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The concept sounds cool, but what sort of fixes could the Voyager probes possibly need? They were launched in 1977, that's almost 40 years ago. As far as I know

by avar 11y ago

The concept sounds cool, but what sort of fixes could the Voyager probes possibly need? They were launched in 1977, that's almost 40 years ago. As far as I know they're waking up every once in a while and sending telemetry back. It would be cool to have access to the source code and an emulator, but I really don't find it plausible that members of the general public could submit patches to something that's been running smoothly for 40 years, and where the risks of changes far outweigh the benefits of keeping the existing software running as-is.

deleted 11y ago
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saganus 11y ago
The article says that part of the need to get programmers back in the project is to be able to get exact readings on the amount of energy that's being used and the amount left. It appears like they are currently working with estimates (e.g. they cite a use of 3.2 Watts but it's actually 3.0 due to margins of error in the original design. Now they want to know exactly how much power is consumed). So maybe they don't need fixes in the traditional sense that something is broken, but fixes in that they need the spacecraft to do stuff that wasn't designed for. Another example they cite is when they revamped the software in 1990 so they could better automate certain functions since they were preparing for the interstellar part of the journey and they needed certain automatic procedures which apparently were done manually in the past.
- noselasd 11y ago
  It seems being a fortran/assembly programmer is just a small part of whats needed. What they seem to need are engineers that can teach themselves quite deep domain knowledge of the voyagers to figure out how they work, reverse engineer the hardware and software that arn't documented. (and eventually do some programming, mainly on old ground based code, and certainly without bricking the probes if the flight software needs to be altered).

by avar 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

saganus 11y ago

The article says that part of the need to get programmers back in the project is to be able to get exact readings on the amount of energy that's being used and the amount left. It appears like they are currently working with estimates (e.g. they cite a use of 3.2 Watts but it's actually 3.0 due to margins of error in the original design. Now they want to know exactly how much power is consumed). So maybe they don't need fixes in the traditional sense that something is broken, but fixes in that they need the spacecraft to do stuff that wasn't designed for. Another example they cite is when they revamped the software in 1990 so they could better automate certain functions since they were preparing for the interstellar part of the journey and they needed certain automatic procedures which apparently were done manually in the past.

noselasd 11y ago
It seems being a fortran/assembly programmer is just a small part of whats needed. What they seem to need are engineers that can teach themselves quite deep domain knowledge of the voyagers to figure out how they work, reverse engineer the hardware and software that arn't documented. (and eventually do some programming, mainly on old ground based code, and certainly without bricking the probes if the flight software needs to be altered).