NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced a computer glitch that’s causing a bit of a communication breakdown between the 46-year-old probe and its mission team on Earth.
For those who didn’t read the article, voyager 1 is still sending and transmitting data. It’s stuck in a loop sending the same packets to Earth on repeat but it is receiving commands just fine. It’s not completely dark.
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That’s fantastic, that means all they have to do is reset some components and it should restore functionality. I say should, it’s still a scary thing to turn on/off components om a satellite bcz you aren’t guaranteed they’ll come on. Nasa people usually prefer soft resets to hard resets of components, but we’ll see what happens.
One of the satellites I worked on had to have a software update to do a soft reset of a component every time it tried to write certain data. It was really scary bcz we thought we had lost one of our redundancies right after launch, which would have sucked.
But, we didn’t. Anyway, just wanted to give a little bit of insight into what the FOT might be thinking about while they’re trying to recover the satellite to nominal state.
Yeah I got very sad when I saw the headline and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Voyager 1’s death will be far sadder than most public figures. Maybe any.
Same, for a moment I was really concerned. Voyager is like a lifetime achievement for humanity at this point. When it stops communicating its going to be a big loss for the scientific community, and population as a whole. I’m not looking forward to hearing about its loss of functionality in the next decade or so.
Will we ever reach as far again?
I really can’t say, I’m not privy to any of the outer solar system projects that might be in the works. Voyager was originally intended to do flyby of the outer planets, and then it headed out of the solar system. I think the trajectory was always designed with the idea that it could exit the solar system. As far as I’m aware, we’ve done a few missions to asteroids, but nothing that is going out to do flyby of the outer planets. But, I could be wrong, don’t take my word for it. All of the stuff I have worked on has been near earth, or pointing away from the earth but still within the vicinity of L1 and L2 Lagrange points.
You’d be surprised how many missions nasa has in the works at any one time.
From ChatGPT just now:
Me: Summarize projects active as of early 2022 involving plans to send objects out of the solar system
ChatGPT (v4) Voyager 1 and 2: Continuing their journey, both launched in the 1970s. They are studying the outer solar system and interstellar space. New Horizons: After its Pluto flyby, it’s on an extended mission to explore the Kuiper Belt and beyond.
Pioneer 10 and 11: Although no longer sending data, they continue to travel out of the solar system.
Interstellar Probe Study: A NASA conceptual study for a mission to explore the interstellar medium.
Breakthrough Starshot Initiative: A research and engineering project aiming to develop a proof-of-concept fleet of light sail spacecraft, capable of making the journey to Alpha Centauri.
NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Programs: Some concepts under study, such as solar sails and fusion propulsion, could potentially send craft out of the solar system. These projects represent a blend of ongoing missions, conceptual studies, and advanced propulsion research with potential applications for future interstellar travel.
Incidentally, the light sail starshot project is talking about speeds of 0.3c.
I fucking love that project. Heard about it from Neil Tyson.
I think when we have space based fuel and fabrication infrastructure we’ll be able to make some interesting projects, some huge thing that just burns its rockets at full power through the solar system.
Or a very robust probe fired from a giant nuclear cannon on the dark side of the moon. If you start the journey at top speed that cuts out all the acceleration time, we could have stuff popping off in every direction.
Wait till it returns as V’ger
Or the Mighty V-GINY.
You waited 40 years to be able to use that.
Hats off to you.
I don’t know if I would consider Voyager to be ‘dead’ if it stops transmitting.
If I put a message in a bottle, with a blinky light on it, then throw it into the ocean, the message is still there even if the blinky light goes out.
Are we sure it isn’t YouTube trying to insert an ad?
This is the dumbest thing I’ve read today. You got a giggle out of me.
How do we know that it’s receiving commands fine? I am assuming pinging Voyager 1 might take a while.
It takes 20+ hours so since the announcement and now they could have send a command and gotten a response
It takes 45 hours and that’s a good question.
Perhaps there are multiple distinct channels with one for command responses and another for scientific data?
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God forbid we pollute the far reaches of space with radiation. (sic.)
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One of the main people who raised concern about rockets full of nuclear material exploding above populated areas was mitchio kaku. He certainly has a good few clues about radiation and nuclear physics.
As a smoker: I’m not clueless, I just don’t love myself more than the addiction. But I’m getting there, cause breathing “easily” is an under-rated pleasure, when compared to… not breathing that well
It can take time to break the mental stuff before breaking the habit, regardless of understood risk
Now magnets though… I’m at a complete fucking loss
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RTGs are still used for outer solar system missions. Not enough light for solar panels. Hell, even the Perseverance Mars rover, which was launched in 2020, has an RTG.
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Tell that to Tuvix.
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I heard they just ran out of coffee though…
V’Ger must evolve. It’s knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve.
Hacker news thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38640900
It’s gonna be a real pain in the ass to get a tech out there and look at it
Good thing we have cheap labor at your disposal!
Elon, get the fuck up there. Take bozos.
They should go check out the Titanic first
uh have they tried rebooting it?
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
They actually did:
The Voyager team sent commands over the weekend for the spacecraft to restart the flight data system, but no usable data has come back yet, according to NASA.
Unfortunately, that didn’t help. So now they’ll have to find out what’s causing this, and then see if they can fix it.
You know what this means?
When the new intern presses shut down instead of disconnect while connected to the production server
“No! No! Log out you fool! No! Don’t shut it down oh god he shut it down”
“Told you we should have greyed that out”
Never forget to QA test for stupid user errors.
Is there any other kind of user
dead ones
The question then is why the intern has access to the shut down button.
His GPA was stellar
Management got one IT guy managing the whole infrastructure so everyone who needs anything gets domain admin rights
Ah, time to reconfigure the IP address. Just set that, and *click* bring down network port, and *click* bring it up again… *click* … *click* … oh.
Based on a true story.
Why did they install Windows 11?
Forced update, they took too long to restart.
Well, I’m 46 and sometimes getting old is hard…
Engineers are working to resolve an issue with one of Voyager 1’s three onboard computers, called the flight data system (FDS). The spacecraft is receiving and executing commands sent from Earth; however, the FDS is not communicating properly with one of the probe’s subsystems, called the telemetry modulation unit (TMU). As a result, no science or engineering data is being sent back to Earth.
So now they are going to send engineers to fix/ replace the unit?
Letting a billion dollar piece of equipment go to waste is not very good either.
Yep, but it will take them 46 years to fix.
Well considering how far it is… I can only imagine that they are going to let it go due to redundancy. And yet the notion does not escape my mind.
Who knows what solutions we might come up with in the future ?
Pac man iq right here.
I think the pellets he’s been swallowing up were little bits of his brain
Coming from arch Linux, I can relate to that.
Please tell me this is a shitpost.
There are dozens of satellites, and, o’ how ironic that I have mistook this for the reachable ones !
Cut me some slack, I have been reading nothing but books about coding for the past year or so, okay !?
Cut me some slack, I have been reading nothing but books about coding for the past year or so, okay !?
Books about coding? Could you tell the 00’s I said hi?
But it’s the VOYAGER Engelbert!
Wags finger disapprovingly
Lol name me 3 of the core components that make up for the structure of the voyager.
The antennae, the dish and the computing stuff.
You kept the bar too low 😂😂😂
Ho !? I didn’t know you had it in you ! 😱
I kind of hoped you would have mentioned any of these: the magnetometer, polarimeter, and the interferometer; or the spectrometer, or the RTG system.
The engineers would die of old age before they even caught up to it.
New communications unit who dis?
Bit of a misleading title. The voyager can still receive commands and send data to earth, the problem is that instead of useful data it just keeps sending repeating code of no use. Not a huge fan of these sensationalized and just blatantly wrong news article titles.
Would you consider someone screaming gibberish at you, communicating?
People do this on a daily basis.
From what I read they can talk to the CCS (Computer Command System) just fine but the CCS is getting garbled data from the FDS (Flight Data Subsystem)
Flight data is like the log of sensor data right?
It’s not gibberish. It’s alien for “Sorry, no interstellar science for you”
It’s actually just gotten far enough that the data is being rendered at lower fidelity to save resources
They didn’t expect us to get sensors outside the heliosphere before winning the game, but players always immediately find crazy and unexpected ways to break your games
Haha I mean that’s fair. Although I’m mainly just displeased with the title of the article. Its worded in a way that conveys that we’ve lost contact with the satellite completely, which is not the case. Just a bit too click baity for my tastes.
I didn’t quite read it that way, but I can see how someone could read it that way. It does really seem like the probe is having problems with its internals, less than “communication has stopped”
Twitter?
“Amazingly old spacecraft is starting to break.”
Voyager 1 has had an exceptional service life, the poor old thing is tired.
I hope they can say that about me one day
“He was basically built to live 75 years. Fortunately for us, and for science, he’s still sending back signals these 4,000 years later”
Nope! Not me. I’m kinda hoping to undershoot the median age. My warranty’s expired and I really don’t know if I’m up for the “maybe we can find parts at the You-Pick” stage of existence.
No choice, pal. In our own subjective universe we never die.
Imagine if this were built with tech from today. It would be non-functional right after the warranty.
Thanks, Uncle Facebook.
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They don’t manufacture their equipment.
I believe they still make the probes and rovers.
They don’t, but they manage the people that do and pay for it
Shrug, Opportunity is much newer and still lasted about a thousand times longer than its design length.
But it’s got 70 terabits of storage! We closed over 1700 issues on this thing! My god we must have spent 13 billion on it so far!
How can it be failing? I mean just … just … look at the numbers!
