NASA Shuts Off Voyager Science Instrument
gizmodo.com
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The engineering involved in making these spacecraft durable for as long as they have been is truly awe inspiring. As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years. I wish it wasn't.
I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.
[1] There was, however, one game I worked on where they had to pull the boxes from stores (delivered, but not yet for sale) and swap out the disk in order to release a critical fix that was discovered too late. Fun times (:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_(1994_video_game)#Rece...
I just checked the one commercial game I developed and there are two patches I can see released by Eidos for it.
The issue was that one programmer used an unauthorized system call to make the disc drive spin twice as fast, as they thought it was a great way to resolve some of the data streaming issues the game had. And yeah it worked - but after few hours of playing it would kill the GameCube. It wasn't really noticed because no one tests the game on actual discs right until actual gold master is made(usually), and then when the devkits died it was considered a random hardware fault and Nintendo just replaced them.
But yes, my understanding is it was quite expensive and the publisher was none too pleased (:
Yep - at my least job I worked on three products, only one of which is still running.
The job before that still has their main product running, so I guess I'm at 50% (not including my current job).
>>NASA's Voyager Mission: Remastered [4K] https://youtu.be/M62kajY-ln0
And when I was 9 or 10, I took a tour of JPL. They sent me home with an envelope of about 300 8x10 pictures, many of which were from the Voyager missions (but no Neptune pics because it hadn't gotten there yet!).
Those pictures decorated my walls until I left for college.
I'll be sad when they finally shut down the last instruments and the Voyagers go silent, speeding through space with a message of peace.
There was a cartoon, in OMNI magazine, were two scientists look at each other after decoding the first S.E.T.I Message: "Send More chuck Berry."
Few people wax poetic about the IRS master file or Air Traffic Control systems. These systems are/were crucial and ancient but survived with hardware upgrades and love and care of dedicated staff.
The Voyager was deployed once and the hardware has survived for decades. NASA flight control software of that era is a different league of fault tolerance and engineering.
Writing it is also painful by modern software standards.
What makes you say that? I suspect it's improved with decades of lessons learned.
Nearly everything now is fast and cheap "money money money." We're living in a collapsing civilization. It's uncomfortable to think about, certainly, but it's a reality nonetheless.
The very values that have brought us here have been abandoned in favor of delusional thinking, greed, and shortsightedness in pursuit of ephemera like money and status. Where you do see some flicker of these values, more often than not, it's just marketing disguised as sincerity.
A negative outlook aside, I think it's very possible to do things in a way that have a time horizon of decades. I'm trying to do that with the things I'm building, but there's far less "ra ra" for that then there is for the inverse.
In fact Money, Money, Money was recorded in 1976 just before the Voyager launch. (https://youtu.be/ETxmCCsMoD0)
https://longreads.com/2018/11/20/the-second-half-of-watergat...
Corruption was in full swing and easier to hide. Dale Carnegie recently reminded me of the Teapot dome scandal, and Gordon Gekko was in the 80s.
"Reproducing the Saturn V rocket engines, specifically the F-1 engines used on the first stage, is a highly complex task due to their immense size, powerful thrust, and intricate design, requiring advanced engineering and manufacturing capabilities to accurately replicate the combustion chamber, fuel injectors, nozzle, and other critical components, making it a significant undertaking even for modern aerospace companies; essentially, recreating them would involve detailed reverse engineering of the original designs, access to specialized materials and manufacturing techniques, and extensive testing to ensure proper functionality and safety. "
We can, but ...
Conclusion, money isn't preventing us from sending people to the moon.
[0]https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/04/15/f-35s-to-cost-2-t...
The immediate answer is that we simply weren't interested in supporting major new manned missions. Manned spaceflight in general requires serious, ongoing political support across administrations. At the height of the space race, public support pretty much never rose above 50 percent in the United States.[1] The literal high mark was 53% immediately after Apollo 11 successfully landed on the moon, which is honestly mind-boggling to think about. We've completely white-washed the existence of serious political opposition[1] to the Apollo program that plagued it from the beginning to the end because--looking back--it seems almost absurd, as if the very idea that half the country had no interest in going to the moon is an insult to the American psyche.
It's honestly amazing that we managed to follow up with the Space Shuttle at all. The STS program was shaped by a great many compromises NASA had to make in order to elicit political and military support. John Logsdon's After Apollo is a wonderful read on the subject.
Anyhow, it's not like we can't go back. It's not like orbital mechanics changed on us at some point and now we're all stuck in LEO. It's just a political choice, and we can make a new one whenever we want. It's just hard, in large part because we don't have the cold war and constant fear of imminent nuclear war to push the program through congress.
Beyond the political, to go back means redesigning everything that was done for Apollo. That's not a slight on American engineering or manufacturing capabilities. Everything--from the Saturn V, to the lunar module, and the countless pieces of equipment that helped get both where they needed to go--was designed for the manufacturing capabilities and techniques of the 1960s. You can't just grab the plans for the old Rocketdyne F-1 and start building them anew. The welds alone[2] represent a fundamental shift in capabilities and thinking. Common CAD design and analysis programs would have had Apollo engineers singing in the hallways in joy once they got over the shock.
They took what they had, and they made it work brilliantly. Change that context, and they would have designed a different engine, and the same goes for everything else.
0. https://www.space.com/10601-apollo-moon-program-public-suppo...
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...
2. https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
Because I personally haven't landed on the Moon, and I don't plan to, but “we” is typically assumed to include the speaker.
I'm beginning to suspect that those who perpetuate the meme of “we never landed on the Moon” are coyly defining “we” in a restrictive way that excludes the astronauts who did. “We [our family in California] never landed there!”
Cheap word-games. See also, political slogans designed to be misinterpreted and energize the base.
The engineers behind the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter operating overhead may like to have a word with you.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mars-reconnaissance-orbite...
EDIT: I hope it's Jean-Luc and not The Borg!!
My attitude is that it's something similar to getting ready for the end of the world by putting money in a savings account. If the money (or gold under your bed, cans of beans in the basement or even a pistol in your nightstand) does any good then it's not the end of the world.
If the universe is so crowded or so good at finding things like voyager that it's found in a meaningful (i.e. before humanity goes extinct or joins the godhead) time frame then we would have that encounter if voyager existed or not.
Possibly an advanced civilization that says "No, not ours."
"That belongs to the previous tenants. The probe is one of the few interesting things they did, otherwise they were terrible planet owners, they fought with each other and didn't appreaciate what they had, they wrecked the whole place."
Easier said than done. The Earth will be nowhere near where it is today. I assume such advanced civilization would be able to do the calculations, but it's going to be tricky. I hope they share with us their ways to solve the n-body problem.
As for more probes - getting more speed than these did efficiently is probably hard, let alone the fact that they don’t generate personal profit probably stops them being politically viable for a while…
I only mention that to say that the motivations of people in the future will probably seem odd to us and it's possible ours may seem equally odd to them. Not odd in the sense that they are intellectually inscrutable but - like people getting excited over the matters theological - that they're emotionally inscrutable.
Could you please share the title of this book?
A new probe wouldn't necessarily need to travel faster than these to not be on Earth when the sun dies.
The idea of there being a minuscule chance the Voyager probes hit anything is fair, but even a third one of the exact same model launched in the exact same direction has just as much chance of surviving just as long, barring wild speculation that could easily go either way.
> but also any future objects sent from Earth to do the same things
As somehow saying something about the “furthest”
Here is one approach using solar sails that would get up to 22 AU/year (~6 times faster than Voyager 1):
https://youtu.be/NQFqDKRAROI?si=Ol20sGMnsEMhRVf1&t=883
...and then further down in TRL: using laser pushed light sails to get over 10% of the speed of light:
https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...
Whether humans will still exist or our planet is a glowing radioactive waste by the time the voyagers encounter a new star is not a given.
But the voyagers have interstellar particles and dust to contend with, 5 billion years of abrasion from particles will wear them away to nothing.
On top of that they will eventually come near a random star which will eat them, or at least damage them. For example in 40,000 years they'll come pretty near some stars. In 5 billion years? Lots of stars.
Earth will easily outlive them.
Not a physicist, but I thought this didn't really happen in orbital mechanics, instead they'll just orbit said star.
But if they get close they'll slow down by interaction with the atmosphere of the star. Which is more likely than random chance because the star is attracting them.
Although eventually a rather obscure form of evidence as it'll gradually become a melted blob of constituent materials from cosmic rays.
(Assuming my hazy memories of Beast Wars are correct)
From the article. This is not really correct. The plutonium doesn't decay that fast. Its half life is about 87 years. So it's still way above half. I Unfortunately the thermoelectric converters that are losing efficiency too. Otherwise there'd still be enough power for a long time. Still pretty awesome they lasted so long of course.