NASA’s interstellar Voyager probes get software updates beamed from 12 billion miles away::A few updates to the two Voyager spacecraft should extend the space explorers’ lives so they can continue adventuring in the cosmos.
Any IT worker who has ever updated a remote system, knowing that if something goes wrong you’re facing a 12 hour drive to fix it, fully understands the sheer butt clenching terror that those NASA engineers experienced for the almost full day they had to wait between deploying the update and finding out if they broke anything.
More than a full day. It would take the signal about 18.5 hrs to get to Voyager. We’d then have to wait another 18.5 hrs for the signal to get back so we could know if it worked.
Imagine driving 18 light hours. 😬 How long would that even take??
At 70 mph, that would take 172,444,276 hrs. That’s about 19,635 years non-stop.
I recently watched It’s Quieter in the Twilight, a fascinating documentary about the shrinking and aging team of engineers at the JPL still working on Voyager.
I messed up a server config and was terrified I had to spend an extra hour for travel. I can’t imagine the pressure those NASA engineers have.
Oof yeah. When I update a Cisco firewall remotely it’ll go offline for around 30 minutes to around two hours where it is completely unreachable. In the time window I’m desperately watching a continuous ping to see if it comes back up okay. If it does, I’m done. If it doesn’t, it means I need to go into work and probably spend several hours on the phone trying to fix it.
Can’t imagine the stress of trying to update something that is almost 20 light hours away.
It’s mind blowing that we launched something over 45 years ago and it hasn’t traveled one light day yet.
Cool. 4in sail, expected them to be bigger!
Mooooom! 32GiB of RAM isnt’ enough for me to code a decent app!
I don’t even have a normal WiFi signal and these mofos update a satellite 12 billion miles away.
Interesting fact is voyager both 1 & 2 using less than 1 mega byte of ram
Much less than 1mb. Something like 69 kB.
The ram only holds the programs which are written in Fortran and assembly. The images and other data are stored on tape.
Another interesting fact is that the computer holds the record for being the longest running computer of all time.
And 270w of power as of 2011, dropping exponentially over time
249W as of today. I’m hoping for some kind of miracle to get it to the 50-year mark.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook.”
One update, a software fix, ought to tend to the corrupted data that Voyager 1 began transmitting last year, and another set aims to prevent gunk from building up in both spacecraft’s thrusters.
This bugfix won’t answer why the AACS had diverted the telemetry data in the first place, however, a mystery that may hint at a larger problem with Voyager 1.
Still, engineers are confident the patch should stem the issue — at least, after the update’s transmission completes its more-than-20-hour-long journey to Voyager 1.
Over decades of maneuvers, the residue has built up; engineers worry that the tubes might soon clog completely.
So, over September and October, engineers began allowing the spacecraft to rotate more— aiming to reduce how often the probes need to fire.
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Imagine if it were running Windows - probably faster to send a Starship full of floppies
Don’t let this distract you from the fact there are more devices on Mars with working sound than there are on Earth
There are more planes in the ocean than there are submarines in the sky, too.
