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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:33:56 AM EDT
[#1]
"The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again."
Voyager now: "It's dark and there's nothing here." Voyager tomorrow: "It's still dark and there's still nothing here." Rinse, repeat. |
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AUS
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:40:11 AM EDT
[#2]
someone hit the ctrl - alt - del keys
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:42:47 AM EDT
[Last Edit: AeroE]
[#3]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Jambalaya: What kind of volatile memory did they have 46 years ago? Wasn't most memory stored on tape? I remember cassette tape drives in the early 80s before floppy disks. Maybe there were early hard disk drives? Nope, looks like they store memory on 8 track tapes!  https://www.floridatoday.com/story/money/business/2017/08/24/voyagers-technology-little-memory-goes-long-way/104908888/ Magnetic drums, magnetic cores, magnetic tapes, magnetic discs, and punched tape and cards. Bubble memory was the next big thing in the late 70's, I remember a tech sergeant in my shop that was so excited about them he talked about them every day. Bubble memory was a chip with a magnetic film with magnetized regions. I don't believe it survived long. The original radar data processor in the F-15 had a magnetic core memory in a big card. That one was interesting due to the rapid TCTO's we had to swap that to larger and larger memory until the entire unit was replaced by the Programmable Radar Processor. The memory doubled with each change and on two the card was about half the thickness (still over an inch) of the card before. Those were old school cores with four sense wires. The F-106's down the ramp used a drum memory that weighed about 30 pounds. The capacity was tiny. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:48:22 AM EDT
[#4]
In the early 90's I worked with a legacy computer with limited memory and any fixes required putting an assembly jump code from the bad area to a free spot where the fix would be implemented, then a jump statement back to the main code.
I remember other engineers would be sloppy and not document where their "patches" were and you would end up writing over their patch and crashing the system at random times when their code would execute and jump into your code instead. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:56:20 AM EDT
[#5]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By ske714: I saw a documentary about that. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1c/fe/ac/1cfeac5aa8348e54a5c03f2e904f15b6.jpg Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By ske714: Originally Posted By ArmyInfantryVet: The Aliens captured it, did experiments or tweaks and released it back into the wild.  I saw a documentary about that. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1c/fe/ac/1cfeac5aa8348e54a5c03f2e904f15b6.jpg Yep. This. |
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WA, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:57:58 AM EDT
[#6]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By ArmyInfantryVet: The Aliens captured it, did experiments or tweaks and released it back into the wild. Renamed it V'ger and sent it back to Earth to look for its creator. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:08:28 AM EDT
[#7]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Oceans87: So is it in a different solar system now? Crazy to think how far away it is, and still sending back data. Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Oceans87: Originally Posted By seek2: There's a solar system pic it took when it still worked, I'll see if I can find it. So is it in a different solar system now? Crazy to think how far away it is, and still sending back data. It’s barely out of our solar system, the next closest one (Proxima Centauri) is a little over 4 light years away. If it were to make it there your great x10 grandchildren’s bones would be dust. Like a poster stated above it’s about 1 light day from earth. It’s still very cool that something man made is out past the heliosphere in interstellar space. What’s incredible is that either or both voyager 1 & 2 will most likely out last the human race or even life on earth since the void of space is so incredibly vast and very very empty unless they collide with something. And since they are such small objects I could see if they lasted long enough to possibly be captured by some other larger objects gravity and become “satellites” again. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:21:02 AM EDT
[#8]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By ED_P: In the early 90's I worked with a legacy computer with limited memory and any fixes required putting an assembly jump code from the bad area to a free spot where the fix would be implemented, then a jump statement back to the main code. I remember other engineers would be sloppy and not document where their "patches" were and you would end up writing over their patch and crashing the system at random times when their code would execute and jump into your code instead. Try dealing with ALTER commands in COBOL. That shit was evil. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:22:07 AM EDT
[#9]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By SmilingBandit: It’s crazy that it’s nearly a light-day from earth. Yeah, AI gonna need to learn to space fold. |
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CA, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:22:44 AM EDT
[#10]
So, who pulled the power plug and plugged it back in?
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MO, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:23:22 AM EDT
[#11]
Originally Posted By ske714: Cool. https://www.foxweather.com/earth-space/nasa-voyager-1-resumes-data-after-outage Engineers with Voyager's flight team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been troubleshooting an issue since November, when the spacecraft, more than 15.1 billion miles from Earth, began sending back nonsense computer code. So it never actually stopped communicating. Click bait headline. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:24:46 AM EDT
[#12]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By klinc: A dos star trek game taught ne all I needed to know about loading/unloading drivers and managing lower and upper memory on startup than I ever needed to know... and this was before having internet.  And yet millennials and Gen Xer's will say you don't understand technology. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:25:23 AM EDT
[Last Edit: ED_P]
[#13]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Admiral_Crunch: Try dealing with ALTER commands in COBOL. That shit was evil. Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Admiral_Crunch: Originally Posted By ED_P: In the early 90's I worked with a legacy computer with limited memory and any fixes required putting an assembly jump code from the bad area to a free spot where the fix would be implemented, then a jump statement back to the main code. I remember other engineers would be sloppy and not document where their "patches" were and you would end up writing over their patch and crashing the system at random times when their code would execute and jump into your code instead. Try dealing with ALTER commands in COBOL. That shit was evil. We're both showing our age. 
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:26:39 AM EDT
[#14]
Cool
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:32:04 AM EDT
[#15]
We should have launched voyager 20 by now.
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:41:14 AM EDT
[#16]
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:42:58 AM EDT
[#17]
It would be cool to make a voyager 3. If they kept it simple it could be relatively inexpensive and be something that could span generations.
Maybe if they made a reality show out of it or made it automatically send interstellar tweets or tiktoks people would care? |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 9:53:26 AM EDT
[#18]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Kihn: Yeah, AI gonna need to learn to space fold. |
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FL, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 10:29:57 AM EDT
[#19]
Does Veeger have AI?
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MT, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 10:33:21 AM EDT
[#20]
You gotta wonder though... what the hell was an entire engineering team doing for 5 months? I mean, everybody figured the thing was finally dead, right?
"Hi Bob, happy Monday.... any signals this morning?" "Nope. Guess I'll go play golf. How about you?" "Fuck it. I'm going camping in the desert for the week. See you next Monday!" |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 10:39:25 AM EDT
[#21]
It really is amazing that the Voyagers are still operating after so long.
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Posted: 4/23/2024 11:07:23 AM EDT
[#22]
I saw a video a while back that talked about how weak the signal was from that distance, and what it took to hear it. I couldn't find the same one, but this one touches on it. It's 5 years old, but still relevant and interesting.
 How far can Voyager 1 go before we lose contact? |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 11:35:23 AM EDT
[#23]
Really though. That is Amazing!
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MN, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 12:35:48 PM EDT
[#24]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Coffin-Nail: It's nuts that a 22 watt transmitter can do that. Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Coffin-Nail: Originally Posted By Jambalaya: What kind of volatile memory did they have 46 years ago? Wasn't most memory stored on tape? I remember cassette tape drives in the early 80s before floppy disks. Maybe there were early hard disk drives? Nope, looks like they store memory on 8 track tapes! https://www.floridatoday.com/story/money/business/2017/08/24/voyagers-technology-little-memory-goes-long-way/104908888/ It's nuts that a 22 watt transmitter can do that. In the 1970s, someone noticed the 4watt CB output wasn't very different than the output of the transmitter for talking to the moon landers. The respons was that it's a 4watt transmitter attached to a multi-million dollar antenna. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 12:46:29 PM EDT
[#25]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By PsyTek: NASA should release the source code for it. It would be pretty interesting. Not like anyone could hijack it, who the hell could transmit to it other than NASA? There are at least about 40 private hams in the world that would have antenna systems depending on the uplink frequency to make that journey. Hell there is a 1.2ghz EME beacon that transmits 24/7 with about 1,000,000 watts ERP. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 1:01:53 PM EDT
[#26]
Imagine if they made one today. I bet they could get 100 years of data out of it
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MD, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 4:07:00 PM EDT
[#27]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By kfs35: It really is amazing that the Voyagers are still operating after so long. Imagine your home Windows machine running continuously since 1977? Truly is a tribute to the quality of work that was done on these things and the care that was put into them. |
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GA, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 4:15:12 PM EDT
[#28]
VGER wishes to meet its creator.
I’ve seen this movie before….. |
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MD, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 4:17:52 PM EDT
[Last Edit: PsyTek]
[#29]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By stanprophet09: There are at least about 40 private hams in the world that would have antenna systems depending on the uplink frequency to make that journey. Hell there is a 1.2ghz EME beacon that transmits 24/7 with about 1,000,000 watts ERP. Interesting, and wow. Per this path loss calculator, looks like at its 2.1GHz earth-to-Voyager link, 218dB path loss. I would have thought it would be worse than that. The V1 antenna has 44dB of gain, which is a tad better than I could get on a EME Yagi for 2m*( No idea what the gain of our transmitting facilities is, and Im sure we can throw nearly unlimited power at it, so I see your point. I'm curious what the beam width of that dish is and how accurately they can point it at us. * My Yagi calc says I would need a boom length of 36 miles, which can't be right but I am late to a call and will look at it later |
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MI, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 4:22:38 PM EDT
[#30]
Had an instructor who said he worked on that craft doing soldering work. He was rightfully proud of what they had done. This was about 8 years after it had launched IIRC.
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AZ, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 4:26:38 PM EDT
[#31]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By PsyTek: NASA should release the source code for it. It would be pretty interesting. Not like anyone could hijack it, who the hell could transmit to it other than NASA? Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By PsyTek: NASA should release the source code for it. It would be pretty interesting. Not like anyone could hijack it, who the hell could transmit to it other than NASA? Originally Posted By mancat: I've been really interested in how they've either modernized or virtualized the software environment of the original Voyager control systems but can find basically no information on it online. PDF Warning Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience Page 176 of the PDF (171 in the book) for Voyager. It uses the same computer at Viking. Also interesting tidbit, it uses CMOS volatile memory that's directly attached to the RTG to make non-volatile. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 5:38:28 PM EDT
[#32]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By PsyTek: Imagine your home Windows machine running continuously since 1977? Truly is a tribute to the quality of work that was done on these things and the care that was put into them. Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By PsyTek: Originally Posted By kfs35: It really is amazing that the Voyagers are still operating after so long. Imagine your home Windows machine running continuously since 1977? Truly is a tribute to the quality of work that was done on these things and the care that was put into them.  |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 5:42:24 PM EDT
[#33]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By seek2: It has a camera but not enough power to run it, and it'd just see the sun as a distant largish star. There's a solar system pic it took when it still worked, I'll see if I can find it. ETA: These wwere taken when V1 was much, much closer. https://i.imgur.com/xDSGX6o.jpeg Uranus is kinda stretched out... Otherwise,what is it sending back? Something like an unexpected message "we're coming for you"? Now that would be interesting |
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AZ, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 7:49:53 PM EDT
[#34]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By JQ66: Uranus is kinda stretched out... Otherwise,what is it sending back? Something like an unexpected message "we're coming for you"? Now that would be interesting There's only a few of instruments that are still turned on, mainly the magentometers and a low-energy charged particle sensor, these are sending data back that let us map the environment outside the solar system, and they're how we know that Voyaget 1 passed the heliopause where the sun's particles start to react to interstellar space -- basically a dividing line that shows Voyager is definitively outside the influence of the solar system. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:01:11 PM EDT
[#35]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By ArmyInfantryVet: The Aliens captured it, did experiments or tweaks and released it back into the wild. Nah...America's secret space force using ships developed from alien technology fixed it. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:06:12 PM EDT
[#36]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By FreefallRet: Gonna need jump gates between galaxy's. Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By FreefallRet: Originally Posted By Kihn: Yeah, AI gonna need to learn to space fold. Can you just free-range jump from the first, the anchor, to anywhere to set the second, the end (use those Boston Dynamics bots as pilots), then go from there? I thinking we can go slow at first, folding space to the end of the solar system. Then just go from there. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:27:48 PM EDT
[#37]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Ulster: No...the nearest star is Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years from earth. Voyager is almost 1 light day from earth. We are still on the porch waving goodbye. Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Ulster: Originally Posted By Oceans87: So is it in a different solar system now? Crazy to think how far away it is, and still sending back data. No...the nearest star is Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years from earth. Voyager is almost 1 light day from earth. We are still on the porch waving goodbye. If it was heading in the right direction (it's not), it would reach Proxima Centari in about 77,000 years. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:28:27 PM EDT
[#38]
You want Vger? Because this is how you get Vger.
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:33:12 PM EDT
[#39]
I wonder if it was a cosmic ray bit flipping issue or if the memory chip just went bad.
The damn things have been incredibly resilient. |
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:42:06 PM EDT
[#40]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By Kihn: Yeah, AI gonna need to learn to space fold. How do you get around the portal to hell problem? |
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NC, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:42:25 PM EDT
[#41]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By HDLS: interstellar space, or the space between the stars. Interstellar space is filled with plasma, ionized gas It’s right in the OP. https://www.space.com/interstellar-space-definition-explanation Just to be clear, "filled" means about one atom per cubic meter (or about 9 atoms per 10 cubic yard dumpster for the GD crowd...). |
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TX, USA
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Posted: 4/23/2024 8:44:25 PM EDT
[#42]
Quote HistoryOriginally Posted By lukus: It changed it's name to V'Ger. This should have been the first post... 
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