NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year

NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year(space.com)

116 points by wglb 3 hours ago | 14 comments

jvanderbot 2 hours ago |

I ran a few research tasks at JPL, small dollar studies. We'd often recruit part time work from engineers around the lab through informal networks, (instead of the official channels that segment by "specialization").

One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago). She would occasionally come late to meetings because they were dealing with some trouble with the old satellite.

Pretty amazing how little is set aside for these projects that most the staff keeping it alive have "day jobs". I hope she's still uploading

wildzzz 1 hour ago | |

To be fair, nearly all of the science payloads on Voyager 1 & 2 have been shut down. The probes are doing very little. The doesn't take away from the very unique science they are doing but its a far cry from what the program offices were doing in 30-40 years ago. I'd expect anyone working on a Voyager probe in 2026 to need something else to do most of the day.

stringfood 36 minutes ago | |

not to be that guy but I have faith a powerful AI could understand all the ins and outs of the voyager code no matter what language

golem14 28 minutes ago | | |

Not to be that other guy, but AI might take a few tries, and you really might not get a 2nd try with these probes.

mrkpdl 6 minutes ago | | |

Based on what documentation?

wanderingmind 22 minutes ago |

A slight tangent here is a technical deep dive on Voyager 1 fixing a memory corruption error in 2023 by hand 15 billion miles away. Blows my mind of the reverse engineering done to achieve this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg

bcraven 2 hours ago |

Ah, good, an opportunity to recommend It's Quieter in the Twilight (2022). Beautiful documentary.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/

nullhole 2 hours ago |

Not a very good title, given that the subtitle for the very same article gives the important context that "Voyager 2 would have had to shut down one of its last remaining instruments later this year, until NASA made some power changes."

(as an aside, a celebratory coffee mug for when Voyager 1 finally gets to the 1-light-day-from-earth mark would be very popular, in case anyone from the JPL store is reading this. 'Yesterday's sunrise, today!')