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This is really amazing given the age of the Voyager craft and the massive distances they have to beam instructions across. I'd imagine that all of the engineeri
by Aaronontheweb 16y ago
This is really amazing given the age of the Voyager craft and the massive distances they have to beam instructions across. I'd imagine that all of the engineering staff would be on pins and needles for hours while they waited for what has to be the galaxy's largest (in terms of distance crossed) SYN-ACK :p
- jakevoytko 16y agoAs someone who works with autonomous robots, restarting a system 30 feet away in demo conditions can cause pins and needles. I can't fathom how the NASA engineers felt. They probably didn't get any good work done waiting for the ACK It's incredible that NASA, 30 years ago, built such a durable and reliable system. The hardware has withstood one of the harshest environments in the universe for decades, and the software hasn't been irreversibly scrambled by passing cosmic rays. My cable modem doesn't even last an afternoon without rebooting itself.
- Qz 16y agoThe Egyptians built the pyramids 5000 years ago. What I find incredible is how we can't seem to build things that last anymore.
- arethuza 16y agoMarket forces - people are quite happy paying for cheap stuff that doesn't last very long.
- ugh 16y agoYeah, but they built them for religious reasons, not because they actually wanted to do something useful with them (for some definition of useful). Sure, we could build pyramids – better pyramids even than the original ones – but they wouldn’t be terribly useful. (Oh, and sometimes we do build things that last. The six Apollo descent stages are still on the moon and probably will be for Millennia. That, to me, is a lot more impressive than any pyramid.)
- Qz 16y ago> Sure, we could build pyramids - better pyramids even than the original ones - but they wouldn’t be terribly useful. There are innumerable Discovery Channel-esque documentaries explaining that we can barely build a small scale reproduction of the Pyramids, at least using the knowledge they had available then.
- m0tive 16y agoI think there are still some attempts to build things to last: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Svalbard_Glob...
- ScotterC 16y agoWe build things intentionally so that they don't last long anymore. There's an entire realm of engineering dedicated to predicting failures of mechanical devices at a certain range. The ipod comes to mind of course, but there are many more all designed to maximize returns by having customers buy new ones.
- mturmon 16y agohttp://www.longnow.org/ http://www.longnow.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubTropolis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubTropolis
- smackfu 16y agoLas Vegas will last forever. Arid climate, Lots of concrete.
- sliverstorm 16y agoOn the bright side, I bet you they have a fully operational earthbound Voyager copy, and test these things extensively. That probably relieves some of the anxiety.
- caf 16y agoThey do (likely, several). The article notes that they replicated the flipped bit that was causing the issue, and demonstrated that it caused the same symptoms.