NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
blogs.nasa.gov
blogs.nasa.gov
I really wish most other websites were like this. SEO and Google has really made the world a worse place.
I hope one day when we're a true interstellar species we'll still keep tabs on it. The data may not be useful anymore, but it would be cool to imagine a year 3000 society with a little "Look at where Voyager is now :)" tool that you can see its path and where humans have colonized by comparison.
There was no beginning; there is only the voyage.
In life, we voyage together, and in death we shall voyage alone.
Now, then, and forever voyaging.
It was the surprise ending for the first Star Trek film...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur...
Earth probe gone bad is a common trope in Sci-Fi. Star Trek alone has a few episodes:
- https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad
- https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Friendship_1
Also the Doomsday machine was a very different type of probe to V’ger
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Doomsday_Machine_(e...
> As a side note, the general story is nearly identical to the Original Series episode "The Changeling,"
That episode was one of the other examples in my post (Nomad).
Staying on subject, I wonder if we will see a new adaptation of ANDROMEDA STRAIN some time. As a story it seems topical and relevant.
Wasn't really great, but not bad, either. Just didn't have the impact of the 1970s movie.
[0]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Friendship_One_(episode...
If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics.
Maybe we don't need to go anywhere at all. Maybe we [1] have all we need right here to become literal gods.
[1] Our digital descendants. Humans are very much fit to the gas exchange and metabolism envelope of our gravity well.
Unfortunately the simulated classical humans in your Matrioshka Brain will want to mine Bitcoin, which means that our digital descendants will have to become a true interstellar species anyway in order to convert the Laniakea Supercluster into coin-mining computronium.
I grant that. But why would that keep us from pressing on?
If we have more resources in general, we will also have more resources for interstellar adventures.
We already have quite a lot to exploit in the region around us.
We assume we understand our future wants, needs, costs, and capabilities. (Granted, any future thinking is also subject to this, including my own.)
I don't disagree.
> We assume we understand our future wants, needs, costs, and capabilities. (Granted, any future thinking is also subject to this, including my own.)
Even if 99.99% of people are content with what the solar system has to offer, there will still be billions left to go and explore and settle outside for whatever needs and reasons they have. Even if those needs are imagined, or the reasons might be purely ideological or religious.
> But I think that assuming we'll want to send lots of entities vast distances in space and time might be a lot like thinking we'll have flying cars.
If only a tiny fraction of people will _want_ this, that's enough.
Supposed to run out in the 2020s
The Voyagers will soon no longer have enough power to operate any of their instruments. They'll have enough power to continue operating the transmitter (which serves as a science experiment of its own) into the 2030s. The power of the signal will drop before the electronics and control brown out (if it works as designed), and it the signal might become too weak to detect before the probe completely stops operating. Such a fate befell Pioneer 11, who may yet still be warbling away at low power no longer pointed at Earth; its carrier was last detected in 2003.
[1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/
Also:
Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth.
That FAQ covers a lot of interesting ground (though it talks about 2020 in the future tense).
After Voyager 1 took its last image (the "Solar System Family Portrait" in 1990), the cameras were turned off to save power and memory ...
I didn't realize that was the last image.
... it is very dark where the Voyagers are now. While you could still see some brighter stars and some of the planets with the cameras, you can actually see these stars and planets better with amateur telescopes on Earth.
Since it’s powered by an RTG, how does the power get “used up”? I assume that this refers to the available power budget at a given moment versus some sort of expendable power reserve.
It would be quite depressing if it was us failing to receive a fainter signal, rather than Voyager failing to send it.
One of the longest-running scientific experiments, too. It's already about as old as the Queensland pitch drop experiment was when Voyager I was launched.
When being condescended to it's your choice to either be incensed or reflect on maybe you deserved it.
Or just chuckle at and ignore the misinformed idiot doing the condescension and move on with your life if appropriate.
$ qalc '24.4e6 km / 1 week / c to %'
(((24.4 * (10^6)) kilometers) / (1 week)) / SpeedOfLight = approx. 0.0134572816%
Edit: found a potentially easier (more intuitive to understand) query, giving the same result, as well as how to ask it nearly for the how manyth part of c this is. I'm still learning all the tricks of this tool :)
$ qalc '24.4e6 km / 1 week to c%'
[...] approx. 0.0134572816(%c)
$ qalc '24.4e6 km / 1 week to 1/c'
[...] approx. 7430.92125 c^-1Wolfram Alpha also yields approx. 0.134 c for 1 week of travel time:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=distance+to+voyager+1+÷...
---
Perhaps targeting 100 weeks of travel time would be more plausible:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=distance+to+voyager+1+÷...
0.00134 c is approx. two times the top speed of 0.00064 c for the fastest space probe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe
If only we could harness gravity assist at will…
It is important that all the know-how about this type of maintenance never disappear. I hope the designs in electronics that this team would have wanted to have available in the probe are implemented in the new designs.
Heck of a job.
Bless you all that worked on it. Thank you.
Recently I designed in a Voyager inspired secret Easter egg into the surgical robot I designed. I put a gold (plated) plate with everyone's signature engraved on it. Gave everyone one as a surprise Christmas gift.
Voyager might make it to 2027.
With some amount of luck, Voyager might last ten more years beyond that:
"Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth."
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/
(And then, 15,000 years later, maybe this happens: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football )
I hope the 3rd installment comes out someday. Seems to be on permanent hiatus.
Or are you talking about something else?
Oh, good, it won't have to suffer a year 2038 problem :)
Also: what's with that last link? Definitely didn't expect something to make my browser slow to a crawl.
Talk about a slow feedback loop! And I get frustrated when I need to push code to a repo to test things in CI...
16/18-bit custom architecture, 4k/8k words (around 9/18KB total). Other sources I could find indicate a 250kHz clock frequency and around 8KIPS.
It has taken 46 years to get 22.5 light hours away from Earth!
Walking such a path is is not the same, but a bit like [3] if one is patient (which is difficult on the internet) and doesn't scroll manually but only via the little "c" in the lower right corner, wich scrolls with light speed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_Planet_Walk (there are several other listed at the bottom of the page)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model
[3] https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....
“Your device battery no longer supports the camera. Or the backlight on the top third of the screen. But it runs at full speed otherwise!”
After reading some details about the Voyager, I have my doubts that a disposable vape has more computation power [1]. Maybe the higher end devices with programable displays and temperature settings?
[1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/voyagers-1-and-2-take-embe...
Crazy that we have disposable one use electronics now.
This silicon and lithium could be used for much much better things and recycled as well, than a few puffs of a substance only meant to make people addicted.
The Voyager had a custom-designed processor (well, several) that were basically computers made out of basic logic chips (74xx series); see details here https://www.eejournal.com/article/voyagers-1-and-2-take-embe...
Either way, it's clear that we (well, JPL) can build extremely powerful and sophisticated systems with relatively small computers, suggesting that resource constraints can sometimes be a source of stability and creativity.
This was not unusual at the time: many early arcade games were made exactly the same way. They've even been emulated by the MAME project.
Anyway, apart from the browser, comics reading, TuneInRadio, old games and digital photoframe apps still work ok.
(in case you have the strange idea to buy outdated ipad to play with, take at least ipad 2, which is indeed stupidly obsolete, but faaaaaar more powerful than the original iPad :)
Also to nit pick, Apple is based in Cupertino (northern CA) and JPL is in Los Angeles - so it'd be quite a bike ride lol
Sorry about the distance thing. I’m from Philadelphia, so all of that (vaguely waving west) has got to be bikeable. But I’ll remember the /s for next time.
Devices would last way longer, prices would be much lower, and it'd be unimaginably better for the environment. But Apple wouldn't make as much money, and the government's GDP growth figures wouldn't be as high. So clearly it's a terrible idea.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_smartphone, the modularity of the FairPhone helps it live 5-7 years. Notably that's not different from the 6-8 years that an iPhone is supported for.
It's easy to blame it as planned obsolescence on the part of a single party instead of viewing it as a consequence of natural marketplace dynamics. You may of course adjust those dynamics by having the government impose a different set of constraints to have a different outcome. Politically that can be difficult though, especially in America, & it's not primarily because of the GDP but because people here generally distrust the government.
And you're dramatically understating the benefits of modularity. PCs are indeed the perfect example, and no - people are not replacing them every 5 years. You can see a Steam hardware survey here [2]. And that's for gamers, who are going to iterate their hardware faster than average! Even for video cards, one of the most likely to fail and most likely to be upgraded parts, the GTX 1060 (released in 2016) is the 6th most popular card, making up about 4% of all players (contrasted against 7% for the #1 card)! Without planned obsolescence, most things can last for extremely long periods of time. And those that do have, more or less, inescapably high failure rates (like old hard disk drives) can and should be standardized and able to be replaced/upgraded.
[1] - https://www.waveform.com/pages/right-to-repair-april-2020-re...
[2] - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
As for luck of trust of government, that's an overbroad generalization as to the root of it. That's one class of reasons for a specific population group. There are others that don't share those reasons (e.g. the Bundy/BLM standoff had nothing to do with the government not implementing common sense ideas & the people involved share ideological 0 in common with those that are skeptical of the government for the reasons you mentioned).
As for government trust, I think it can almost entirely be explained as a result of the government behaving in an ever more opaque fashion, and constantly lying on top of that. Fool me once, and all that. In the Kennedy era, and all the way up to his assassination it remained extremely high - well above 70%. Since then it's been spiraling downward, to its now pitiful levels where we're at today - about to enter the single digits. [1] It's practically an achievement in itself to be that distrusted. I mean can you imagine a time when somebody could say non-ironically, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."? Anyhow, I digress. It's just a topic I feel strongly on.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/public-trust...
I'm not sold on modularity - the EU seems to be effectively dealing with malicious compliance. Even the details of repairability are tricky enough because you're internalizing an externality but it can be debated that if the externality is a better tradeoff for society which benefits from a faster pace of innovation because the companies don't have to support those products forever (support costs for older products are very real in engineering & supply chain orgs). Think about how very different phones today are from the 1st gen. That being said, now that things have stabilized, maybe forcing phones to standardize a bit would be OK provided manufacturers are still allowed to innovate (e.g. such requirements wouldn't be relevant to VR which hasn't reached an innovation plateau like phones and laptops have).
[1] - https://mspoweruser.com/apples-app-store-changes-in-the-eu-i...
As for DMA malicious compliance, it's still waaaay to early to say they're doing nothing. There's a lot of hubub about it clearly and it's on their radar. Meta & Microsoft have gotten into the game lobbying the EU to do something so there's countervailing pressure [1].
> According to a new report from the Financial Times, two of the biggest critics of Apple's new App Store rules are officially lobbying the EU to reject the iPhone maker's crafty new App Store terms.
> The EU could potentially fine Apple for non-compliance when the law goes into effect if it determines that these policy updates do not embody the spirit of the DMA. Or the DMA could reject Apple's App Store proposal entirely and force the company to come up with a new DMA-compliant policy.
But basically expecting a regulatory body to start enforcing something less than one month after compliance became mandatory (it took effect March 2024) of a fairly complex piece of legislation is asking a bit much of any regulatory body. It takes time to investigate this stuff in the first place so that they can get ready to bring a court case. They'll also negotiate with Apple before-hand to see if a resolution can be reached without a lawsuit in the first place.
But the EU already hit Apple with a massive 2B antitrust fine:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/04/tech/apple-europe-antitrust-f...
[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/24/apple-wont-have-t... [1] https://mashable.com/article/meta-microsoft-lobby-eu-apple-a...
Summary of repair rules:
* Manufacturers must provide spare parts and tools at reasonable cost
* Manufacturers cannot use "contractual clauses, hardware or software" to obstruct repairs
* Independent repair firms must be allowed to use secondhand or 3D-printed parts
* Manufacturers cannot refuse to repair solely for economic reasons
* Manufacturers cannot refuse to repair a device because it was previously repaired by another company
Imagine you earn $100k a year, it would be the equivalent of a $520 fine - a speeding ticket. And it won't just be the $520 fine. Apple will appeal and drag it through the courts for as long as possible, both reducing the cost of it due to inflation, and also potentially getting the cost itself reduced. So you create a scenario where at the end of the day, we can engage in all the behavior we want and all we have to do is deal with a speeding ticket every once in a while, all the while the bureaucrats pat themselves on the back for really cracking the whip. This is not even close to a deterrent.
It's the ongoing practice of treating massive corporations with kid gloves, while behaving brutally towards small businesses or individuals - when, in an ideal world, it should be the exact opposite. And again, we're back to the trust issue. Because obviously the reason they're being so gentle is because they want to have the headline of really cracking down on e.g. Apple, but don't actually want to risk Apple withdrawing from the EU. And that conflict of interest will not go away, and thus will guide their future actions as well.
[1] - https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...
No, because a CPU is not a line-replaceable unit on Apple hardware. Nobody, not Louis Rossman, not Apple-certified repair stores, and not street-shops in Shenzhen are doing SOC-level repairs. It is a complete red-herring example that almost makes me question how serious you take this, accusing others of using "BS reasons."
> So basically the number of repairable parts in electronics is shrinking due to improvements in manufacturing.
That's really tangential to the point. Integrated components can still be replaced with donor parts (or OEM replacements) if each component isn't DRM-matched to a phone. Apple goes out of their way to deliberately stop their systems from being repaired by others, and it doesn't stop at miniaturization.
> it's still waaaay to early to say they're doing nothing.
If someone is doing nothing, you're never too early to call them out on it. We're not waiting for Apple to get the memo, they have had three years to anticipate this legislation and the only thing they seem interested in doing is pissing and moaning in a PDF while trying to get their last petty jabs in against Spotify and Epic: https://developer.apple.com/security/complying-with-the-dma....
Apple is doing nothing, you can't piss on my back and tell me it's raining.
Edit: I spoke way too soon. It varies, as discovered with Voyager measurements recently: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/as-nasas-voyager-1-surveys-int...
Although I suppose it could actually be easier depending on how the code works- perhaps it's just simple bare metal assembly without the approx 10^99999 libraries a modern python stack has.
What's hard about their work is 1) it's really, really slow to communicate with, so you can't iterate quickly, 2) the tech is really old and unlike today's stuff, so it's very specialized domain knowledge.
On the technical side of things, there are also other companies doing live patching, like the Ericsson telephone exchanges. Their code can be altered “live” while operating, in order to fix or enhance the software and with zero downtime ;-)
I wish media would report about it to illustrate what hacking used to mean.
With systems hundred times more complex and build by a NASA that is a fraction of what it was 50 years ago, i guess a modern day Voyager will not even make it to the edge, let alone continue to function.
The distance is currently 22.5 light hours (and increases by half-hour per year.) But it is indeed about 2 days of round-trip time for debugging.
Even in modern C programming goto is still pulling its weight for handling unrolling and cleanups.
The distances are so vast, almost unfathomable, that we need Faster Than Light means of traveling. Perhaps I’m being naive or romantic, but I prefer to think this is the real reason :-)
Also as particles spread out, there's less of a chance of interaction, which by extension makes it so there's less of a chance that a system of electrical impulse that fires in a synapse would exist over large distances. This system, of course, would be the catalyst for producing such thoughts as "I wonder if we're alone in the universe."
That's not to say you can't send dense information over larger distances with a shorter wavelength (re: radiation; gamma rays)... it just means the flying saucers with little green men landing on earth are probably out.
Does anybody know how they identified the non-working regions of the chip, without being able to probe the chip?
Meanwhile, radio, TV and radar have been advertising the presence of a new technological civilization on Earth for more than a century. That means any entity worth worrying about within a 100+ light year radius - a distance 44+ times longer than to Proxima - already knows about us. And that sphere keeps growing in all directions at the speed of light, or roughly 18000 times faster than Voyager 1 is moving.
If you really want to worry about the Dark Forest, it would be more justified to ask if your local radio station takes into account the repercussions of sending commercials and TOS reruns into deep space.
There’s actually a documentary about this:
In fact some billionaires [2] invest into using telescopes with fast sampling cameras (in this case IACT [3] telescopes used normally to detect gamma-rays by their interaction with the atmosphere) to detect flashed of extraterrestrial lasers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array (see the animation of the radiation pattern)
[2] https://www.space.com/are-aliens-flashing-laser-beams.html
We're not talking about lasers and directional antenna here, we're talking about humans using radio communications to talk to each other on Earth over the last 100 years, and whether that's detectable from great distances.
military radar transmissions set up during the Cold War to detect incoming ballistic missiles have the power and frequency characteristics to be detected over hundreds of light-years – and have already broadcast our existence to any aliens within around 60 light-years of the Earth [1]
But never underestimate the power of television:
The most detectable and useful escaping signals arise in a few ultra-powerful military radar systems and in normal television broad-casting. A model including over 2,000 television transmitters is used to demonstrate the wealth of astronomical and cultural information available from a distant observer’s careful monitoring of frequency and intensity variations in individual video carriers (program material is not taken to be detectable). [2][3]
once the Square Kilometer Array is completed in Australia and Africa, it would be able to detect the current TV carrier wave radio leakage at a distance of about fifty lightyears for objects in the southern hemisphere sky [4]
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-far-from-earth-could-...
[2] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-9115-6_...
[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.199.4327.377
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/27/how-far-into-s...
"Oh, looks like Earth just got radio waves, which means there's probably life there."
From there you just monitor the wave Hertz output by the planet, and when they start transmitting waves at higher Hz, you know it might be time to meet up.
"Oh they're sending photonic gamma rays as messages now instead of radio waves, I'm gonna go say Hi."
If each ship was used like an expendable stage, and we were willing to use 100 ships, how long would it take to catch up to Voyager, stop, and return to earth?
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/timeline/#event-a-once-...
But you'd still have to fly for ~40 years to get to where they are now, and they'll keep on flying during those 40 years.
We could use more investigation at Uranus and Neptune, but we'd get much more out of extended orbiter missions to those rather than another quick flyby. A Uranus orbiter is currently one of the higher priority missions in planning, and there's a launch window for a Jupiter-Uranus slingshot in 2034 or 2035.
(What I wonder is, how much planning do these things need? Why can't we just launch another copy of Cassini to Uranus and skip all the expensive design? You'd need some changes to antennas and power supply for a more distant planet, but the scientific instruments and computing platform should just be reusable designs.)
That's about how long it takes for me to deploy a change with modern CI/CD pipelines.
* NASA
Just another proof that we may have gained a lot, but also lost something in our pursuit of modernity: on modern systems direct memory access is discouraged if not prevented by the underlying OSes, and this hack would not have been possible.
The "hack" wouldn't be necessary, or can be done natively in many modern systems.
No one thought of having backup computers on the spacecraft?