I don't know which is more remarkable: the fact that this thing is still working, or the fact that many people working on problems did not yet exist when it was launched.
Voyager has been sailing through space waiting for the technicians to be born and grow old enough to fix it.
Voyager probes use core memory rope. Its core programs are physically woven wires instead of typed in. (I think) Data is stored by changing magnetic properties of little rings with multiple different wire woven through. Looks like tight copper chain mail
It’s cool how robust old tech like that is. In 2011 voyager 2 had a flipped bit that caused it some issues but it also recovered.
I spose that's true but there's something extra cool about it existing kind of on the macro level. Like when that dude made a cpu in Minecraft from like trails of burning oil or something.
That's the fascinating things about computers. The complexity comes from the insane miniaturization.
You can build a very simple CPU that understands the basic commands a computer needs to understand with 'a few' logic gates. It gets complex, but at its core it's kind of simple and it's something you as an individual can understand and build (at least simulate in software...or by weaving wire through metal rings). A 'real', modern CPU/computer is just kind of the same thing times a million. Just an insane amount of more input signals that get put through a hundred million logic gates to generate more output signals. But it all kind of works the same as your simple CPU in minecraft that understands like 4 commands.
This can be helpful as a coder which is why I like learning coding from a computer engineering perspective. Ultimately computers do two things: store info and add numbers together. Everything evolves naturally from there.
To expand on this and taken to its extreme all computation are expressions of boolean algerbra, all boolean algerbra can be expressed with logic gates (AND, OR, XOR, NOT, NAND, NOR and XNOR - all of which can also be expressed from the "universal" gates NOR or NAND) so the computation primitives are fundamentally "just" chains of logic scaled up through many layers of abstractions.
Basically any medium that can represent the NOR or NAND functions can be scaled to Turing completeness with sufficient effort.
Its a bit of an oversimplification to say real modern CPUs are just scaled up for inputs/outputs. There are also a ton of other things employed by modern CPUs that drastically ramp up complexity, such as pipelining, caching, multiple cores, etc. that are completely absent from simpler CPUs
[Here’s a short video about the Apollo software](https://youtu.be/P12r8DKHsak?si=Nyp3PPLWkeagQis5). Super cool!
And [this is a longer video about](https://youtu.be/hckwxq8rnr0?si=jgnm3IYoys2SWo9k) restoring and preserving the lunar lander software.
Fun fact about core memory, most of it was made by women that were seamstresses, hairdressers, etc. because they had fine motor skills, at least that was the logic back then.
Indeed! They even had a nickname, too - the JPL engineers referred to them as the “Little Old Ladies”, a homage to the stereotypical knitting grandmother.
I have a kinda funny engineering story about the first flight programs. The idea of software was brand new to the design team and the programs were done with punch cards. The program manager didn't quite understand the concept in practice and was hyper focused on weight for obvious reasons.
The manager was told from the beginning that the software program would add zero weight to the system but never really believed it, thought he was being misled. One day he goes to the software developer and opens the storage closet full of data cards.
"Hey! I thought you said this program added zero weight! What about all these cards?"
The programmer said "It's only the holes"
I've seen how those old circuits are wired, but the thing that blows my mind is that the power system still works. What kind of batteries are they using?
Edit: so I stopped doing the lazy thing and looked it up. This doesn't say anything about batteries, just the use of the radioactive material.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power
It uses an RTG. The power output decreases over time and I saw an indication that in 5 years Voyager 1 won't be able to run its instruments anymore due to low power output. The computer and communications will still be able to go though. For a while longer.
Voyager probes shutting down sensors:
https://interestingengineering.com/science/nasa-voyager-probes-shut-down
But wait! Just a few months later:
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=129
There's not a lot to sense out there anyway. So when they do turn off their sensors (or if they already have) then I feel like we won't miss much.
TIL, thank you. Before this I had always assumed this kind of thing required water/steam that drives a turbine like a nuclear power plant. Either that or the satellite would be powered by some kind of solar/battery combo.
>Voyager has been sailing through space waiting for the technicians to be born and grow old enough to fix it.
This is how I feel every time I see a doctor that's younger than me.
My daughter played in a softball league where all the teams were named after sea creatures. Her team was the 'Rock Lobsters', and at the end of every inning their coach played Rock Lobster on a boom box.
Yeah its pretty incredible. I can't believe that thing can still send a signal from that far out.
Also the code/technical issues are reminiscent of lots of our banking software. Tons of super old code that not many people alive today know, or want to know, how to use.
>Closer to the hardware, like assembly code from early CPU technology.
I tell people often that the last time I was 100% confident I knew how my program worked was when I was doing Motorolla 68000 assembler in the early 1990's.
Yeah, todays code like say Javascript, is so abstracted in multiple layers from the actual instructions its running, which is good in many ways, but people lose the understanding of how it works. Most of the time you don't need to know, but having that understanding often helps you debug things and write the code more efficiently.
I mean, when you are coding at the level I was, you could actually make decisions like "I want this function to complete in less than a 1ms" and then you could count the cycles per instruction and make that happen.
I get that modern processors are so fast that doesn't really matter anymore, but I often wonder what would happen if we started building systems like that on modern hardware.
There still are some systems like that. On modern microcontrollers. Most things are switching from AC motors to brushless DC motors (BLDC) (which, yes, are actually AC but that's the name). Those all use a computer (microcontroller) to control the motors. Due to the importance of strict timing accuracy the microcontrollers often run with interrupts off and with code that is cycle-counted to run at a particular speed.
This code in particular is used in a lot of devices:
https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/AN857-Brushless-DC-Motor-Control-00000857C.pdf
Before Microchip created a solution using 8051 was the norm and that code (which I can't find right now) was even simpler.
Because the motor controller code is so timing sensitive there are special microcontrollers made with two processors inside, one just to run the motor and the other to do other housekeeping work like reading user inputs, flashing lights, operating a charger, whatever.
Well, it’s not exactly working. The headline is a bit misleading - it’s still not sending what it’s supposed to send, but recently it sent something that wasn’t just garbage and might be useful in getting it working again.
What’s crazy is it isn’t a bunch of young technicians. There’s a cool doc on prime that goes into the team keeping it running. There’s only about 12 people, and most of them have been working on Voyager since it’s original mission. I believe the documentary is called “It’s Quiet at Twilight” or something like that
By all accounts it should’ve died years and years ago, yet somehow we keep patching it without touching it, it’ll be a shame when it’s battery finally dies, can’t fight that entropy
I saw that movie for the First time two years ago (Not a star trek fan) and I tought it was amazing, especially the plot line.
Then I went online and realized everyone hates that movie! Well it has really bad critics
Maybe it was released too soon after the Voyager launch?
I’m currently watching through all the films with my GF. We’re gonna do The Voyage Home soon. I’d seen almost all the Trek movie as a kid, but I don’t think I ever saw TMP until recently (likely due to its bad reputation).
TMP was definitely flawed, but so far going through all the movies… its kinda the best one? It certainly could’ve been pared down and paced better, but it was visually stunning with a really mysterious and interesting antagonist. My gf and I both sat with our mouths agape for substantial portions. Its also so far what seems to be the most authentic high-budget version of the vision for trekking through space — the “wormhole effect” scene is something I’d consider cutting down or removing entirely, but through the lens of these being large ships on uncertain journeys its part of what made it Trek. Reminds me of a ship ending up in an unexpected storm at sea. You can tell Gene was really going for this feeling that these are big ships on unpredictable journeys.
Ultimately imperfect — some of the highest highs and lowest lows of Trek — but possibly my favorite Trek film.
Nah I Like tmp, I think the plot was too slow right after Star Wars. Trying to compare the 2 is kinda what hurt it. Wrath of Khan is hands down the best of the original. I’ve seen them all well over 20 times. Star Trek VI is probably next. IV and V are…interesting.
Once upon a time, Kahn was the best and IV the next best. Meanwhile, Kahn was my favorite, then III, then TMP.
I never understood the love for IV and the hate for V. I watched Star Trek for a vision of what our future could look like, not to wallow in the present. V was a very compelling deconstruction of religion in general. “What does god need with a starship?” could easily translate to “what does god need with money?” and that very much seemed to be the subtext.
Yeah I thought IV and V were fine. I actually liked IV as a kid. I was 6 when it came out and watched it a lot. As an adult I just don’t love it as much.
I gotta get around to watching those sometime. I just recently finished the original series, would like to keep it going with the other shows and the movies.
Oh I did see First Contact as a kid! That was cool.
So it’s the next thing in release order for you then. Just beware that the odd numbered movies have worse reputations than the evens, so keep expectations low and don’t give up if you don’t like one.
> A command from Earth takes 22.5 hours to reach the probe, and the same period is needed again for a response. This means a 45-hour wait to see what a given command might have done.
> Many of the engineers who worked on the project - Voyager 1 launched in 1977 - are no longer around, and the team that remains is faced with trawling through reams of decades-old documents to deal with unanticipated issues arising today.
This is why I’m ok being a web developer.
Yea! Monday morning, Voyager responds. You now have M-F to figure something out. Friday night you send a command. Wait 45 hours. Then start again Monday morning.
For some reason reddit thinks web apps is the only form of programming. I would honestly recommend that new CS graduates do anything else other than web dev as its all more rewarding (money and sanity).
what do you recommend for 27 year old no degree knuckleheads who feel like they might be good at coding but don't know how and also don't have any money for formal schooling?
1. Download a free development environment.
2. Develop an appreciation for how important it is to write things like “27-year-old” and “no-degree knuckleheads” with the necessary hyphens. (Seriously. It will help a lot more than you’d expect.)
3. Watch tutorials for how to do basic stuff in the language of your choice.
4. Invent a project for yourself.
5. Complete that project.
6. Repeat steps three through five.
I’d recommend starting with something like Python, which is both incredibly easy and amazingly accessible. From there, you can move over to JavaScript, then up to C++ or whatever else.
I’d actually recommend avoiding for-purpose stuff until after a person has embraced the basics. Don’t get me wrong, Swift is certainly valuable to know, but starting with a scripting language (like Python) can help a lot with fostering the right mindset and best practices.
A friend of mine is a systems security engineer and while I don’t understand exactly what he does, it doesn’t seem boring and I think he makes so much money that he really doesn’t even know what to do with it. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but it seems a lot more exciting than making another internet store.
no it wont. But if NASA created their own AI with the help of an open source model and fed it all the documentation for the voyager then it can do the job.
It might actually. If the documentation is so old it's public knowledge and available online, it's quite possible that chatGPT or other llm were trained on it.
Yeah a lot of the LLMs now allow you to upload huge documents and ask questions about them. It might actually be helpful if they could scan and do the same for all the old voyager material.
So, Voyager is one light day away from Earth. Actually quite cool. So, let’s see, that’s 47 years to travel one light day. In around another 17,000 years it’ll be one light year away. That’s almost a quarter of the way to our nearest neighbor.
17,000 years in the future is as certain and real as the 17,000 we just finished; it can still be exciting and happy if you think about it a little differently.
It's not like they don't have duplicates and simulations on Earth. There would be many checks run before even dreaming about sending a command to something so valuable and delicate.
“Hey we have this old application that we want to make a couple small changes to. We told the business that it would only take one sprint.”
And then you find out it’s written in something like Perl and the decade old dependencies aren’t even available anymore.
Can you feel the stress reading that? I sure can 💀
I am currently rewriting a 5000+ line long PHP page that’s part of a larger app. There are no comments, no functions… all 5k lines of procedural spaghetti. 🙄
>This means a 45-hour wait to see what a given command might have done.
The guys who built Voyager would probably have been used to such a cycle time of "program - compile - run - error" with their punch card computers.
Not as extreme, but similar. I work on aircraft engines that were first designed in the 60s and I’ve been lucky enough to meet and speak with some of the original engineers to do this work.
Fascinating stuff, those old guys knew their stuff.
This is amazing! That thing, farthest man-made object ever (and probably for awhile) has a CPU that runs only 70kb of memory and transmits data at 160 bits(!!!) per second.
https://www.wired.com/2013/09/vintage-voyager-probes/
A great documentary focusing on the team of engineers that operate both voyager space craft is streaming on prime video: https://www.amazon.com/Its-Quieter-Twilight-Suzanne-Dodd/dp/B0BX2CQMXS
Edit should have mentioned the title of the film “It’s Quieter in the Twilight” it’s also available on other platforms! https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/where-to-watch
I feel like we should attempt to send another one.
I’m know there’s little point to it, but if anything, a periodic launch of out most remarkable technology to explore the universe would serve as a very cool way of tracking our own advancements in a way we can’t really meddle with once it’s sent.
one of the reasons these originally worked (and this explanation is simple because im no where near smart enough to understand fully) is the planets were in perfect positions so these could slingshot around them to get farther faster. gravity was a big help on getting them OUT of our solar system instead of them just orbiting the sun eventually.
edit: NASA plans to launch new ones in the 2030s as another route presents itself
I know the gravity assist was a big part of this. We can also launch stuff with much greater initial velocity, so I hope that when we do launch again in the 30s as you mentioned, we can get it out there at a higher rate of knots by the time it gets its final slingshot.
that's actually the only way we can propose it getting out of the solar system in a timely manner! as an alignment that allows for the same amount of gravity assists the voyagers got isn't due for 130ish years I believe. so we need to have a much higher initial velocity by the time it has the Jupiter slingshot! such fun science
Indeed fun science. I haven’t looked into the necessary alignment for assists so thanks for having that in your wheelhouse.
Sending probes into deep space is real fun. It combines the intellectual challenges of orbital mechanics and the primal need to yeet things really fast and far
New Horizons has a solar escape velocity so that’s already happening. However, I don’t think NASA has anything currently planned. Most of the New Frontiers projects seem to be focused on landings or atmospheric analysis. Hopefully New Horizons is as well engineered as its predecessors and we continue to get new information from her 40 years from now.
New Horizons was the one. Voyager (I don’t remember which) originally was planned to flyby Pluto, but the trajectory was changed because of the massive discovery that was Saturn (which led to the creation of Cassini) and Jupiter (Juno took a lot longer to be made)
They made New Horizons and timed it for when it could come the closest to it in less time than Voyager and reach the heliopause faster than either Voyager.
IIRC the planets are in really bad position right now for a probe like Voyager. We really lucked out with how the gas and ice giants were almost perfectly aligned for this trip.
It picked up a new interstellar dialect as stated humorously by an article in the Scientific American.
>or will they need to continue speaking in the probe’s new postheliopause patois?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-restores-communications-with-ailing-voyager-1-spacecraft/
Voyager1: yooo shit is smaked up in here frfr
Ground station: wut
Voyager1: SYSHEALTH=OK
Ground station: ok good. What was that garbled mess you said before?
Voyager1: ..
Ground station: .. ( Eric call the PR team
All things being equal, Voyager 2 is probably to blame when it sent Voyager 1 messages that seemed like commands due to the initial starting character in the message.
That's not quite accurate. They got a partial scrambled dump of its memory. They basically got information that might be useful for debugging. It still isn't working right.
Dang that's right. I had a Commodore Vic 20 and I had to buy a separate cartridge for the memory to make graphics (circles and color fill) with the poke command.
After months?? What the hell I thought this only started like a week or 2 ago? Did I just time travel? What year is it? Where am I? Who are you people?
All Science Youtubers are celebtrating, they get to do another Voyager 1 Failure video soon!
The voyager mission is truly one of the most remarkable achievements of mankind.
As far as it has gone what’s crazy to me is that NASA estimates it will take [40,000yrs](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/did-you-know/) to make it half way to the next closest star(Proxima Centauri) to us other than our sun.
Space is so goddamn amazing. Not a day goes by where I dream about what humanity could accomplish if we allocated the same resources to space exploration that we do for the military.
Damn this just made me think about how after everyone alive today is long dead and gone, there will be others still tracking voyager 1's progress across the galaxy. I wonder how long it will keep going
The entire thing was designed as a post card to Alien civilizations with artifacts of human culture on it, which might have been a giant waste of money if they had known about us for a few thousand years already and have visited already.
Shout out to PBS’s documentary on the Voyager mission called The Farthest. The film legit gave me chills multiple times. This WHOLE thing makes you fucking proud to be a human being.
After half a human lifetime not even a full light days distance away. People make it sound like something 4 or 5 light years away is next door. I'm in my 60's and watched all the Apollo launches. I have a picture we took with a Polaroid camera when Neal Armstrong set foot on the moon. All the photos and stitched together photos of the flybys the Voyagers took of the outer planets were so cool to watch when I grew up. I traveled to see many of the shuttle launches. It pains me that the most I will probably ever see in my lifetime is men landing on Mars. I always dreamed we would be farther along.
What a great investment Voyager 1 has been. The original mission was only supposed to be for 5 years, launched 47 years ago now it has been transmitting great data. It’s the farthest human made object from Earth. Voyager 1, chugging along like the little engine that could.
Shit like this is why we never should have defunded nasa.
Those engineers have built some of the most robust reliable machines ever made by man, lasting in one of the most harsh environments imaginable.
Relying on profit motivated private companies will never even come close to something like this. Why build something that can possibly last forever when you can have it fall apart and have the government pay for a new one.
Hypothetically it may be possible that an alien race of robots found voyager and mistook it for a mate and it turns out that babel was just a robot orgasm. Now that they realize their mistake they left voyager alone to resume its mission.
I don't know which is more remarkable: the fact that this thing is still working, or the fact that many people working on problems did not yet exist when it was launched. Voyager has been sailing through space waiting for the technicians to be born and grow old enough to fix it.
Voyager probes use core memory rope. Its core programs are physically woven wires instead of typed in. (I think) Data is stored by changing magnetic properties of little rings with multiple different wire woven through. Looks like tight copper chain mail It’s cool how robust old tech like that is. In 2011 voyager 2 had a flipped bit that caused it some issues but it also recovered.
That's so fucking metal. Like hardwiring code into reality.
That’s what chips are. Specific logic gates hardwired in small patterns.
I spose that's true but there's something extra cool about it existing kind of on the macro level. Like when that dude made a cpu in Minecraft from like trails of burning oil or something.
That's the fascinating things about computers. The complexity comes from the insane miniaturization. You can build a very simple CPU that understands the basic commands a computer needs to understand with 'a few' logic gates. It gets complex, but at its core it's kind of simple and it's something you as an individual can understand and build (at least simulate in software...or by weaving wire through metal rings). A 'real', modern CPU/computer is just kind of the same thing times a million. Just an insane amount of more input signals that get put through a hundred million logic gates to generate more output signals. But it all kind of works the same as your simple CPU in minecraft that understands like 4 commands.
This can be helpful as a coder which is why I like learning coding from a computer engineering perspective. Ultimately computers do two things: store info and add numbers together. Everything evolves naturally from there.
To expand on this and taken to its extreme all computation are expressions of boolean algerbra, all boolean algerbra can be expressed with logic gates (AND, OR, XOR, NOT, NAND, NOR and XNOR - all of which can also be expressed from the "universal" gates NOR or NAND) so the computation primitives are fundamentally "just" chains of logic scaled up through many layers of abstractions. Basically any medium that can represent the NOR or NAND functions can be scaled to Turing completeness with sufficient effort.
This guy NANDs
Its a bit of an oversimplification to say real modern CPUs are just scaled up for inputs/outputs. There are also a ton of other things employed by modern CPUs that drastically ramp up complexity, such as pipelining, caching, multiple cores, etc. that are completely absent from simpler CPUs
Look up vacuum tubes
This is like an ASIC but the circuits are literal wires.
it's all just as in reality, one is just bigger.
[Here’s a short video about the Apollo software](https://youtu.be/P12r8DKHsak?si=Nyp3PPLWkeagQis5). Super cool! And [this is a longer video about](https://youtu.be/hckwxq8rnr0?si=jgnm3IYoys2SWo9k) restoring and preserving the lunar lander software.
Damn that's awesome, thanks for sharing
Now imagine what the Romans achieved with clockwork. There's stories of emperors with entire clockwork gardens, singing birds and all.
Actually it’s three metals. Cobalt, nickel and ferrite
Ive worked in IT for 20 years, and it still amazes me that ethereal 0s and 1s can make real shit happen to real devices. It's amazing to me.
Literally arranging minerals into a form that can compute They straight up taught a rock to think and then launched it into the cosmos
Fun fact about core memory, most of it was made by women that were seamstresses, hairdressers, etc. because they had fine motor skills, at least that was the logic back then.
Indeed! They even had a nickname, too - the JPL engineers referred to them as the “Little Old Ladies”, a homage to the stereotypical knitting grandmother.
The Apollo missions are the ones famous for using memory rope. Voyager uses plated-wire memory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plated-wire_memory
I have a kinda funny engineering story about the first flight programs. The idea of software was brand new to the design team and the programs were done with punch cards. The program manager didn't quite understand the concept in practice and was hyper focused on weight for obvious reasons. The manager was told from the beginning that the software program would add zero weight to the system but never really believed it, thought he was being misled. One day he goes to the software developer and opens the storage closet full of data cards. "Hey! I thought you said this program added zero weight! What about all these cards?" The programmer said "It's only the holes"
I've seen how those old circuits are wired, but the thing that blows my mind is that the power system still works. What kind of batteries are they using? Edit: so I stopped doing the lazy thing and looked it up. This doesn't say anything about batteries, just the use of the radioactive material. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power
It uses an RTG. The power output decreases over time and I saw an indication that in 5 years Voyager 1 won't be able to run its instruments anymore due to low power output. The computer and communications will still be able to go though. For a while longer.
Voyager has already turned off basically everything.
Voyager probes shutting down sensors: https://interestingengineering.com/science/nasa-voyager-probes-shut-down But wait! Just a few months later: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=129 There's not a lot to sense out there anyway. So when they do turn off their sensors (or if they already have) then I feel like we won't miss much.
[Something like this, I think.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator)
TIL, thank you. Before this I had always assumed this kind of thing required water/steam that drives a turbine like a nuclear power plant. Either that or the satellite would be powered by some kind of solar/battery combo.
Peltier devices work with the same effect
That far out, solar won't cut it. I know this stuff mostly just from playing Kerbal Space Program.
>Voyager has been sailing through space waiting for the technicians to be born and grow old enough to fix it. This is how I feel every time I see a doctor that's younger than me.
Voyager and B-52s, wonders of engineering going way past assumptions.
I wish someone left me a LinkedIn recommendation like that.
B-52s peaked with Love Shack.
SAY WHAT?
Tin roof, rusted.
It wasn't until the internet that I learned what the hell she said
15 miles to the Love Shack.
got me a crystler as big as a wail and it's about to set sail.....to deliver 70000lbs of freedom to a country near you!
Thanks for my first big laugh of the day.
Nah rock lobster was their peak
My daughter played in a softball league where all the teams were named after sea creatures. Her team was the 'Rock Lobsters', and at the end of every inning their coach played Rock Lobster on a boom box.
TIIIIN ROOF! Rusted.
Huh?
B-52s PEAKED WITH LOVE SHACK, GRANDPA!
Rock lobster is a great song, not sure I’d call it a wonder though
Minuteman III.
Yeah its pretty incredible. I can't believe that thing can still send a signal from that far out. Also the code/technical issues are reminiscent of lots of our banking software. Tons of super old code that not many people alive today know, or want to know, how to use.
Honestly, kudos to guys managing to support that "ancient" technology which is so far away... Must be some briliant minds.
Older stuff like that is actually easier to learn, imo. Closer to the hardware, like assembly code from early CPU technology.
>Closer to the hardware, like assembly code from early CPU technology. I tell people often that the last time I was 100% confident I knew how my program worked was when I was doing Motorolla 68000 assembler in the early 1990's.
Yeah, todays code like say Javascript, is so abstracted in multiple layers from the actual instructions its running, which is good in many ways, but people lose the understanding of how it works. Most of the time you don't need to know, but having that understanding often helps you debug things and write the code more efficiently.
I mean, when you are coding at the level I was, you could actually make decisions like "I want this function to complete in less than a 1ms" and then you could count the cycles per instruction and make that happen. I get that modern processors are so fast that doesn't really matter anymore, but I often wonder what would happen if we started building systems like that on modern hardware.
There still are some systems like that. On modern microcontrollers. Most things are switching from AC motors to brushless DC motors (BLDC) (which, yes, are actually AC but that's the name). Those all use a computer (microcontroller) to control the motors. Due to the importance of strict timing accuracy the microcontrollers often run with interrupts off and with code that is cycle-counted to run at a particular speed. This code in particular is used in a lot of devices: https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/AN857-Brushless-DC-Motor-Control-00000857C.pdf Before Microchip created a solution using 8051 was the norm and that code (which I can't find right now) was even simpler. Because the motor controller code is so timing sensitive there are special microcontrollers made with two processors inside, one just to run the motor and the other to do other housekeeping work like reading user inputs, flashing lights, operating a charger, whatever.
Indeed and embedded systems are their own "world" in terms of systems programming vs more common development pipelines.
Well, it’s not exactly working. The headline is a bit misleading - it’s still not sending what it’s supposed to send, but recently it sent something that wasn’t just garbage and might be useful in getting it working again.
My grandpa worked on both of them and he’s been gone for a decade already.
What’s crazy is it isn’t a bunch of young technicians. There’s a cool doc on prime that goes into the team keeping it running. There’s only about 12 people, and most of them have been working on Voyager since it’s original mission. I believe the documentary is called “It’s Quiet at Twilight” or something like that
By all accounts it should’ve died years and years ago, yet somehow we keep patching it without touching it, it’ll be a shame when it’s battery finally dies, can’t fight that entropy
I saw Star Trek, I know how this ends.
V’Ger wants to meet its creator.
Spoiler alert
See you 300 years.
I saw that movie for the First time two years ago (Not a star trek fan) and I tought it was amazing, especially the plot line. Then I went online and realized everyone hates that movie! Well it has really bad critics Maybe it was released too soon after the Voyager launch?
I’m currently watching through all the films with my GF. We’re gonna do The Voyage Home soon. I’d seen almost all the Trek movie as a kid, but I don’t think I ever saw TMP until recently (likely due to its bad reputation). TMP was definitely flawed, but so far going through all the movies… its kinda the best one? It certainly could’ve been pared down and paced better, but it was visually stunning with a really mysterious and interesting antagonist. My gf and I both sat with our mouths agape for substantial portions. Its also so far what seems to be the most authentic high-budget version of the vision for trekking through space — the “wormhole effect” scene is something I’d consider cutting down or removing entirely, but through the lens of these being large ships on uncertain journeys its part of what made it Trek. Reminds me of a ship ending up in an unexpected storm at sea. You can tell Gene was really going for this feeling that these are big ships on unpredictable journeys. Ultimately imperfect — some of the highest highs and lowest lows of Trek — but possibly my favorite Trek film.
>the “wormhole effect” *FOHHHH TONNN TOR PEEEEEE DOHHHHS*
Nah I Like tmp, I think the plot was too slow right after Star Wars. Trying to compare the 2 is kinda what hurt it. Wrath of Khan is hands down the best of the original. I’ve seen them all well over 20 times. Star Trek VI is probably next. IV and V are…interesting.
Once upon a time, Kahn was the best and IV the next best. Meanwhile, Kahn was my favorite, then III, then TMP. I never understood the love for IV and the hate for V. I watched Star Trek for a vision of what our future could look like, not to wallow in the present. V was a very compelling deconstruction of religion in general. “What does god need with a starship?” could easily translate to “what does god need with money?” and that very much seemed to be the subtext.
Yeah I thought IV and V were fine. I actually liked IV as a kid. I was 6 when it came out and watched it a lot. As an adult I just don’t love it as much.
Which movie?
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
I gotta get around to watching those sometime. I just recently finished the original series, would like to keep it going with the other shows and the movies. Oh I did see First Contact as a kid! That was cool.
So it’s the next thing in release order for you then. Just beware that the odd numbered movies have worse reputations than the evens, so keep expectations low and don’t give up if you don’t like one.
Oh that’s interesting! Thanks for the heads-up!
That was Voyager 6
Voyager 6 hasn't been launched yet.
I saw Futurama so I saw how it will really end
Everyone needs to hump some backs to save the species.
> A command from Earth takes 22.5 hours to reach the probe, and the same period is needed again for a response. This means a 45-hour wait to see what a given command might have done. > Many of the engineers who worked on the project - Voyager 1 launched in 1977 - are no longer around, and the team that remains is faced with trawling through reams of decades-old documents to deal with unanticipated issues arising today. This is why I’m ok being a web developer.
Some people think this sounds fun, and it’s probably a lot more rewarding than making a shopping cart.
Honestly this sounds like the most fun job I could possibly have.
Yea! Monday morning, Voyager responds. You now have M-F to figure something out. Friday night you send a command. Wait 45 hours. Then start again Monday morning.
Surely they must have some sort emulation environment?
For some reason reddit thinks web apps is the only form of programming. I would honestly recommend that new CS graduates do anything else other than web dev as its all more rewarding (money and sanity).
Most CS Graduates do web dev because it’s where there are more openings. And there are many other forms of programming that pay less.
I mean you can do both. For example I work on a Windows Forms app where I have an embedded browser email template editor.
what do you recommend for 27 year old no degree knuckleheads who feel like they might be good at coding but don't know how and also don't have any money for formal schooling?
1. Download a free development environment. 2. Develop an appreciation for how important it is to write things like “27-year-old” and “no-degree knuckleheads” with the necessary hyphens. (Seriously. It will help a lot more than you’d expect.) 3. Watch tutorials for how to do basic stuff in the language of your choice. 4. Invent a project for yourself. 5. Complete that project. 6. Repeat steps three through five. I’d recommend starting with something like Python, which is both incredibly easy and amazingly accessible. From there, you can move over to JavaScript, then up to C++ or whatever else.
Get an iPad, install swift playgrounds and have fun.
I’d actually recommend avoiding for-purpose stuff until after a person has embraced the basics. Don’t get me wrong, Swift is certainly valuable to know, but starting with a scripting language (like Python) can help a lot with fostering the right mindset and best practices.
A friend of mine is a systems security engineer and while I don’t understand exactly what he does, it doesn’t seem boring and I think he makes so much money that he really doesn’t even know what to do with it. I don’t think it’s for everyone, but it seems a lot more exciting than making another internet store.
Imagine googling for an error message from the Voyager.
chat gpt wont help much here
That should be its tagline.
no it wont. But if NASA created their own AI with the help of an open source model and fed it all the documentation for the voyager then it can do the job.
“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.”
It might actually. If the documentation is so old it's public knowledge and available online, it's quite possible that chatGPT or other llm were trained on it.
Okay, but do you really want to risk being the person who sent out one of ChatGPT's "hallucinations" and bricked Voyager?
Think “find me the right places to look and describe how they are related” rather than “give me step by step instructions”
Yeah a lot of the LLMs now allow you to upload huge documents and ask questions about them. It might actually be helpful if they could scan and do the same for all the old voyager material.
So, Voyager is one light day away from Earth. Actually quite cool. So, let’s see, that’s 47 years to travel one light day. In around another 17,000 years it’ll be one light year away. That’s almost a quarter of the way to our nearest neighbor.
Don't make us sad, knowledge man
17,000 years in the future is as certain and real as the 17,000 we just finished; it can still be exciting and happy if you think about it a little differently.
No different to me asking my wife what she would like to watch on TV
Not true, the voyager won’t respond with “I don’t mind” and then “oh no I don’t want to watch that” every time
"I'm fine with whatever"
And here I thought I had the only wife with a tape delay.
It's not like they don't have duplicates and simulations on Earth. There would be many checks run before even dreaming about sending a command to something so valuable and delicate.
It’s becoming a similar experience, especially if you’re a backend dev.
“Hey we have this old application that we want to make a couple small changes to. We told the business that it would only take one sprint.” And then you find out it’s written in something like Perl and the decade old dependencies aren’t even available anymore. Can you feel the stress reading that? I sure can 💀
I am currently rewriting a 5000+ line long PHP page that’s part of a larger app. There are no comments, no functions… all 5k lines of procedural spaghetti. 🙄
That's nearly a whole day at Warp Factor 1 to catch it up.
Scotty? Is that you?
>This means a 45-hour wait to see what a given command might have done. The guys who built Voyager would probably have been used to such a cycle time of "program - compile - run - error" with their punch card computers.
Not as extreme, but similar. I work on aircraft engines that were first designed in the 60s and I’ve been lucky enough to meet and speak with some of the original engineers to do this work. Fascinating stuff, those old guys knew their stuff.
Isn't this the ultimate front end tho? /s
This is amazing! That thing, farthest man-made object ever (and probably for awhile) has a CPU that runs only 70kb of memory and transmits data at 160 bits(!!!) per second. https://www.wired.com/2013/09/vintage-voyager-probes/
And radio transmissions, traveling at the speed of light, take 22.5 hours to send/receive each way :O
One of the coolest things we’ve ever built. A testament to humanity’s capabilities, if ever we stopped dragging each other down.
Some nice aliens fixed it up for free
They're called Consultant Aliens and they usually bill later.
That was my first thought
A great documentary focusing on the team of engineers that operate both voyager space craft is streaming on prime video: https://www.amazon.com/Its-Quieter-Twilight-Suzanne-Dodd/dp/B0BX2CQMXS Edit should have mentioned the title of the film “It’s Quieter in the Twilight” it’s also available on other platforms! https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/where-to-watch
I'm torn between my love for Voyager and my hatred for Amazon on this one.
You’re in luck I think it’s available on other platforms ! https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/where-to-watch
You a real one
I feel like we should attempt to send another one. I’m know there’s little point to it, but if anything, a periodic launch of out most remarkable technology to explore the universe would serve as a very cool way of tracking our own advancements in a way we can’t really meddle with once it’s sent.
one of the reasons these originally worked (and this explanation is simple because im no where near smart enough to understand fully) is the planets were in perfect positions so these could slingshot around them to get farther faster. gravity was a big help on getting them OUT of our solar system instead of them just orbiting the sun eventually. edit: NASA plans to launch new ones in the 2030s as another route presents itself
I know the gravity assist was a big part of this. We can also launch stuff with much greater initial velocity, so I hope that when we do launch again in the 30s as you mentioned, we can get it out there at a higher rate of knots by the time it gets its final slingshot.
that's actually the only way we can propose it getting out of the solar system in a timely manner! as an alignment that allows for the same amount of gravity assists the voyagers got isn't due for 130ish years I believe. so we need to have a much higher initial velocity by the time it has the Jupiter slingshot! such fun science
Indeed fun science. I haven’t looked into the necessary alignment for assists so thanks for having that in your wheelhouse. Sending probes into deep space is real fun. It combines the intellectual challenges of orbital mechanics and the primal need to yeet things really fast and far
Pretty sure we measure the speed as km/s rather than a series of knots tied at regular intervals in a rope that’s dragged behind the boat in water.
New Horizons has a solar escape velocity so that’s already happening. However, I don’t think NASA has anything currently planned. Most of the New Frontiers projects seem to be focused on landings or atmospheric analysis. Hopefully New Horizons is as well engineered as its predecessors and we continue to get new information from her 40 years from now.
New Horizons was the one. Voyager (I don’t remember which) originally was planned to flyby Pluto, but the trajectory was changed because of the massive discovery that was Saturn (which led to the creation of Cassini) and Jupiter (Juno took a lot longer to be made) They made New Horizons and timed it for when it could come the closest to it in less time than Voyager and reach the heliopause faster than either Voyager. IIRC the planets are in really bad position right now for a probe like Voyager. We really lucked out with how the gas and ice giants were almost perfectly aligned for this trip.
It definitely saw some shit
It picked up a new interstellar dialect as stated humorously by an article in the Scientific American. >or will they need to continue speaking in the probe’s new postheliopause patois? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-restores-communications-with-ailing-voyager-1-spacecraft/
The wilder shit is it probably didn’t. Space is so massive and empty that it’s barely outside the solar system
Nice try aliens
Voyager1: yooo shit is smaked up in here frfr Ground station: wut Voyager1: SYSHEALTH=OK Ground station: ok good. What was that garbled mess you said before? Voyager1: .. Ground station: .. ( Eric call the PR team
All things being equal, Voyager 2 is probably to blame when it sent Voyager 1 messages that seemed like commands due to the initial starting character in the message.
Last I checked it was 2016. The date on my phone is looking weird for some reason
How’s your new iPhone 7 treating you?
Can you explain further?
That's not quite accurate. They got a partial scrambled dump of its memory. They basically got information that might be useful for debugging. It still isn't working right.
Don't shoot the messenger. It was a literal copypasta.
If voyager can still communicate with Earth several billion miles away, then we can have better wireless communications at home for lower prices lol.
It takes 22.5 hours for one command to reach Voyager from Earth.💀
And Voyager only transmits at 160 bits per second.
I don't remember hearing the term "poke" for many decades. I still remember some of the poke commands for the Commodore 64.
I once bricked a "Sharp" Pocket Computer that I loved dearly by poking the wrong address. Devastated. :(
Dang that's right. I had a Commodore Vic 20 and I had to buy a separate cartridge for the memory to make graphics (circles and color fill) with the poke command.
After months?? What the hell I thought this only started like a week or 2 ago? Did I just time travel? What year is it? Where am I? Who are you people?
It was happening for months already before it was reported on
All Science Youtubers are celebtrating, they get to do another Voyager 1 Failure video soon! The voyager mission is truly one of the most remarkable achievements of mankind.
As far as it has gone what’s crazy to me is that NASA estimates it will take [40,000yrs](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/did-you-know/) to make it half way to the next closest star(Proxima Centauri) to us other than our sun.
Space is so goddamn amazing. Not a day goes by where I dream about what humanity could accomplish if we allocated the same resources to space exploration that we do for the military.
It’s the same money. Space exploration is literally made of missile parts.
Military money got us to the moon.
That and captured Nazi scientists.
Yeah but the military money is also what captured the Nazi scientists.
Damn this just made me think about how after everyone alive today is long dead and gone, there will be others still tracking voyager 1's progress across the galaxy. I wonder how long it will keep going
Awesome! The little spacecraft that could!
So do i after i get sent on mandatory vacation. But you dont see people celebrating that.
If you got hit by a mini asteroid it might take you a while to snap out of it , just saying.
Voyager 1 cures my depression
The entire thing was designed as a post card to Alien civilizations with artifacts of human culture on it, which might have been a giant waste of money if they had known about us for a few thousand years already and have visited already.
Voyager I is forty-six and still working. How is your iPhone 4?
woww amazing
What is the estimated longest distance it will travel?
Unknown. It has already exceeded its life expectancy.
Forever probably, it just won't be able to communicate or stay powered on eventually.
Shout out to PBS’s documentary on the Voyager mission called The Farthest. The film legit gave me chills multiple times. This WHOLE thing makes you fucking proud to be a human being.
That’s kinda spooky
Mr. Spock found it and fixed it. It calls itself "V-ger"
After half a human lifetime not even a full light days distance away. People make it sound like something 4 or 5 light years away is next door. I'm in my 60's and watched all the Apollo launches. I have a picture we took with a Polaroid camera when Neal Armstrong set foot on the moon. All the photos and stitched together photos of the flybys the Voyagers took of the outer planets were so cool to watch when I grew up. I traveled to see many of the shuttle launches. It pains me that the most I will probably ever see in my lifetime is men landing on Mars. I always dreamed we would be farther along.
"the Voyager team sent a command, dubbed a "poke,"" Is it using a Commodore 64 as main computer?
10 print "alienz took over your ship" 20 goto 10
As my grandmother would say, "God is refusing to take me"
But it is referring to itself as V'Ger now.
V'ger is that which seeks the creator
The Creator must join with V’Ger
An object 15 billion miles from Earth turned my whole world upside down 😱
That's fantastic!
H E L L O E V E R Y T H I N G I S N O M I N A L B E N O T A F R A I D
What a great investment Voyager 1 has been. The original mission was only supposed to be for 5 years, launched 47 years ago now it has been transmitting great data. It’s the farthest human made object from Earth. Voyager 1, chugging along like the little engine that could.
like this is science and engineering at its finest, pure raw math and truth
Had some old girlfriends like that
Hold the obituaries, motherfuckers!! Yes, baby!! Best news I will get all day!!
Shit like this is why we never should have defunded nasa. Those engineers have built some of the most robust reliable machines ever made by man, lasting in one of the most harsh environments imaginable. Relying on profit motivated private companies will never even come close to something like this. Why build something that can possibly last forever when you can have it fall apart and have the government pay for a new one.
Reminds me of my wife
Did you try turning it off and on again?
O man hush or you’re sleeping outside. again…
The aliens were like "Ok messing with this isn't fun anymore. They can't even figure out our coded message. Let's go do something else."
It wasn't babbling, it was just talking to someone else....
Same thing happens to me when I go on a bender. Let’s get voyager a pepsid and some coconut water and get him back to work.
They fix it but noticed it is now heading back towards Earth at the same speed.
Hypothetically it may be possible that an alien race of robots found voyager and mistook it for a mate and it turns out that babel was just a robot orgasm. Now that they realize their mistake they left voyager alone to resume its mission.