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Comment by ziofill | Hacker News Reader

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ziofill·

Working on a remote fix with a day of latency. That's badass, NASA.

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And with no way of pushing the power button if things go seriously wrong.

Decent uptime, too.

It's more than one day though, one day is what it takes for the signal to get there, takes twice as much for it to get back. So a ping would take almost two days.

I believe there is a way of pushing the reset button. What you do is feed the bits coming out of the radio receiver into a shift register, and when they match a particular pattern, a reset is triggered.

(It wouldn't surprise me if they could shift between primary and backup computers this way as well.)

One thing that does have great backup time is the RAM, which IIRC is powered by a dedicated power line coming right off the RTGs.

> (It wouldn't surprise me if they could shift between primary and backup computers this way as well.)

The backup is dead.

It is crazy that if we were observing Voyager 1 through a telescope, and we remotely turned on a light on the spaceship, it would still take us 1 day to see the light turn on.

If anyone is in the mood for getting nerd-sniped: I'm curious if it would be possible to see such a light from earth (or earth orbit) using any actually existing telescope, and if so how bright would the light have to be.

I tried with a few LLMs, and they seem to agree (sometimes) around 10^15 lumens. A light wouldn't work, but it seems that a nuclear explosion close to Little Boy's would do it.

PS: The best way to get an answer on the internet is to provide a wrong answer.

It would be about 2 days from the moment you sent the command to turn it on.

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