8 ms·
In short, it was remote bricked, by giving it commands to rotate a bit. After successfully executing those commands - no further commands could be received, as
by hutzlibu 3y ago
In short, it was remote bricked, by giving it commands to rotate a bit. After successfully executing those commands - no further commands could be received, as now the antennas are not facing earth anymore.
But luckily it automatically readjust itself to earth automatically every half year exactly for these events. So on 15.10 we will know, if it is really lost. In either case, the end of its mission is near anyway, because the nuclear batteries are near its end.
edit: Nasa has a blog post on this https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/07/28/mission-update-voyager-2-communications-pause/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/07/28/mission-update-voy...
- swarnie 3y agoAmazing that someone thought up a solution to a hypothetical problem 46 years ago, then fired it 30 billion km away
- behnamoh 3y agoSometimes we don’t give enough credit to previous generations.
- detourdog 3y agoI only give credit to previous generations. Firm believer that we only understand in retrospect.
- bumby 3y agoAerospace has a very high quality standard compared to other industries. Lots of formal processes capture what would otherwise be informal design decisions elsewhere. In this case, they probably have reams of pages detailing a failure mode effects analysis (FMEA). One mode is “oops, we sent the wrong command” and the document would define the specific design mitigation(s) for that outcome until it reaches an accepted risk threshold.
- aetherspawn 3y agoFMEDA probably. And in recent times, fault tree analysis seems to be better for complex systems.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bumby 3y agoAs far as I’m aware, no NASA standards call for FMEDA. It doesn’t mean a project manager couldn’t levy it, but it’s not often that a contractor adds additional requirements to a gov funded build.
- aetherspawn 3y agoFMEA relies on a really smart person anticipating all the different combinations of failures worth exploring (NxM), not just N or M. Some failures are fairly common, and individual failures might be fairly inert but have more serious consequences if they are cascaded with another specific failure.. for example, cruise control enable + failure of steering wheel control pad _and_ previously undetected failure of brake sensor/brake light circuit = cruise control stuck ON. Actually, this failure is inert if the cruise control is OFF when it happens. Contrived example but you get the idea ... I have seen a lot of FMEDA (and other tool) use lately to combat concerns with cascading failure, but not sure what's currently standard at NASA or how they deal with this. I would think cascading failure would be their expected scenario on a 10+ year unmanned mission.
- bumby 3y agoNASA STDs, handbooks, guidebooks, NPDs and NPRs are all open-source. They don’t mention FMEDA, and they don’t generally have a detectability column in their FMEA. IMO they are a little outdated
- sheepshear 3y ago
- rcxdude 3y agoIt's not really hypothetical: losing communication with stuff in space is a very common failure mode and a huge amount of the system design is focused on making it as unlikely as possible (generally the radio system gets a huge priority in almost everything and there are a lot of failsafes built at every level to make it possible to reestablish communication if anything disrupts it).
- JdeBP 3y agoIndeed. Voyager 2 has in fact been listening via its backup receiver since 1978.
- dekhn 3y agoI was amused to learn that if modern satellites lose contact with earth, they go into "safe mode": pointing towards sun, solar panels fully deployed, everything else except telemetry, radio, and temperature management disabled, waiting for further instructions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_mode_in_spacecraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_mode_in_spacecraft Imagine deploying a billion dollar piece of hardware and hoping that it has enough intelligence to keep itself from burning up before you can reestablish contact!
- jjk166 3y agoIt wasn't a solution for this specific problem. Spacecraft orientations are going to drift over time, periodically rehoming is the simplest way of dealing with it. That it doesn't care whether the orientation drift was natural or artificial is just a bonus.
- whartung 3y agoThe Voyager that's flying now is not necessarily the Voyager that was launched. The hardware is the same, but they've updated, patched, and rewritten the software that's running in it throughout the years. I'm not suggesting that the failsafe mode wasn't originally considered, and implemented, but simply that it doesn't have to be the case. They could have made changes to it over time.
- Shawnj2 3y agoIt’s possible to update the Voyager FSW?
- kdinn 3y agoActually there's a couple of work arounds for this problem as they anticipated it all along. My father was Director of Operations at Tidbinbilla deep space tracking station which ran most of the comms to Voyager 1. I am paraphrasing what he said as a non-technical person: Voyager has both a dish receiver, and a pole antenna. The dish is the usual mechanism for comms but in an emergency such as this they would send commands to the other antenna. To do this they would turn the main tracking station dish up to max, and send a "TURN AROUND!" signal out. But prior to that they had to alert the local electricity grid, and the local air traffic control to not have any planes flying over at the time! I guess the Voyagers are too far away for this manoeuvre now.
- politelemon 3y agoThis link from NASA mentions the October 15 date: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-mission-update-voyager-2-communications-pause https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-mission-update-voyager-2-...
- hutzlibu 3y agoThe text and link I provided mention it as well, but I am now not sure, if giving 15.10 as a date was maybe confusing for non europeans (or non germans, I am a bit lost who uses what date format)...
- guraf 3y agoIt was confusing to me. Took me a while to realize it was a date and then had to deduce what it represented. Frankly before your comment I wasn't going to complain because I saw the tantrum you threw when people corrected you on the usage of "bricked" but maybe next time spell the month to avoid ambiguity.
- Nexxxeh 3y ago2023-10-15 would be pretty universal. ISO 8601 works for everyone. It avoids confusing the Americans who otherwise put the month in the wrong place. It avoids being ambiguous for everyone who may otherwise be worried that it was written by an American with the month in the wrong place, when the day is less than 13. 2023-10-09 is the 9th of October and it's clear to everyone regardless. It also has the benefit of sorting chronologically if sorted "by name" when used in a filename as it's largest unit on the left, smallest on the right.
- mromanuk 3y agowho and when was this automatic reset on 15.10 added?
- ck2 3y agoHow the heck does it know where earth is? That's some impressive science there, not like there is a deep-space GPS. Does it look for the sun and figure out from there?
- gregsadetsky 3y agoI assume star tracking -- wikipedia seems to confirm "... and celestial referencing instruments (Sun sensor/Canopus Star Tracker) to maintain pointing of the high-gain antenna toward Earth" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2
- kyleyeats 3y agoDung beetles do this too.
- gregsadetsky 3y agothat's nuts! "- African dung beetles orient to the starry sky to move along straight paths - The beetles do not orientate to the individual stars, but to the Milky Way" https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)01507-2 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)... https://www.science.org/content/article/dung-beetles-navigate-milky-way https://www.science.org/content/article/dung-beetles-navigat...
- CMCDragonkai 3y agoSo you can see astrological events do affect us.
- ozzmotik 3y agos/log/nom/
- dylan604 3y agoAs long as there's not too much light pollution. Fortunately for the dung beetles, their habitat isn't very urban. However, it's the little examples like this that make me a light pollution dork.
- madacol 3y agoOh man that reminds me a lot to Kerbal Space Program, those times I lost communication because of a wrong turn and the antenna/solar panel faced the wrong way
- NBJack 3y agoI like to think at least a few NASA engineers come to meetings with some brilliant ideas....that were cooked up at the 1am mark of a 7 hour weekend KSP binge.
- jojobas 3y agoYou have to agree that "skip to morning" button really works.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoA bad case of planet between antenna and space center! Is orbit stable? If so, launch and maneuver into position a huge network of relays until connectivity is restored. If not, watch while probe crashes and burns onto the celestial body. An automatic realignment function would be nice...
- wafflemaker 3y agoHow? What mods do you use? I played pretty much without mods, so if you could also mention your whole mods' stack would be cool. In vanilla, all antennas are omnidirectional and as long as there is a working solar panel on a probe, it can be used as a relay sat.
- madacol 3y agoI exaggerated a bit, it only happened with solar panels. But it does gives you a similar feeling when you schedule a maneuver on a point where the planet/moon blocks your signal, and you only realize after it's too late
- dang 3y agoAll: if you want to argue about what "bricked" means, please do that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36946612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36946612, not here. But also consider: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dylan604 3y agoreminds me of the time I forgot i was on a remote connection, and could not figure out why the thing quit responding when i typed eth0 down
- renewiltord 3y agoHad a node that I was connected to over wireguard. Wanted to reset the wireguard conf. sudo wg-quick down wg0 Nice one, mate. Had to drive back to log in and bring up that interface. I still do this, FWIW, but now I use `at` to schedule "up" 1 min in future haha. So far so good though it's not smart :)
- dylan604 3y agoLuckily for me, I just had to go down the hall to the data center, and then reset it with the local terminal. Compared to you, I learned the lesson on the cheap, but you got the bonus of a nice get out of jail free card. Neat CYA trick that I will keep in mind.
- dekhn 3y agoThere's a feature in many business data centers called "remote hands". Mainly to avoid the drive/flight to admin a remote machine.
- owenmarshall 3y ago> FWIW, but now I use `at` to schedule "up" 1 min in future Any time I’m ever doing a pfctl to change my router’s firewall rules I schedule a “revert to the n-1 rule set” job two minutes from now to avoid the trip to the basement & hunt for the serial cable. I do +2 because once I was too close to the next minute, fat-fingered the update command & instinctively corrected it. But the change had reverted before I hit enter on the new update, so of course I blocked too much traffic and wedged my SSH connection, triggering the cursing and trip to the basement with the serial cable.
- huehehue 3y agoor when I was futzing with display configs on a linux install, accidentally disabled my screen, and had to restore it blind
- datadeft 3y ago> because the nuclear batteries are near its end. and we are charging our phones daily....
- Inityx 3y agohttps://youtu.be/NT8-b5YEyjo https://youtu.be/NT8-b5YEyjo
- WalterBright 3y agoPerhaps a better design would be to realign the antenna automatically if it hasn't received any signal from Earth after a week or whatever.
- jonny_eh 3y agoWe can certainly do that with Voyager 3!
- amelius 3y agoSo they don't have a simulator they run these commands on first?
- michaelcampbell 3y ago> In short, it was remote bricked, by giving it commands to rotate a bit. After successfully executing those commands - no further commands could be received, as now the antennas are not facing earth anymore. I did this exact thing in the small last night - wanted to work on fixing a faulty switch, so my wife and I get on the intercom system on our landline phone so she can tell me when the correct breaker is off. And of course, breaker #1 is the one that controls the intercom, severing our connection.
- jdkee 3y agoWho is directly in charge of the program?