NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating(science.nasa.gov) |
NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating(science.nasa.gov) |
Here's an excerpt from a 2013 article in Scientific American that appears on the first page of results when searching for "voyager left the solar system" [1]:
> Voyager 1 was starting to get a reputation as the spacecraft that cried wolf, after scientists repeatedly claimed it was leaving the solar system, only to change their minds and say it wasn’t quite there yet.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/voyager-1-leaves-...
Crazy to think how much time has passed since that flyby.
Also, one of the program managers was on The Moth podcast describing the panic when new Horizons rebooted days before the flyby.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft launched on January 19, 2006, and performed its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. This journey took 3,463 days (approximately 9.5 years).
3,932 days July 14, 2015–April 19, 2026
You can use the sun as a gravitational lens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
You need to be about 550 au out.
There's a reason why Apollo was cancelled. Putting people on the moon is interesting in the context that it was accomplished. Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.
Deep space itself - that's what the Voyagers are measuring.
Next think about what effort we have done to send a galactic hello. We don't have any deep space probes sent off in the universe constantly sending a hello message. So if all we did was fire a hello message away from earth for 24 hours what are the odds that some alien life picked it up verses they had that day off and missed our signal.
I think this is a much more plausible explanation to the Fermi paradox. If we want to do our part to prove it wrong we need to begin sending a universe hello from earth transmission and run it for not years, not decades, not centuries but from now and for the rest of humanity. Hopefully some other alien civilization has realized the same and they too begin sending a continuous transmission we might get lucky and pick up.
Both assume that there _is_ some other life, but that it's hard to reach. We don't know if there is anything else.
Earth could be completely unique in the existence, even with all the endless multiuniverses. Mathematical propabilities are not proof that there _must be_ life somewhere else. The answer could just as well be '0'. Only life that was, is and will ever be. When we are eventually gone, that's it. No more life.
edit: sorry about the negativity in my reply; just pondering out loud :D
Even if we launch a new deep space probe as best we can they're gonna be real slow?
Of course, I would like to note, you have just spent 20 times the NASA annual budget, in a 3 week war of choice...
When they talk about rerouting power and performing a "big bang" reconfiguration with a 23 hour lag on equipment that was underpowered when the 8088 came out... it kind of melts my brain.
Apparently it still has ten years worth of fuel left!
> The team will implement the Big Bang on Voyager 2 first, which has a little more power to spare and is closer to Earth, making it the safer test subject. Tests are planned for May and June 2026. If they go well, the team will attempt the same fix on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a chance that Voyager 1’s LECP could be switched back on.
Voyager 1 has only a year left otherwise? Also, what low-powered alternatives are there? Is there that much redundancy? I'd love to know what their idea and plan are?
Also,
> For Voyager 1, the LECP was next on that list. The team shut off the LECP on Voyager 2 in March 2025.
Why? Voyager 2 has more power to spare, per the prior quote.
Because Voyager 2 has different equipment active. It still has the Cosmic Ray Subsystem active.
Closing in on one light day!
It's amazing not only are the electrical components still operational, but some mechanical ones as well.
Unlike the non human-made craft in the region?
It is annoying to find out that your job failed to run or exited immediately due to a typo or other minor mistake.
Of course ML training (and scientific computing) jobs can take weeks or months to complete. Checkpoint and restart features are important because node or other failures are almost inevitable.
I would guess that even that case is partially accounted for by a watchdog that is hardwired into the system.
Some of the challenges they had to deal with while developing the fix:
- The only source code they had for the flight data software was an OCR'd Microsoft Word document (with typos) that was likely scanned from a hard copy assembler listing printout.
- The processor runs a custom instruction set developed by JPL for the Voyager mission. The documentation they had on the processor was incomplete.
- Everybody who had designed the flight software was dead.
- They had no assembler, no debugger, and no processor simulator. They had no testbed, the only two FDS processors were in space.
There is a Vimeo video of the Voyager team reacting when data first began trickling in from Voyager 1 after the fix in April 2024. "Voyager 1 Team Reacts to Receiving Engineering Data From Spacecraft" (JPLraw channel): https://vimeo.com/939376171
Cummings is the one against the back wall who shoots his two arms up in the air in celebration. He and Armen Arslanian (in the blue shirt to his left, right in the image) developed the software fix.
The slides from Cummings' presentation can be downloaded as a PDF from the Flight Software Workshop Day 2 page, first entry: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BXSBUgEJExsLSE-m585I...
It's just that in most cases, the amount of effort required is orders of magnitude higher than is really justifiable.
Most microcontrollers can update their own flash while running, either with a built-in bootloader or a user-programmed bootloader that takes up a little bit of the flash.
What makes you think that Voyager isn't "rebooted" though?
So you copy a small write routine into RAM, copy a chunk of new data there too, jump to the routine, then it returns to your main bootloader in flash which receives the next chunk from a UART or whatever (because of course it doesn’t fit into RAM all at once), rinse and repeat. You aren’t exactly going to be serving realtime interrupts during this.
(So if you do need minimal downtime, you probably have dual external flash chips, or even just two microcontrollers given execute-from-external-flash would bump you up to fancy micros.)
Obviously we will never know. I am also fairly confident that most likely there is more life across the universe but that we will also never confirm that to be true. The size of the universe is just too immense and unless we discovered some new physics breakthrough like some sort of particle or way to transmit a signal much faster then the speed of light, milky way is like 100000 light years across and next galaxy over 2 million light years away, so even something going 10 times the speed of light is massively too slow to be significant. We would need to be able to send a signal at minimum 1,000,000 times the speed of light and even at that speed it would still be extremely slow and not likely fast enough to matter.
I do believe there is life out there but most likely it is millions or billions of light years away. And at that distance with our current technology and knowledge it would be impossible for us to find them.
That's it. Nothing to do with speed. We could launch something that goes way faster right now, if someone wanted to pay for it. Hell, we could have done it 50 years ago.
We didn't because it would go in a straight line towards "nothing".
Generally we don’t construct and maintain expensive scientific equipment just for the fun of it. There usually is some question or debate we expect them to answer or settle.
This argument that 'we went there already, there no reason to go back' just demonstrates a lack of imagination, at best.
Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.
No, that'd be talking about how much we achieved with the moon landings while doing little else since.
If you seriously believe that there's nothing new to learn from continuing to study the moon up close and in person, then you're just deliberately being obstinate about the subject. Humans are explorers, and the moon is just the next closest thing to explore. You're "won't stop talking about" comment is also just lame. If the 1400s explorers had decided that continuing to sail the seas looking for new routes or new lands was like having a friend that wouldn't stop talking about their childhood experiences, then the colonists would never have left Europe.
Because it’s unnecessary.
It’s not a difficult skill.
When folks are in that situation, they tend to adapt quickly to their reality. But that’s not the reality for the vast majority of developers today.
Thankfully.
I spent about 6 months teaching myself how to tie a set of useful knots, and the reality is by now I can't do most of them anymore because day to day it turns out I just never need to tie a Midshipmen's knot (it's super useful when the siruation arises..which is rarely for an IT worker).
There is simply no reason to try doing this in your head. You're worse at it than the debugger is. And I say this as someone who does have the skill. It's just not necessary.
It’s just silicone. Who hard could it be?
But Voyager will keep going forever. Because there is no air resistance or friction in the vacuum of space, Voyager 1 doesn't need "fuel" to keep moving. According to Newton’s First Law of Motion, an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. Since there's nothing out there to stop it, it will continue its journey long after its systems go dark.
In 40,000 years: It will pass within 1.7 light-years of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Ursa Minor. In 300,000 years: It might pass near the star Sirius. The Long Haul: It is expected to orbit the center of our Milky Way galaxy indefinitely, potentially for billions of years, carrying the "Golden Record" as a final message from humanity. Fun Fact: If Voyager 1 were to hit a pebble-sized object at its current speed, it would be catastrophic. Fortunately, space is so incredibly empty that the odds of it hitting anything larger than a dust grain for the next several billion years are nearly zero
I think it wasn't intended.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7589524/
Without the benefit of large special effects budgets, I found it incredibly effective, and left me nostalgic and reflective for days.
It’s not so much about what they’re doing, but rather how they’re built and represented to the public
IDK, my point is I can see how some people might get confused about the more Guinness book style factoid around these missions
Horizons has been fastest when it left Earth