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Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years
- rootbear 9y agoI've seen this article mentioned on several sites. The title is terrible, misleading clickbait that seem to indicate that the Voyager 1 has been unresponsive for 37 years. What nonsense! This is really about how NASA found they could use a set of thrusters that had been idle for 37 years. A much better discussion can be found at this NASA page: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/voyager-1-fires-up-thrusters-after-37 https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/voyager-1-fires-up-thruster...
- colanderman 9y agoThanks, I've edited the title to match NASA's. (Can't change the URL though.)
- rootbear 9y agoExcellent. It's a great story about how amazing the Voyager spacecraft are and I'm glad to see it getting a lot of attention, even with click-bait titles!
- sctb 9y agoThanks! We've updated the link from https://techstartups.com/2018/03/22/nasa-receives-response-from-voyager-1-spacecraft-13-billion-miles-away-after-37-years-of-inactivity/ https://techstartups.com/2018/03/22/nasa-receives-response-f....
- dirkk0 9y agoThanks! And the original message is from 12/2017.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- asciimo 9y agoFrom the Voyager FAQ (https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/) Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth.
- burnte 9y agoThey'll definitely keep collecting science data until it no longer transmits. They keep closing in on ending data collection and then scrounge up funding. It's a human milestone, we'll listen until the end. That said, when the digital world ends in 2038 it'll be moot anyway, but we'll record our stellar wanderer's name on stone tablets.
- solarkraft 9y agoLuckily the Voyager software is not vulnerable (& can be remotely updated).
- dschuler 9y agoThe article mentions the thrusters used are the Aerojet Rocketdyne MR-103 [0]. They look pretty delicate, but only need to provide about 1N of thrust. Visually I was expecting something like the MR-107S in the same datasheet. I ended up getting voyager "golden record" LPs for a friend's bday [1], which was a pretty neat present. Turns out her bf's uncle produced one of those records in the 90's. [0] http://www.rocket.com/files/aerojet/documents/Capabilities/PDFs/Monopropellant%20Data%20Sheets.pdf http://www.rocket.com/files/aerojet/documents/Capabilities/P... [1] http://www.ozmarecords.com/product/voyager-golden-record-3xlp-box-set http://www.ozmarecords.com/product/voyager-golden-record-3xl...
- asciimo 9y agoHere's a photo album of producing the original golden record, followed by its visual contents. https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa-jpl/sets/72157676187916186/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa-jpl/sets/7215767618791618...
- dandare 9y agoI would love to read a story about aliens finding the records and trying to decode them. Personally, I find the image encoding impossible to understand.
- jvm_ 9y agoThere was a reddit post today showing the picture of the naked humans and the quasar map to earth... the caption was - maybe the reason aliens haven't contacted us is that we sent unsolicited nudes and directions to our house.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoA related, but slightly different take: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/monkey https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/monkey
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
- okket 9y agoSee also previous discussion from 3 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15827369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15827369 (260 comments)
- biot 9y ago”Voyager 2 is also on course to enter interstellar space, likely within the next few years.” Is the lack of precision on the date because they don’t know precisely where the boundary of interstellar space is?
- codewritinfool 9y agoYes. This is based on Voyager 1's heliopause exit back in 2012 at 121 AU. It is presently at about 141 AU. Voyager 2 is at at about 117 AU now. The uncertainty in "the next few years" statement is because of the assumption is that the heliopause will occur at roughly the same distance that Voyager 1 found it at.
- mehrdadn 9y agoObligatory :) https://xkcd.com/1189/ https://xkcd.com/1189/
- codewritinfool 9y ago"that was coded in an outdated assembler language" LOL, that's just a sad statement.
- codewritinfool 9y agoCan anyone explain to me why is this being downvoted? I have coded in assembly since the 1970's and still do today. It is essential for some tasks and when these spacecraft were designed, it was the obvious choice. I just don't understand why NASA would call it "outdated".
- mastax 9y ago"an outdated assembler language" While I think many folks here would argue that assembler is outdated in general, the specific form of assembler used in the Voyager probe is probably considered outdated by any reasonable standard.
- tomxor 9y ago> While I think many folks here would argue that assembler is outdated in general Assembly is not outdated in general, it's just outdated as a human interface for big CISC programs. If you are working on very small micro-controllers it's not even necessarily outdated as a human interface since you might be working on a much more minimal platform in which case it's important you understand exactly what's going on. What was probably meant in the article is that the particular assembly used in the CPUs of the CCS at the time is quite different compared to various modern micro-controller assembly (not compared to CISC like x86 or even ARM which are almost completely different beasts). Sometimes these projects have custom silicon and so are even quite different to other commercial chips of the same era... Having a quick google, the CCS was NASAs first redundant computer, having two of everything, but at a fairly low level unlike say the mars rover with it's triple redundancy basically at the "whole computer" level. Interesting stuff, I wish there was more info available about all the details of these machines.
- scott_karana 9y ago
- Theodores 9y agoWhomever collects this piece of 'space junk' in the far distant future would be puzzled how that every power source had been eeked out and used, with no remaining systems functional they will wonder how it got to that state. To them it will be like one of those bicycles that has no brakes, a couple of punctures and no working gears - how did it get there, what broke first?
- jstanley 9y agoAnybody who can come up with a method of "collecting" it that doesn't smash it into millions of unidentifiable tiny pieces is probably smart enough to figure out the rest!
- mrhappyunhappy 9y agoIt would be interesting if humans in a distant future figured out how to traverse vast distances of space quickly and then stumbled upon voyager 1 and the golden disc. I imagine by that time everything they see on that disc may seem very foreign to them.
- lucb1e 9y agoPosts like these are fascinating, but constant comments like these just take me entirely out of the story: > [far away from earth,] there's no mechanic shop nearby to get a tune-up. Did someone from marketing write this to dumb it down or something? It seems so random when two sentences down they talk about milliseconds and assembler language without explaining the terms.
- mrhappyunhappy 9y agoI found this kind of odd and distracting too. You either go full nerd or no nerd, not half and half.
- dwighttk 9y ago(2017)
- DrScump 9y ago(December 2017) Original submittal, 740+ points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15827369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15827369
- swasheck 9y agoNeat timing on this resubmit. I just watched The Farthest on a flight this week. It's a neat movie that gives interesting (and human) context to the mission and those who executed it. I'd definitely recommend it as a watch for anyone even nominally interested in space exploration.
- reeteshv 9y agoThis article piqued my interest in Aerojet! Reading the Wikipedia entry, I was stuck by how the founders list control of their firm, "Unhappily for us, no bank would lend us money; bankers hadn’t yet come to think of rocketry as a stable business." Interestingly, a tire company acquired majority control!
- codemogul 9y agoSo, if you are ever in Miami, you can take a 45 minute drive down to their old facility at the edge of the Everglades in Homestead. Bring/rent a mountain bike because the last 2 miles are closed road. Great place to run. Even cooler, there is still a test missile in a silo in one of the remaining structures. There is all sorts of interesting rusting hulks out there. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet#Florida_facility_and_canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet#Florida_facility_and_c... [2] http://www.abandonedfl.com/aerojet-dade/ http://www.abandonedfl.com/aerojet-dade/
- userbinator 9y agoThis reminds me of those many YouTube vidoes showing extremely old machinery such as cars being started after many decades of inactivity. There's a certain indescribable feeling when something like this happens.
- guhcampos 9y agoAnd yet my phone can't last three full years.
- dorgo 9y agoYour phone will be outdated and replaced in three years. Hard to replace a probe in space. For this reason it is a good idea to design phones to last 3 years and space probs to last decades.