Aging Voyager 1 sends back surprising response after 'poke' from Earth | Hacker News Reader

Aging Voyager 1 sends back surprising response after 'poke' from Earth

cnn.com

58 pointspseudolus22 comments

> On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data. While the signal wasn’t in the format the Voyager team is used to when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network was able to decode it.

Such cool work. Imagine issuing debug commands into your Prod system, waiting 40 hours for an unintelligible reply, then one keen engineer notices a pattern and is able to extract something meaningful from it. It's amazing the expertise on these systems continues to develop and thrive.

Check out It's Quieter In The Twilight movie.

It would be an awesome sci-fi plot: voyager 1 is captured by an alien race. Goes silent for a while they figure out how to boot it up. Then it starts transmitting the instructions to build a wormhole . Lone engineer who held out hope discovers the signal after the project was mothballed. (sorry this bit stolen from Contact). Or instructions for a hyperdrive.

if the movie contact was made today unfortunately, the signal would have been intercepted by a teenager who the builds the machine to the alien spec in his bedroom with his best buddy from school

That's just an Explorers remake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_(film)

unfortunately that shoots down my "today in Hollywood" theory

That's kind of the plot of 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

"A for Andromeda" - Fred Hoyle (Sort of. Without the spacecraft.))

Mold | A Sci-Fi Short Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8URdhSigzjs

Groveling over a core dump from deep space! The old timers are in heaven.

Your very, very accomplished child is very, very far away and needs some digital TLC.

V'Ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve…

Must... Find... Creator.

Unrelated, but when I first saw it as a kid I loved it. Then I saw it as an adult and my wife ruined it when she said that the enterprise was entering a sphincter.

Game over .

so you decided to ruin it for the rest of us? :)

What's wrong with entering sphincter?

Bend over and I’ll show you.

You want the Borg? That's how we get the Borg.

[dupe]

Lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39704914

Is the hardware much more robust than modern hardware? One would assume it was more primitive. Yet it survives beyond the lifespan expected of modern components even in the harsh environment it is located, for decades.

More primitive equipment generally is much more robust than modern hardware, no?

ever bought something from Harbor Freight?

Not exactly. In electronics, on smallest techprocess most important source of failures, single failures, but on large techprocess, more important become total dose.

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