NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause
scitechdaily.com
scitechdaily.com
The round trip time is 45 hours.
That is some kind of latency!
That or apply xkcd #303: https://xkcd.com/303.
In the former case, a relay could help quite significantly.
In the latter case, it would just add even more delay.
Deep space RTT is unavoidable.
More hops = more latency. The fastest way is a straight line between origin and destination.
Also throughput could be increased by changing or updating the modulation and coding schemes. AFAIK Pioneer and Voyger probes were still using PSK and FSK.
Sorry to say, this limit applies to Elon Musk and his satellites as well.
[1] Sourced via https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/VOY_library.html
This is the most fascinating part to me. Isn't it well-established how sensitive a signal we can hear? Did they implement something like a new signal analysis method that enabled it?
And it says this wasn't used or even tried since the 80s anymore, I guess it grew too faint. Looking up the frequencies, X is 8–12 GHz and S is 2–4. Doesn't that mean X gets more data across at the same redundancy level? Why have this slower transmitter at all for only the first years, power conservation despite the fresh RTG?
They arrayed three antennas together.
> Doesn't that mean X gets more data across at the same redundancy level?
There's nothing special about the frequency itself. The advantage for X-band is that the antennas at both ends have more gain. 12 dB for the spacecraft and 11 dB for the ground station for a total of 23 dB.
No, they didn’t. The three antennas are in California, Spain, an Australia; they can’t all point at the same point in the sky at once, and even if two could do so, they’re not designed to work as an interferometric array.
If you catch a site commutating with Voyager you will sometimes see it using two dishes... though most often it's just the one big one at the site. When they do, its not getting signal on two, but having one of the track the carrier wave (I think).
https://www.cdscc.nasa.gov/Pages/antennas.html
... and to "even if two could do so, they’re not designed to work as an interferometric array." They can.
> The DSN anticipates and responds to user needs. The DSN maintains and upgrades its facilities to accommodate all of its users. This includes not only the implementation of enhancements to improve the scientific return from current experiments and observations, but also long-range research and development to meet the needs of future scientific endeavours.
> Interferometry
> The accurate measurement of radio source positions; includes astrometry, very long baseline interferometry, connected element interferometry, interferometry arrays and orbiting interferometry. Measurement of station locations and Earth orientation for studies of the Earth.
> Very Long Baseline Interferometry
> The purpose of the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) System is to provide the means of directly measuring plane-of-the-sky angular positions of radio sources (natural or spacecraft), DSN station locations, interstation time and frequency offsets, and Earth orientation parameters.
Well, we do keep building bigger and bigger antennas and antenna arrays. So while Voyager can't change, we do. And we can build more and more sensitive (i.e. noise rejecting) equipment.
X is 8–12 GHz and S is 2–4
I don't know much about the Voyager design but the beam width is related to the frequency and so the S-band transmitter will have a larger beam width and thus can point less accurately that the X-band when trying to talk to Earth. Conversely, X-band is higher frequency than S-band and it's likely they would be able to use more bandwidth. So, interesting trade offs.
> The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it.
Someone else commented about a wider spread in this other band, though. Perhaps the operators were not sure what that does for adsorptions and reflections by intervening dust or so?
https://theskylive.com/voyager1-info#orbitdiagramcontainer
It's absolutely impressive, yet at the same time somewhat underwhelming when compared to the vastness of our galaxy.
It's slightly melancholic, the engineers are aging, the mission's heyday is long past... but there's something gripping about it...
"It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022)
We can and have send other probes to the planets.
Its a shame Carl Sagan is with us to cheer.
https://character.ai/chat/J9KKnR34ouSfAiNQIlDnY2v8pW5a1-QGYG...
Now try not to commit suicide, like the floridian young man.
Hope they make it to 50 years.
We could build a more or less arbitrarily large rocket in orbit by adding more and more fuel. More fuel means more delta-V means the probe is faster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...
Long story short: they plan these out for decades at a time, and take your best shot when the planets align, literally.
If you can build larger ships in orbit, relatively cheaply, you can go a lot more direct, a lot faster.
Tsiolkovsky's equation shows how much dV you get with a given wet : dry (empty) mass of a rocket stage. Very quickly it's becoming very inefficient.
Unless you are talking about some untested rocket that dumps empty fuel tanks in pairs. (Like in the dV book by Daniel Suarez).
"The beauty of the gravity assist is that you use the gravity field of a large body to change course. A common misconception is that the gravity assist increases speed, but it actually leaves speed unchanged. It's more accurate to say that the gravity assist changes direction, since velocity is both a magnitude (speed) AND a direction."
And that's assuming you don't do an extra burn at periapsis, which is far more efficient at changing speed than doing the burn in interplanetary space.
Wiki explains it well. From the frame of reference of ship and planet, the relative speed is the same. But relative to the sun, the ship can be moving faster.
"A gravity assist around a planet changes a spacecraft's velocity (relative to the Sun) by entering and leaving the gravitational sphere of influence of a planet. The sum of the kinetic energies of both bodies remains constant (see elastic collision). A slingshot maneuver can therefore be used to change the spaceship's trajectory and speed relative to the Sun"
We could easily overtake Voyager via only Jupiter if we wanted to (and New Horizons eventually will), and Jupiter-to-any-target launch windows come at least every 12 years.
https://www.universetoday.com/154791/the-best-way-to-leave-t...
(I have also seen a variant with an upper stage class SRB used for the meneuver.)
In fact I wonder if we'll stop talking to Voyager 1 before or after New Horizon.
Anyway I'm still curious if V1 outlasts New Horizons
I read that one too.
Anyway, the Wikipedia article says:
After 2036, both [Voyager] probes will be out of range of the Deep Space Network.[14]
[The RTG] will decay too far to power the transmitters in the 2030s.
The sundiver probe could go 547 AU in 17 years. Voyager 1 is at 162 AU. So around 5 years.
That kind of brings up some interesting questions of team composition. When you're building something complicated that will last 50 years, you probably want a few people on the team who are: 1) talented, 2) very young (like fresh out of college), and 3) have the mindset of a lifer. You deliberately get them involved in all the stuff and put them in the room when all the decisions are made, then they serve to preserve the institutional knowledge of the project for the latter half of its lifetime.
Some would freeze themselves to be thawed later to direct a several hundred year secret plan that only they know.
I do agree that we need to do a better job of celebrating the people that do maintenance which is what the vast majority of our field is based on.
"While the S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it."
Heros, both those who made the S-band radio and those who managed to retrieve the signal.
Does anyone know whether the Voyagers even do any command authentication?
Probably doesn't matter now as only the dsn has the ability to talk to them, and that happens comparatively rarely.
Even if not, it should be fairly straightforward to compute its position from the initial flightplan. Once it escaped Jupiter its trajectory is just a straight line.
I honestly don't know that we understand gravity well enough to keep this close of track of this small of an object for so long. Plus all the effects of the "negligible" gravities of nearby objects have to add up over time, and we can only include so many bodies in our N-bodies simulation, right?
The problem is simply that you need a huge transmitter with (AIUI) some special and unique modulation hardware. Also there's nothing to be gained from interfering with the Voyagers. Really the only practical thing you could do is shut them down a couple of years before they die anyway. There's just no point.
The source code isn't hiding in a repo somewhere for security reasons — it's spread around on various pieces of paper and computers over the last 50 years. There isn't a single source of truth. Adds a whole other level of wizardry to keeping the thing running.
How has nobody at the top ordered a digitization and consolidation of all known code and supporting documentation during that time frame.
Having a ton of people run around the office for a couple months to collate a bunch of documents so you can better pass info on to a new generation of workers when the satellite might not even be usable anymore isn't very efficient. Might as well just pay an extra 50% or whatever to the 5 dudes who know what's going on until the thing is inop. Even if it died today, the mission still would've been a massive success.
20,000 years until V1 transits the Oort Cloud. Twenty thousand years.
That and having to guess what commands to send to the probe
Here's a nice video on what NASA uses to communicate with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=586Zn1ct-QA Not something you'll put in your backyard :')
NASA could have gotten away with sending a password in plaintext (can anyone intercept a focused radio signal?), or DES, but it's possible they didn't use anything.
Where it is now, you'd need some serious equipment to transmit to Voyager, and network security is all about cost-benefit analysis; it's not worth the while for any adversary.
That should be written on a poster that is put on each desk of each employee of each car/washing machine/fridge/television manufacturer.
"The $3.57 you save on capacitors per unit will cost you $50 in lost good will."
On the other hand there is a balance between longevity through simplified maintenance and replacing aged appliances with newer and significantly more efficient models.
Given the economics, I wonder if best buy could pay customers $10 for a survey of their old products, knowing that it'll inspire upgrades etc.
its shocking how amazon went from 'me getting a package every week' to 'i go there only if i have too'
Even in areas where they have brand name products, it's often impossible to surface them through their search. (I've, many times, failed to find something there and then went and searched Google/etc and the top result has been... an Amazon link to exactly what I'm looking for.) And if you purchase through Amazon, there's no reason to believe it's not gray market or something else where you may end up having issues with support/warranty if you ever need.
And combined with the inventory commingling, even if you find brand name products there you can't be sure you'll actually receive it and not a knock-off. So it really only makes sense to order things that are already the cheap/knock-off quality anyway.
So... yeah, there was a nice period of time there where Amazon was just "shopping made more convenient". These days it's "Aliexpress made more convenient". Unless I'm setting out to buy cheaply made Chinese imports with no warranty, I'm not even go to start looking on Amazon. There's little reason to.
Over the volume of say Amazon, The noisiness of varied intent will normalize itself out across a sector.
They could surface this as a reliability metric on some kind of relative scale.
They could...
Guess what theyre gonna do?
Isn’t the company going to make more sales in the future (and hence more profit)? And isn’t replacing stuff with new versions going to lead to improvements in people’s lives through more efficient, quieter, and more effective technology?
So, yes, replacing stuff with new versions will bring more and more sales as opposed to building something that will last. Hence "planned obsolescence" and the war on making things repairable that we've seen lately. Great for business, bad for the customer.
Modern electronics certainly can be made with much higher reliability than their mid-century ancestors, but the driving factor that prevents this is aggressive cost cutting that happily shaves pennies off COGS to shift the statistical distribution to the left. Unless consumers are willing to pay more for long-lived devices, this is doomed to continue.
Yet people understand it with cars. Maybe because it’s moving?
I've got a relative's dryer right now that's acting up. Do I really want to do the work of calling around to a bunch of repair guys to find out which one won't charge me a fee to come out and say "it's going to cost more to fix than to buy a new one, and we can have the new one installed and delivered tomorrow" ? I've heard this trash spiel so many times at this point I don't even care to try engaging, despite not even having to pay for it myself.
No, I'll spend the 20 minutes taking a few screws off and looking at the thing. Then order parts. Then next week, an hour or two to replace the part. Then it will likely be sorted for the next decade, but if it does break again it will continue to be repairable rather than effectively a consumable.
Only if you don't overdo it. When your products break too quickly many customers will stay one-time customers and switch to products from the competition. There's also the reputation damage to consider.
And of course it works best if you have a fairly high market share. If you have a low market share most products on the market are from your competitors, so you can you are better off boosting your reputation with longer-lasting products (compared to other products at the same price point).
Come to think of it, the "break it faster to sell more" strategy works mostly in monopolies, duopolies or with market collusion (like the Phoebus cartel that lowered the lifespan of light bulbs)
It is the behavior of the buyers that drives costs down. People are extremely cost sensitive in the mid to low segments, shifting their purchase decisions from one product to another just because of less than $1 price difference. Some companies cannot survive at all without saving those $3.57.
Unlike Voyagers 1 and 2
Are we still expecting to make significant efficiency improvements for appliances in the next 30 years? Will it be enough to justify the production of a new appliance?
Legal warranty for appliances like washers, dryers, refrigerators among others should probably be raised to at least 5 years.
An LG dishwasher with a similar 10 year warranty on the pumps and what not in the dishwasher. Awesome, great. The display panel has failing LEDs. Is that under that warranty? Nope. Who cares about the pump not technically failing if one can't know what mode the dishwasher is in?
If they're going to stick a sticker on the face advertising their warranty on an appliance it should cover the whole appliance. Not just a small handful of parts that should practically never fail under regular use while all the surrounding stuff has a nearly useless warranty.
I'm so salty about warranties and support these days I usually try and do every possible thing I can do to fix the problem myself before obviously voiding a warranty before I ever bother calling their support. So worthless most of the time.
Uh oh, a moral judgement from a peasant? Say it aint so. Anything but that. I'm literally shaking right now.
Anyway, here are some actual incentives:
- If you do some shady corner-cutting, you'll be legally compelled to trade in your Bugatti and drive a used Kia the rest of your life
- If this chemical causes bodily harm to me, we shall inflict bodily harm on thee
- A portion of the profits will be placed in a trust and will be passed down to your children, if and only if your product lasts long enough to be passed down to our children
- If you (banker) lose our money, you will lose your head
No. They encourage new businesses to start without compromising on the fundamental stuff.
Or it might cost you $0 in lost good will, and will gain you $5 in sales because many price-sensitive people will buy the thing that's cheapest, without doing an omniscient analysis of its quality.
Not to mention that gold-plating your capacitors won't do you much good if some other part is expected to fail first.
https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-hostile-is-space-2...
And consumer. Very few people would use 50 year old devices even if they were/are perfectly functional.
Their costs really did increase all the time. Not needlessly, despite what some people thought: their cost per spare part really did grow quite a lot, as the number needed per year decreased and the fixed overhead slowly increased.
People don't buy quality: people buy cheap!
I went to look up my purchase but not only is that listing gone, the brand no longer exists.
Problem is... they're expensive. Real pricey. This kinda industrial-tier consumer stuff does exist, but very few people bother buying it.
As always, ask or imitate an expert with aligned incentives. A seasoned local auto shop owner guided me towards Acura after two of my fancy German cars needed multiple expensive repairs. He doesn’t service Honda group vehicles, but drives an Acura himself and I couldn’t be happier after listening to his advice.
Keeping it alive is a remarkable feat, but costing taxpayers eye watering sums of money, due to the ever increasing shortage of skills, while a modern cloud alternative is developed. Be careful what you wish for.
I do get the value of iterating quickly towards a solution but that does not invalidate the conservative engineering approach other people have to take to build something much more stable/reliable where they have to be very cautious and can't just break things until you have a solution.
“In order to reduce costs and overheads, NASA decided to leave design and construction of the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn spacecraft to JPL, rather than to Boeing, General Electric, Hughes, Martin Marietta, and North American Rockwell, all of which had some level of preparation for a Grand Tour proposal. The largest aerospace firms lobbied NASA Headquarters and Congress for the contracts. In order for expensive projects to pass congressional scrutiny as part of the NASA budget, they often had to include an intention to contract out much of the work” voyager - Andrew J. Butrica
I think they also did build a test spacecraft ?
Anyways the approach (smaller focused team) contrasts with the big SLS type projects that are contracted out for political reasons.
The "secret" solution is it was one of the last years made in Japan, not China.
I just move it from apartment to apartment over the years while everything else breaks.
* Environmental regulations require additional or more complicated systems - which adds points of failure (IE: Variable-speed motor controllers, Exhaust Gas Recycling, etc). They also require other changes - like using lightweight plastics where metals would have been used previously. Plastic fan blades crack, metal ones don't.
* Consumers, on the whole, only care about price and features. Those are tangible. Some people care about things like maintainability and longevity - but they make up a tiny, insignificant fraction of consumers. Thus, companies optimize for price - even if it comes at the cost of longevity. Any company that doesn't quickly loses market share to global competition from dozens of others that are more than willing to make that sacrifice and offer a better deal.
Those two factors explain everything about why modern appliances fail the way they do.
Now, how do you get the people buying these things to buy the better engineered one when the one sitting right next to it is $200 cheaper?
The thing with consumer products is not evil, they are made to consumer expectations. Would you buy a $10k washing machine? Probably not, even if is designed to outlast you. Of course you also won't buy a washing machine that lasts a week, no matter how cheap it is. Manufacturers did studies and noticed that there is a sweet spot at around 10 years or so of lifetime for typical household usage. More than that and it become too expensive and people might want to change anyways to benefit from new technologies or some other reasons.
Once the "ideal" lifetime have been established, you are going to have parts that last the expected 10 years, others that last less, and other that last more, possibly forever. The parts that break too early need to be addressed as it may cause expensive warranty returns and a loss in reputation. But the parts that last forever also need to be addressed. Let's say the water pump is over-specified, sure it is great, it will never fail, etc... but all that doesn't matter because the machine will be trashed because of some other failure. So why would the manufacturer and ultimately the customer pay extra for that pump they have no need for. Instead, a cheaper should be used. The ideal consumer product is one where every part breaks down at the end of the expected life of the product, but not before, any more than that is a waste of money.
That's thanks to that value engineering that we all can afford cars, washing machines fridges and televisions, with cash to spare. These are not luxuries for the elite anymore. They are not made like they used to, but we don't pay them like we used to either.
“It’s been an adventure…”
“An important message from Voyager…”
Uhhhhhh...
I guess they mean "in operation"? Not sure how it could do anything but remain in flight.
Meanwhile a javascript app of mine from 2022 does not build now because I can’t get it to install the dependencies for some reason.
BTW, that transmitter apparently can not transmit back to earth at this point because it is too far away. But looks like it can receive (we can transmit with much higher powers here?) and they managed to send a command to restart the primary transmitter. Now debugging.
Debugging on a 2 day feedback loop. Fuck that.
JS isn't the problem, it's the overcomplicated dependency and build systems that were layered on top. It's why Go is a breath of fresh air. A 10 year old codebase will still build and run like it was made yesterday.
This is what it's like for me, working with an offshore QA group.
Reminds me of working at the branch office with HQ on the opposite side of the world.
The modem dpeed was in low one-digit bytes per second so you were careful thinking about what you send.
Tired take... I promise that if your JS app ran in 2022 and you completely isolated the computer from the internet, your JS app would still run in 2067. This is completely unrelated. Also JS is probably one of the easiest language to repro, if you have a lockfile you're good to go.
But then again, why the fuck does that fail now?
I had a friend who was convinced that JPEGs would slowly degrade sitting on a disk. This was around 1990s so he would store important things in BMP so they would not degrade.
I think node_modules has something similar.
Come to think about this, we used a lot of different software and switched them as Windows would not open JPEGs by itself I believe.
Stuff today has been so hilariously abstracted on such thick layers of complexity pressed into neat "simple" blocks that it's almost miraculous anything works day-to-day.
Fun fact: we call this "firmware" and it still exists today!
Once you fully internalize that your buggy program is running on a buggy framework, in a buggy language, in a buggy sandbox, on a buggy virtualization, on a buggy file system, scraping along on buggy silicon running buggy microcode, managed by other buggy silicon running buggy firmware, using peripherals with their own buggy silicon and firmwares, with everything happening billions of times per second (a car engine typically doesn’t reach a billion cycles over a 20 year lifespan ), it seems mind bogglingly improbable that anything works at all lol.
The fact that it does work, and can even routinely reach 5 nines, is a testament to the generosity of the universe… and a good argument for making sure that to whatever extent possible, you should write your software to be resistant to random events and erroneous operations. Fail safe/ fail soft, fail and retry, fail and restart. The more resilience we build into our work, the less angst we create in the world.
It’s amazing to see both the half hour miracle of engineering and the half century one playing out at the same time. I just hope our accomplishments today will in some way be as durable as those of generations past.
Everything we create is to save on our most precious resource: human effort and time.
AI is so ridiculously wasteful if you think about it, from a computing point of view. But, it doesn’t require us to write a dedicated piece of code for each new problem, thus it’s saving humans effort and time.
Of course, the question remains, what does come out of all this productivity?
So much software nowadays is written like it's a disposable item (and then the company decides to keep using what amounts to a 2006-era paper cup from McDonalds every day in a business-critical process for the next 20 years).
There's so much scaredness, anger, and mistrust of js. But this tired take was with us, and still is with us, and will keep being with us for a long long long time. Nothing else comes as close to being a media form as HTML+js+css.
But hey, maybe you won't even be able to login if you do so through a Google/Microsoft/Apple ID.
...and you use an SSD? Be amazed at how fragile they are. Chances it will be running 45 years are... not good.
https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_n...
I wager that Voyager 1 is way simpler than Node.js.
Off topic a little, but I feel that Heinlein-esque generation ships or frozen embryo payloads carrying biology and all that bio requires are not the future of human expansion. I think it’s long-lived mechs carrying encodings of human neural pathways, with maybe just enough biology to generate randomness. (Could we make hearty fungi function as synapses?)
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205670068-exodus [2] https://www.exodusgame.com/en-US
UPDATE: 0.006%, not 6%
A Slower Speed of Light: http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/
In May 2021, NASA reported on the continuous measurement, for the first time, of the density of material in interstellar space and, as well, the detection of interstellar sounds for the first time.[91]
We can't know what value of the readings will have in the future of the science being studying. The studies will end in 2025 when it won't be able to power any instrument.
We can still track the position and speed. Any deviations from theoretical models would be interesting. Non deviations are also useful, although less interesting.
my dialogue with ChatGPT:
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are powered by \*Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs)\*. These RTGs use the natural decay of \*plutonium-238\* to generate heat, which is then converted into electricity using thermoelectric materials.
Here’s how the process works:
1. \*Radioactive Decay\*: Plutonium-238, a radioactive isotope, decays over time, releasing a consistent amount of heat.
2. \*Thermoelectric Conversion\*: Thermocouples in the RTGs convert this heat directly into electricity.
3. \*Power Supply\*: This generated electricity powers the instruments, computers, and communication systems on each spacecraft.
Each year, the power output of the RTGs decreases slightly as the plutonium decays, so the Voyager missions have had to shut down non-essential systems over time to conserve power. Despite this, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have enough energy to continue transmitting until at least the late 2020s, when their power levels will likely drop below the minimum required for communication.The Voyager probes are powered entirely from their RTGs, they have no solar panels nor batteries[1]. So if the power output from the RTGs drops below the level needed to power the transmitter, Voyager can't talk to us anymore. There's no batteries that can be recharged and no solar panels it ever drew power from.
The exciting part from this discovery is the potential to keep talking to Voyager longer than we thought. If the S-band transmitter uses less power and we're still able to detect that signal, we may be able to communicate with the probes with lower RTG outputs than we initially thought. Though at that point, if the radio is the only thing still running and there's no instruments operating, the usefulness is probably pretty low at that point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Power