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"Other than finding a few binary counters and observing the general structure of the frames, I haven’t been able to figure out the meaning of any of this data."
by nn3 5y ago
"Other than finding a few binary counters and observing the general structure of the frames, I haven’t been able to figure out the meaning of any of this data."
Feels a bit like failing to communicate with an alien race.
- kingcharles 5y agoThis made me sad after the obscene amount of work put into decoding the radio signal into a binary format. Is this because the specs for the data aren't published? But wait, NASA is a public body, so these specs should be out there. Or is it because the spec is lost to time?
- petschge 5y agoWe are still getting science data from both Voyagers. So somebody somewhere has code to decode the bits.
- marcodiego 5y agoIs it hard to ask NASA people how to decode these bits?
- petschge 5y agoAsking shouldn't be hard. (And I would start at the DSN people at JPL). But the answer might be "well, we have that binary. I think it was written in $deadlanguage. But I have never seen the source, don't know who wrote it and I don't know how the decode works". Or they might have a binder full of documentation on paper. Who knows.
- piperswe 5y agoGiven what I know about the JPL's engineering process, they probably have a binder full of a few hundred pages of documentation archived somewhere.