate that Voyager 2 is about 18 light hours from Earth.
According to the article the update hasn't been activated yet but they are still checking if everything is okay.
> NASA scientists are carrying out a readout of the AACS memory to ensure that it is in the right place for the update. If there aren’t any issues, it will trigger the Voyager 2 update on October 28.
Either way so, that SW update of Voyager is some seriously impressive stuff!
Easier to read than 19300000000km
"Polar Coding for Forward Error Correction in Space Communications with LDPC Comparisons", Naveed Namipour, Haleh Safavi, & Harry Shaw.
<https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190032244/downloads/20...>
Also "Design of Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) Codes for Deep-Space Applications" <https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-159/159K.pdf>
The first specifically discusses early missions.
Long-term updates to old devices are a drain on the people updating them. You start a hardware company and let’s see how long you and your little team of really expensive engineers keep updating last year’s product.
No, they just have (Apple 2022 iPhone revenues alone vs 2023 NASA budget) 10x the amount of money of NASA's budget (or 3x, if we stick to net profit), and around 1000x more money are depended on them.
>You start a hardware company and let’s see how long you and your little team of really expensive engineers keep updating last year’s product.
As long as the law mandates updates and bugfixes for older products, which, in a civilized society that actually did care for waste and the environment would be decades.
Aren't they though? Clearly it's not on the same scale, but a 5 year old phone is still perfectly capable of transmitting very valuable data and providing utility to the user.
It is just about money. Cheap out and buy a budget phone and you will also get budget support.
The original Voyager budget was $865 million (~$5 billion today), and has paid out even more for maintenance and operation since. Spend that much money on an iPhone and not only will updates be available for decades, but someone from Apple will come and personally install the updates for you.
--- open source enters the chat ---
Opensource: if you had the means to swap the code with a new version, you should do that instead.
So... testing in production in a secondary market.
They probably don't have a Kanban board either... Dinosaurs!
Just get me thinking: Why there is not more missions like this ? It takes significant time to cross "somewhere there", every year one launch could not hurt ?
Edit:
*Obligatory video: "Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager" by Aaron Cummings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o
Also here on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=voyager
That makes absolutely no sense. Even someone who thinks technological progress will slow greatly in the future would acknowledge that something designed today will likely be obsolete and unbuildable in 127 years. I mean, probably *every* *single* electronic component in a design made today will almost certainly have been EOL for over a century by the time 2150 rolls around.
It would be no surprise to anyone to say the 2150 probes will have technologies that haven’t been invented yet, and won’t for some time.
https://spacenews.com/increasing-demands-putting-pressure-on...
Starship will both greatly reduce the cost to orbit, and the cost to design spacecraft (far wider mass budgets). I do not know how much C3 it will have, but very likely a kicker stage will come along for interplanetary and possibly interstellar craft.
https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Interstellar-Probe-Exec...
So with twice the area of radio dish and a power supply that after 50 years is still double what Voyager launched with, the data rate will be two bytes per second.
https://www.zachtek.com/post/a-new-wspr-transmitter-for-ball...
Should be similar out there & also likely not much stuff to take photos of.