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NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away

555 points by quyleanh 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sundvor 3y ago
It's mind boggling to think the first of these launched when I was ~5 years old - and still operational, at these distances.
huytersd 3y ago
I don’t understand why we are not sending these off in every direction constantly. The price can’t possibly be that prohibitive considering what we can accomplish with 40 year old technology.
- causi 3y ago
  The Voyagers took advantage of a particularly good planetary alignment for gravity boosts.
- AllegedAlec 3y ago
  The equivalent of about 4 billion dollars in modern day money for both of them. That, plus waiting for some very opportune launch times so that we can gravity boost off of everything.
  - HappyDaoDude 3y ago
    Those gravitational boosts are vital. The closest in speed so far would be 'New Horizons'. But even then NH is going at 14.5KM/sec compared with Voyagers 18KM/sec. There are no probes currently that would catch up to Voyager.
    - samtho 3y ago
      18km/s is almost understated in terms of speed, so I looked it up to more familiar measures of speed: 65,000kph or 40,000mph. The only thing I really learned here was how even in the thousands of miles or km per hour, it’s just inconceivable how fast that is. Km per second was a better measure after all.
      - heavyset_go 3y ago
        > it’s just inconceivable how fast that is And even more inconceivable is how slow it still is in terms of human spaceflight outside of the Solar System.
      - 14 3y ago
        What is crazy to me is that even at those speeds, it is over 18,000 years from reaching one light year distance. The closest star is 4.2 light years away. So to ever reach it we would need multi generational ships or some way to go much much faster.
      - ta1243 3y ago
        Round the world in 40 minutes Travelling from New York to LA quicker than playing the song "From New York To LA"
  - grishka 3y ago
    But the more copies you make of something, the cheaper they become. The R&D cost is the same and is only paid once whether you're building 2 space probes or 2000.
    - tg16 3y ago
      The probe itself is a relatively insignificant cost. The launch costs and timing windows are the limiting factor. The tyranny of the rocket equation is the fact that to carry more fuel to orbit, you need more fuel to get it into orbit, which itself needs more fuel. That's why gravity assists are so essential for escaping the solar system on a budget. The planetary alignment that enabled the Voyager launch windows only occurs once every 175 years. We should definitely be sending out more probes, but we can't just do it whenever we want, at least not without a lot more expense.
      - dredmorbius 3y ago
        The specific alignment for the Voyager missions was to permit flybyes of all the gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, with only two spacecraft. Both V1 & V2 visited Jupiter and Saturn, with Voyager 2 continuing on to both Uranus and Neptune. All visits were flybyes, that is, the probes were within the vicinity of the target planets, but did not orbit them for any prolonged length of time. More conservative trajectories giving fewer flybyes but relying on more probes would be possible, and are in fact what we've accomplished with the Gallileo & Juno (Jupiter), Cassini-Huygens (Saturn), and New Horizons (Pluto) spacecraft. There are NASA (U.S.) and Chinese proposals for a return visit to Uranus and Neptune, though those remain in planning stages. <https://www.space.com/nasa-uranus-orbiter-and-probe-mission-objectives https://www.space.com/nasa-uranus-orbiter-and-probe-mission-...> The orbiter missions had a much longer time-on-station. For Gallileo, roughly 7 years 9 months, Cassini-Huygens 13 years, and Juno 7 years to date, with another 5 or more possible. The Ulysses solar probe also flew past Jupiter, using the planet for an orbital assist to both slow it down to approach the Sun more closely and incline its orbit above and below the planetary plane so that the Sun's poles could be observed directly.
    - tivert 3y ago
- psunavy03 3y ago
  Because there are windows to visit certain planets, especially with modern rockets. You can't just point them in the direction of a planet and yeet them into space; there is physics involved.
  - larschdk 3y ago
    We did yeet New Horizons at Pluto. It got an assist from Jupiter, but could have reached Pluto without, six years delayed.
  - 7373737373 3y ago
    What about electrical propulsion methods?
- INTPenis 3y ago
  I used to think this until I learned how our solar system moves around the galactic core. Truth is, space is wild. We're like the equivalent of stone age people standing on the shore of the atlantic looking out wondering if we can make it out there. Except the ground beneath us is also moving through the ocean at fantastic speeds, causing huge waves in our wake. This is a huge oversimplification by a layperson, but just as ancient seafarers had to escape the currents caused near their shore, we have to figure out how to escape our solar system first, into interstellar space. You're not safe there, but at least you've exited the wake of our sun. Just like we had to exit the graviational pull of earth to reach the moon.
- samtho 3y ago
  The only reason why we got these probes as far and as fast as we did was because we were able to fly by each planet and use their gravitational influence to skip to the next one, increasing velocity after each slingshot.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > use their gravitational influence to skip to the next one You are correct in that the Voyagers' launch window was unique. Nit pick: gravity assist doesn't fundamentally rely on gravity. It extracts energy from planets' motion about the sun [1]. If we could somehow "bounce" a spacecraft off a planet's surface, it would impart momentum similar to that of a gravity assist. (In my opinion, it's a badly-named term.) [1] https://science.nasa.gov/learn/basics-of-space-flight/primer/ https://science.nasa.gov/learn/basics-of-space-flight/primer...
    - Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
      Good point, it’s a bit like calling hitting a baseball with a bat an “electric assist”. It’s not wrong, it’s just not very helpful. It’s also a good illustration of why we call some forces strong and others weak.
    - baseballdork 3y ago
      > gravity assist doesn't fundamentally rely on gravity I'm not sure how you can make that claim. If you were to bounce off the surface, that would likely not be considered a "gravity assist", no?
    - dctoedt 3y ago
      > If we could somehow "bounce" a spacecraft off a planet's surface, it would impart momentum similar to that of a gravity assist. When my kids were little, I showed them by holding a basketball in one hand and a tennis ball in the other, with the tennis ball on top of and touching the basketball. When I dropped them simultaneously, they fell together and bounced off the driveway — and the tennis ball took off like a rocket (no pun intended).
- Sharlin 3y ago
  You can take a look at the New Horizons to get an idea of what a moderately capable trans-Neptunian probe costs today (~$700M). If you made several, economies of scale would of course lower marginal costs somewhat. But the money isn’t even the main bottleneck (although it absolutely is a huge one) – power is. Specifically, the RTG radioisotope generators that are our only reasonable way of powering things at distances beyond Jupiter. Synthesis of radionuclides (eg. Pu-238) suitable for RTG use was originally a nice side effect of nuclear weapons production, but these days availability is very low even though the DOE recently restarted production after a long pause. In the 21st century NASA has launched exactly three RTG-powered missions: New Horizons (2006), Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity (2012), and Mars 2020/Perseverance. The next will be the (very awesome) Dragonfly mission to Titan, planned to launch in 2027. So given a cadence of roughly seven years, and one out of four missions targeting trans-Neptunian space, you could expect to launch an interstellar probe every 30 years or so, barring significant advances in power technology. The next one will most likely be a sorely-needed Uranus or Neptune flyby mission that would possibly launch in the mid to late 2030s. There are maybe a dozen reasonable mission proposals submitted for every mission that actually ends up at the launch pad. The competition is fierce, and any proposal has to argue its return on investment incredibly convincingly to get selected for implementation. We now know many interesting Kuiper Belt objects that would definitely deserve a closer look – but we also know many other things that are much more accessible and would also deserve a closer look! No amount of extra money would realistically allow NASA (or any space agency) to fly missions simply "because we might discover something" because there are always many, many other mission proposals in the pipeline with vastly better justification than merely "because we might discover something".
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
  Because the inverse square law applies to probes too. We can send them out by the millions, but by the time they get far enough out to see something interesting the probe density will be practically zero.
- xnorswap 3y ago
  "Every direction" isn't what you think it is. Even if we had a voyager travelling the "opposite" direction, once outside the solar system they'd appear to be travelling at almost the same speed with respect to the orbit of the solar system around the milky way. The solar system is estimated to orbit ~200km/sec around the centre of the milky way. Even with a perfect ejection, at the estimated speed of Voyager you'd end up with one probe going ~180km and the other ~220km, which isn't a huge difference. And that's without the fact that getting Voyager to that speed required some unique planetary alignment.
  - daynthelife 3y ago
    On a related note, starting from a circular orbit, it takes 1/(2sqrt(2) - 3) ~ 5.83 times more energy to throw an object to the center of a gravity well than it does to throw it out of orbit. It doesn’t matter how close your initial orbit it, or whether you’re orbiting around the Sun or Sagittarius A*. The ratio is always the same, though gravitational assistance from other bodies often affects the calculations in practice. I expect we’d send a satellite outside the Milky Way long before we get one anywhere near the center of the galaxy. Not that either mission seems particularly feasible with current technology.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Doing a % comparison makes little sense. Everything in this arm of the Milky Way is moving along with us. The key metric is that their locations would spread by ~40km/sec. Whether that is an interesting amount of distance in an interesting amount of time is debatable, but that's the number.
- Yizahi 3y ago
  The probes are handcrafted from the unobtanium by the very expensive engineers, and designed individually due to this. We need a heavy lift platform flying for a few years before we could start making much more crude larger probes, with cheaper or even massmarket components. Then it may work.
- tg16 3y ago
  The cost is the fuel. It takes an insane amount of energy to leave Sol. The voyager probes were able to save 30km/s worth of Delta-V by performing a ton of gravity assists during the "Grand Tour" launch window planetary alignment that occurs once every 175 years. For context, getting something to low earth orbit is about 9.4km/s of Delta-V. From LEO to mars is another 4.3 km/s of Delta-V. Getting from LEO to any solar escape trajectory adds is about 18km/s. As you can see, 30km/s of fuel savings is extremely significant, and that required the 175 year Grand Tour alignment.
throwaway888abc 3y ago
Love the Voyagers story. Just get me thinking: Why there is not more missions like this ? It takes significant time to cross "somewhere there", every year one launch could not hurt ? Edit: *Obligatory video: "Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager" by Aaron Cummings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o Also here on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=voyager https://hn.algolia.com/?q=voyager
- pkaye 3y ago
  The Interstellar Probe is something the Johns Hopkins APL has been proposing. I don't think its been funded yet. https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Interstellar-Probe-Executive-Report.pdf https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Interstellar-Probe-Exec...
  - thombat 3y ago
    The difficulty of long range communications is nicely demonstrated there: "X-band with 5-m fixed antenna capable of sufficient downlink (~10 Mbit/week) at 1000 au using Next Generation Very Large Array or equivalent resource" ... "Two Next Generation Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators for 300 W (electric) at end of mission" So with twice the area of radio dish and a power supply that after 50 years is still double what Voyager launched with, the data rate will be two bytes per second.
    - m4rtink 3y ago
      That's still a lot faster than FT8 or WSPR & both are perfectly usable for things like 16g solar powered balooon probes with a RPi Pico and a GPS, flying around the globe. :) https://www.zachtek.com/post/a-new-wspr-transmitter-for-balloons https://www.zachtek.com/post/a-new-wspr-transmitter-for-ball... Should be similar out there & also likely not much stuff to take photos of.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  The answer is money. Starship will both greatly reduce the cost to orbit, and the cost to design spacecraft (far wider mass budgets). I do not know how much C3 it will have, but very likely a kicker stage will come along for interplanetary and possibly interstellar craft.
xvilka 3y ago
I hope they will publish firmware/source code at some point in the future. It would be definitely interesting to look into.
- az09mugen 3y ago
  I could be able to find out the code is a mix between assembly and fotran. I wonder how percentage of it is for sensor, navigation, communication
- withinboredom 3y ago
  I suspect they can’t. It is quite possible security was not on anyone’s mind back then and the last thing they want are rouge signals from some amateur fucking up generations worth of work.
  - HappyDaoDude 3y ago
    That is true now, but maybe once the probes go completely dead with no chance of revival and there is no risk of tampering?
    - jzwinck 3y ago
      NASA have a history of reusing bits and pieces when they develop new vehicles and systems. If someone learns how to control Voyager there may not be much left to figure out if they want to control New Horizons etc.
      - HappyDaoDude 3y ago
        That is a fair call. If that is the case, robably best to just leave it.
  - boricj 3y ago
    I highly doubt an amateur has the means to contact the probes. Heck, I'm not even sure any organization besides NASA has antennas big enough for the job.
Faaak 3y ago
@dang: NASA's official release: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-team-focuses-on-software-patch-thrusters https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-team-focuses-on-...
- layer8 3y ago
  Previously submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37984202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37984202
andyp-kw 3y ago
Were unit tests a thing back when the probes were built? I wonder how new engineers learn about the intricacies of such ancient tech, without breaking them.
- wannacboatmovie 3y ago
  Sadly the "megabytes of JavaScript to 'hello world'" culture of today could not even begin to comprehend how this even works
  - hef19898 3y ago
    It funny, usually people on HN diss NASA et all hard for being those big, inept governkent agencies, with SpaceX being so so mich better because SpaceX get SW"engineering". And then NASA does something like this, and all of sudden it so cool! Coupd it be that those orgs aren't even nearly as incompetent as people have a tendency to think?
    - thiago_fm 3y ago
      It definitely doesn't, maybe there are some jerks that think badly of NASA, but I doubt they make the majority of us. They do a lot of engineering and science, but have been underfunded for so many years, with the government siding with private companies. For many, like me. It would be a dream to work at NASA, whatever the salary or bureaucracies it might involve. It was my childhood dream, but given I wasn't American, that would never happen.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Depending on where you live, ESA would be an alternative. The quite constantly look for people at their Oberpfaffenhofen site near Munich, if memory serves well they do some Galileo related work there.
        thiago_fm 3y ago
        I'll keep my eye on it. ESA is awesome as well.
imranhou 3y ago
This is simply dope! I know this comment doesn't add value, but still, Pluto is "only" 4.5 billion miles away from sun at its farthest point and it takes 247 years to loop around the sun.
- pxeger1 3y ago
  I think you mean 4.5 billion miles.
- nso 3y ago
  Pretty sure you got one of those measurements horribly wrong
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I'll have you know that commenter was units lead on the Mars Climate Orbiter[0] mission! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
- speps 3y ago
  Pluto is 3.7 billion miles away, not "light years". New Horizons probe wouldn't have taken "only" 11 years to reach Pluto otherwise.
  - imranhou 3y ago
    Yup, effect of late night posting.
atleastoptimal 3y ago
Windows 11
- fevangelou 3y ago
  The cumulative patch.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Sir, we've just had a response for Betelgeuse! They say...can they have the old Start Menu back?
  - atemerev 3y ago
    Ah, so that’s what Betelgeuse dimming was about, a few years ago
    - gstrike 3y ago
      [dead]
vasco 3y ago
To a spacecraft and to whoever else was listening.
kaptainscarlet 3y ago
I hope this update doesn't come with ads and data collection to "improve my experience"
- donmcronald 3y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if the Win11 start menu search is running on something 12B miles away. Lol.
  - kaptainscarlet 3y ago
    Feels like a webpage from the days of AOL with blinking images and marquees.
- leokennis 3y ago
  VoyagerOS Updated yesterday 529B Bug fixes and improvements, watered the plants, took out the trash. Keep VoyagerOS up to date to always have the best experience!
  - 72deluxe 3y ago
    Depressingly accurate. How I hate these useless "changes" paragraphs accompanying YouTube and the daily Netflix app update on iOS and Android (why would a video player need so many updates to do exactly the same thing for years: show a selection, permit selection of a video, scrub, pause?!)
bhaak 3y ago
How much is that in metric units?
- OnlyMortal 3y ago
  1931256466260489.5 centimetres or, if you prefer, 3167950339119.439 giraffes.
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    Yeah, but how many football fields for us common people?!
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      Metric or freedom football?
      - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
        Yes.
        hef19898 3y ago
        Soccer, football? And how much is this in Empire State buildings, depending on the average soze of a giraffe? Either way so, that SW update of Voyager is some seriously impressive stuff!
      - BoxOfRain 3y ago
        Rugby football, which went metric some decades ago.
    - nashashmi 3y ago
      How about earth equator-meter as a unit? or Equatometer?
  - bhaak 3y ago
qrybam 3y ago
This is incredible. Not just because of the engineering that went into such a long lived machine, but also because of the ingenuity of the teams that have looked after this mission and those currently working on it. Half a century of operation. Bits of data, like gold dust, peppering our radio telescopes with telemetry from the edges of our protective solar shell, and beyond. Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated, but the pushing of boundaries of our understanding is awe inspiring. It carries the symbolism of some of the best parts of humanity’s desire to explore. This sort of news, at least for me, is an antidote to the darker side of our species. It reinvigorates my hope in what we can achieve when working together. Thank you to NASA and the scientific community at large.
- pantulis 3y ago
  > Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated Only the _documentation_ effort must be monumental.
  - OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
    Yes, and JPL makes it available. Voyager Telecom: https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_new.pdf https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_n... A lot more at the top-level site and the links on the right-hand side: https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/ https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/
  - quietpain 3y ago
    Lets hope the _archival_ effort can match or in 50 years time we’ll have another one of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rocks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rock...
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      Even with those problems, those are still far better than the (complete lack of) documentation I see in software workplaces these days.
tguvot 3y ago
i wonder if NASA is the first "company" ever that implemented OTA updates ? (ok, not exactly air, mostly, space)
2rsf 3y ago
Assembly software, Launched in 1977 with link speed of a few hundred bps
asicsp 3y ago
Another discussion on the same story: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/nasa-wants-the-voyagers-to-age-gracefully-so-its-time-for-a-software-patch/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/nasa-wants-the-voyager... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37993969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37993969
midasuni 3y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37993969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37993969
fuzzythinker 3y ago
To put the 12B miles in an easier grasp, Pluto's average distance is 3.7B miles. So Voyager 2 is a hair under 3.3 Plutos away, and Voyager 1 at 15B miles is slightly over 4 Plutos away. Another point of reference is the heliosphere, at 100AU. 1AU (earth to Sun) is 93M miles, so the heliosphere is around 2.5 Plutos away.
- physicles 3y ago
  On some other YouTube channel, I recently saw a diagram where the width was 0.01 light-year. That’s “only” about 59 billion miles; surely we can’t be too far from the moment we can conceive of Voyager 1’s distance in light-years. Nope. At its current speed, we’ve got another 129 years. That’s an underestimate because the spacecraft will continue to decelerate a bit as it pulls farther away from the sun. That’s about 60,000 years to the nearest star.
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    >That’s about 60,000 years to the nearest star. Assuming it doesn't hit a rock or eventually fall into something. How long could it physically last with cosmic rays etc hitting it? will it eventually just an unrecognizable metal lump?
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      > How long could it physically last with cosmic rays etc hitting it? Likely a long, long time. Neanderthal cave paintings have lasted upwards of 60,000 years.
      - Natfan 3y ago
        Surely there's a difference between cave paintings on a planet with an atmosphere, and a spacecraft travelling void?
        paulddraper 3y ago
kristopolous 3y ago
it really illustrates just how incredibly empty space is that these probes have survived operational and unmolested for this long.
deepGem 3y ago
What got me intrigued was how did they send the update and what was the size of the update. Sadly no mention of those aspects in the article. Is there any way to find out ? I was feeling so low today that I just switched to HN to tune things off of my mind, saw this headline and right off the bat, am in a better mood. What an incredible feat of engineering !
- perilunar 3y ago
  https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
xbmcuser 3y ago
It takes around 22+ hours for 1 way communication to Voyager if I recall correctly. It takes 8 min for light to reach earth from the Sun. The closest star is 4.24 light years away. These kinds of distances are hard wrap your mind around.
- otteromkram 3y ago
  Not distance related, but here's another terrifyingly fun fact: The sun accounts for ~99.9% of total mass of the solar system.
  - api 3y ago
    “It’s called space for a reason.” We live on what barely qualifies as a dust particle, orbited by a much smaller dust particle. The next dust particle over, Mars, is far enough to require something like 12 minutes for light to make a round trip.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    * 99.8% Don't underestimate yourself!
rich_sasha 3y ago
They are doing it all wrong. Who runs on-prem hardware these days??? They should put it all in the cloud, they can replicate and have many instances of virtual Voyagers, not the measly 2. CDN should help with latency too, I hear their latency is measured in many hours, and is getting worse every day! Also, software update, big deal - use CI/CD! They probably don't have a Kanban board either... Dinosaurs!
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  I both love and hate it at the same time, well done.
- sgt 3y ago
  Their latest patch was actually converting the entire app to use npm. Let's hope the poor probe has enough memory.
  - rahen 3y ago
    With npm, 64GB ought to be enough for everyone.
    - kosolam 3y ago
      A rust rewrite from scratch is already in process
      - girafffe_i 3y ago
        Lol
      - gorbachev 3y ago
        A Go rewrite from scratch soon to follow.
        jtvjan 3y ago
        A rewrite in Scratch is in the early planning stages.
skirge 3y ago
Tested on staging?
- thanatos519 3y ago
  Sent to Voyager 2 first, since Voyager 1 is further out so its readings are more valuable. So... testing in production in a secondary market.
  - atemerev 3y ago
    They have staging too (an on-Earth copy of the Voyager probe, with all relevant parts fully duplicated).
autoexec 3y ago
I really have to hand it to NASA. Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 and it's still getting updates but we're supposed to be okay with the cell phones that launched 5 years ago no longer being updated.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Long-term updated devices might be OK for your wallet and the environment, but they're not good at making profits. They also slow down "innovation", and what would we be without 100s of useless ("necessary") functions in our modern phones? We'd have to (gasp) talk to each other at restaurants or also use proper dedicated devices like a camera and would miss some selfies!
  - jen729w 3y ago
    Old mobile phones aren’t transmitting priceless scientific data. Long-term updates to old devices are a drain on the people updating them. You start a hardware company and let’s see how long you and your little team of really expensive engineers keep updating last year’s product.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      > Old mobile phones aren’t transmitting priceless scientific data. Aren't they though? Clearly it's not on the same scale, but a 5 year old phone is still perfectly capable of transmitting very valuable data and providing utility to the user.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >Old mobile phones aren’t transmitting priceless scientific data. No, they just have (Apple 2022 iPhone revenues alone vs 2023 NASA budget) 10x the amount of money of NASA's budget (or 3x, if we stick to net profit), and around 1000x more money are depended on them. >You start a hardware company and let’s see how long you and your little team of really expensive engineers keep updating last year’s product. As long as the law mandates updates and bugfixes for older products, which, in a civilized society that actually did care for waste and the environment would be decades.
coldtea 3y ago
Before: In 1994 JPL started working on the Remote Agent (RA), an autonomous spacecraft control system. RA was written entirely in Common Lisp despite unrelenting political pressure to move to C++. At one point an attempt was made to port one part of the system (the planner) to C++. This attempt had to be abandoned after a year. Based on this experience I think it's safe to say that if not for Lisp the Remote Agent would have failed. We used four different Common Lisps in the course of the Remote Agent project: MCL, Allegro, Harlequin, and CLisp. These ran in various combinations on three different operating systems: MacOS, SunOS, and vxWorks. Harlequin was the Lisp that eventually flew on the spacecraft. Most of the ground development was done in MCL and Allegro. (CLisp was also ported to vxWorks, and probably would have been the flight Lisp but for the fact that it lacked threads.) We moved code effortlessly back and forth among these systems. The Remote Agent software, running on a custom port of Harlequin Common Lisp, flew aboard Deep Space 1 (DS1), the first mission of NASA's New Millennium program. Remote Agent controlled DS1 for two days in May of 1999. During that time we were able to debug and fix a race condition that had not shown up during ground testing. (Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.) The Remote Agent was subsequently named "NASA Software of the Year". https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
- ykonstant 3y ago
  There's some pretty depressing stories in the second half of that article. But more interestingly, the author articulates beautifully one of the main reasons I chose pure mathematics over a programmer career in the late 90s: "One of the reasons I stayed at JPL for twelve years was that I was appalled at what the software industry had become. The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components. The "interface specification" for these "components" usually involves a list of tools in which an engineer has received "training." (I really detest the use of the word "training" in relation to professional activities. Training is what you do to dogs. What you should be doing with people is educating them, not training them. There is a big, big difference.)"
imdsm 3y ago
Is this considered OTA given space is a vacuum? Also, I've had some scary deployments in my time but this would take the biscuit!
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Well, "over the aether" works ;-)
- mdaniel 3y ago
  According to the sibling link to the Deep Space Network <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37995866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37995866>, the updates did in fact travel through our air first :-D
zakki 3y ago
What will be more ... (I don't know the word in English) is, once Voyager 2 completed the update it sends the same update to Voyager 1 (I read online it has the same computer system).
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matrix12 3y ago
KnowledgeWorks update most likely.
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tjrgergw 3y ago
Anyone else disappointed they didn't mention the actual number of bytes in the update?
pyeri 3y ago
That's cool. My Redmi phone makers won't even send it a few miles across this same planet!
misja111 3y ago
From Wikipedia: > There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft, two of each kind, sometimes used for redundancy. They are proprietary, custom-built computers built from CMOS and TTL medium-scale CMOS integrated circuits and discrete components, mostly from the 7400 series of Texas Instruments.[34] Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K. 32K memory to manage such a complex device for 46 years .. Nowadays the size of an OS is measured in GB's.
- Someone 3y ago
  > 32K memory to manage such a complex device for 46 years Word size was 18 bits, so 32k words is an enormous 72 kilobytes. Google also gives me 69.63 kilobytes, for example in https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15iaox2/nasa_has_reestablished_full_communications_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15iaox2/nasa_ha... https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html says the CCS had 8k words (“Along with the new chips, the memory changed with an expansion to 8K”) I guess the confusion is because the hardware has multiple (¿3?) computers.
jdblair 3y ago
If you want to learn about how the Voyager flight data system is designed, read Nasa's historical document Chapter 6: Distributed Computing On Board Voyager and Galileo [1]. The whole read is gripping, but the most interesting part for me is the section "Developing Voyager's Flight Data System Computer " describes the choice to use CMOS memory and DMA from instruments. [1] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html
- jdblair 3y ago
  It was a different world in 1975: After determining requirements, Wooddell examined possible hardware and software tradeoffs. In an insightful memorandum, John Morecroft explained the concept of "soft logic" as a complement to the "hard logic" in the Flight Data System44. Writing in 1975, when the actual flight software began to be prepared, Morecroft pointed out that the program for the computer was actually a soft representation of hard-wired circuits. Conceptually, the memo stands as an explanation of the essential meaning of firmware in general.
  - flkenosad 3y ago
    Damn, that's cool. Do you have a link to the whole document?
    - jdblair 3y ago
      To the memorandum? No! That would be fun to track down.
      - cenazoic 3y ago
        Looks like this, although a quick search doesn’t find it: 43. J. Wooddell, "Design of a CMOS Processor," pp. 2-3, files of J. Wooddell. 44)J. Morecroft to K. Frewing, "FDS Programming," January 14, 1975, files of R.J. Rice, Jet Propulsion Lab.
        3y ago
seydor 3y ago
People jest the quality of our current software, but it's a real concern. The programmer of the '2023 update' is conditioned to bundle too much unneccesary bloat to the update that could eventually slow down and obsolete the device.
- leptons 3y ago
  You don't know that. And this is one device that it really isn't possible to "bloat". Every byte and every bit in the voyager system needs absolute awareness. Bloat happens when programmers are unaware.
zelphirkalt 3y ago
I guess their code for signal correction for the case of package loss or data loss on in transit has to be fascinating. Or it is some simple, yet always working method. Anyway, would be cool to read about the details of that logic/implementation.
infinitedata 3y ago
I wonder which checksum algorithm they use at those ultra low latencies. Amazing work
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  There are some papers discussing this, e.g.: "Polar Coding for Forward Error Correction in Space Communications with LDPC Comparisons", Naveed Namipour, Haleh Safavi, & Harry Shaw. <https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190032244/downloads/20190032244.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190032244/downloads/20...> Also "Design of Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) Codes for Deep-Space Applications" <https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-159/159K.pdf https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-159/159K.pdf> The first specifically discusses early missions.
jedisct1 3y ago
Firmware update in progress, do not unplug your computer...
verisimi 3y ago
It's unbelievable.
wwader 3y ago
Can recommend the documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/ that follows the engineers working with voyager 1 and 2
egberts1 3y ago
Evolution of long-delay error correction in Voyager also evolved a bit, given their 32KB firmware size constraint. NASA went down to k=7 (from k=9) for convoluted coding. Not only were Golay and Reed-Solomon ("a special subset of [Bose-Chadhuri-Hocquehem] codes" which are "a powerful class of Hamming code", Brown, Elements of Spacecraft Design) used, convolutional coding was also used. Sources: - Figure 3 - https://i.stack.imgur.com/z5F1p.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/z5F1p.png - paper -https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/615317 https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/615317
alcal74 3y ago
Does anyone else say “V-ger” in their head when they read about these missions?
- quenix 3y ago
  I say “Voyager” in my head personally.
stuckkeys 3y ago
And yet. I cannot get good cellular service next to Tmobile HQ lol. Always on wifi calling. Amazing.
ngcc_hk 3y ago
Still not accepted we do not have v3 and v4 every decade or a few decade. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37983710#37983731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37983710#37983731
prmph 3y ago
I'm amazed at the sheer sensitivity of technologies man can create. An object billions of miles away is able to sense and pick out our communication from the EM radiation noise hanging out in the vastness of space...
TimTheTinker 3y ago
Original news article (from JPL) here: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-team-focuses-on-software-patch-thrusters https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-team-focuses-on-...
AnonC 3y ago
These two probes are mind blowing achievements. It would be lovely to read about the code and the various things it does, along with a description of the computing hardware (which machine code or assembly language or other language was used), etc. > The update, which took almost 18 hours to complete, was transmitted to help Voyager 2 avoid the same problem that its sibling, Voyager 1, experienced last year. > … > If there aren’t any issues, it will trigger the Voyager 2 update on October 28. Correct me if I’m wrong. The wording is a bit confusing. I presume the first paragraph above, when it says “to complete”, refers to just transmitting the update (and acknowledgment that it has been saved). The patching with this updated code will be triggered on October 28 after some verification checks are done.
js2 3y ago
How do either of these still have any propellent left? If they were originally scheduled to last only four years, how did they manage to get launched with enough propellent to last decades and billions of miles past their original mission? According to this article from 2003, the probes have enough hydrazine to last until 2034 and 2040: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/11/what-voyager-1-uses-for-fuel.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/11/what-voyager-1-u... Edit: this "Voyager Backgrounder" paper from 1980 is terrific: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19810001583/downloads/19810001583.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19810001583/downloads/19... The probes were launched with 104 kg (230 lb) of hydrazine. But I'm still not clear why they were so obviously overbuilt for a four year mission.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Possibly, they underpromised and overdelivered.
- pipe01 3y ago
  They usually have the mindset of "let's put enough propellant so that even if our estimates are orders of magnitude off the mission will live long enough", and normally their estimates are correct so they end up with tons of fuel
- KyleBerezin 3y ago
  I believe the mission length is just how long it takes to complete the mission goals. It isn't necessarily an estimation of the spacecraft's lifespan.
dangerface 3y ago
The real question is did they do it with a java applet?
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dang 3y ago
Recent and related: NASA's Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963826 - Oct 2023 (48 comments)
strangesmells02 3y ago
And it stresses me out just submitting code to github.
babelthuap 3y ago
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Bvlynicole 3y ago
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scionthefly 3y ago
They're about the same age as me, and they're aging better than I am.

555 points by quyleanh 3y ago

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It's mind boggling to think the first of these launched when I was ~5 years old - and still operational, at these distances.

huytersd 3y ago

I don’t understand why we are not sending these off in every direction constantly. The price can’t possibly be that prohibitive considering what we can accomplish with 40 year old technology.

causi 3y ago
The Voyagers took advantage of a particularly good planetary alignment for gravity boosts.
AllegedAlec 3y ago
The equivalent of about 4 billion dollars in modern day money for both of them. That, plus waiting for some very opportune launch times so that we can gravity boost off of everything.
- HappyDaoDude 3y ago
  Those gravitational boosts are vital. The closest in speed so far would be 'New Horizons'. But even then NH is going at 14.5KM/sec compared with Voyagers 18KM/sec. There are no probes currently that would catch up to Voyager.
  - samtho 3y ago
    18km/s is almost understated in terms of speed, so I looked it up to more familiar measures of speed: 65,000kph or 40,000mph. The only thing I really learned here was how even in the thousands of miles or km per hour, it’s just inconceivable how fast that is. Km per second was a better measure after all.
    - heavyset_go 3y ago
      > it’s just inconceivable how fast that is And even more inconceivable is how slow it still is in terms of human spaceflight outside of the Solar System.
    - 14 3y ago
      What is crazy to me is that even at those speeds, it is over 18,000 years from reaching one light year distance. The closest star is 4.2 light years away. So to ever reach it we would need multi generational ships or some way to go much much faster.
    - ta1243 3y ago
      Round the world in 40 minutes Travelling from New York to LA quicker than playing the song "From New York To LA"
- grishka 3y ago
  But the more copies you make of something, the cheaper they become. The R&D cost is the same and is only paid once whether you're building 2 space probes or 2000.
  - tg16 3y ago
    The probe itself is a relatively insignificant cost. The launch costs and timing windows are the limiting factor. The tyranny of the rocket equation is the fact that to carry more fuel to orbit, you need more fuel to get it into orbit, which itself needs more fuel. That's why gravity assists are so essential for escaping the solar system on a budget. The planetary alignment that enabled the Voyager launch windows only occurs once every 175 years. We should definitely be sending out more probes, but we can't just do it whenever we want, at least not without a lot more expense.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      The specific alignment for the Voyager missions was to permit flybyes of all the gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, with only two spacecraft. Both V1 & V2 visited Jupiter and Saturn, with Voyager 2 continuing on to both Uranus and Neptune. All visits were flybyes, that is, the probes were within the vicinity of the target planets, but did not orbit them for any prolonged length of time. More conservative trajectories giving fewer flybyes but relying on more probes would be possible, and are in fact what we've accomplished with the Gallileo & Juno (Jupiter), Cassini-Huygens (Saturn), and New Horizons (Pluto) spacecraft. There are NASA (U.S.) and Chinese proposals for a return visit to Uranus and Neptune, though those remain in planning stages. <https://www.space.com/nasa-uranus-orbiter-and-probe-mission-objectives https://www.space.com/nasa-uranus-orbiter-and-probe-mission-...> The orbiter missions had a much longer time-on-station. For Gallileo, roughly 7 years 9 months, Cassini-Huygens 13 years, and Juno 7 years to date, with another 5 or more possible. The Ulysses solar probe also flew past Jupiter, using the planet for an orbital assist to both slow it down to approach the Sun more closely and incline its orbit above and below the planetary plane so that the Sun's poles could be observed directly.
  - tivert 3y ago
psunavy03 3y ago
Because there are windows to visit certain planets, especially with modern rockets. You can't just point them in the direction of a planet and yeet them into space; there is physics involved.
- larschdk 3y ago
  We did yeet New Horizons at Pluto. It got an assist from Jupiter, but could have reached Pluto without, six years delayed.
- 7373737373 3y ago
  What about electrical propulsion methods?
INTPenis 3y ago
I used to think this until I learned how our solar system moves around the galactic core. Truth is, space is wild. We're like the equivalent of stone age people standing on the shore of the atlantic looking out wondering if we can make it out there. Except the ground beneath us is also moving through the ocean at fantastic speeds, causing huge waves in our wake. This is a huge oversimplification by a layperson, but just as ancient seafarers had to escape the currents caused near their shore, we have to figure out how to escape our solar system first, into interstellar space. You're not safe there, but at least you've exited the wake of our sun. Just like we had to exit the graviational pull of earth to reach the moon.
samtho 3y ago
The only reason why we got these probes as far and as fast as we did was because we were able to fly by each planet and use their gravitational influence to skip to the next one, increasing velocity after each slingshot.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > use their gravitational influence to skip to the next one You are correct in that the Voyagers' launch window was unique. Nit pick: gravity assist doesn't fundamentally rely on gravity. It extracts energy from planets' motion about the sun [1]. If we could somehow "bounce" a spacecraft off a planet's surface, it would impart momentum similar to that of a gravity assist. (In my opinion, it's a badly-named term.) [1] https://science.nasa.gov/learn/basics-of-space-flight/primer/ https://science.nasa.gov/learn/basics-of-space-flight/primer...
  - Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
    Good point, it’s a bit like calling hitting a baseball with a bat an “electric assist”. It’s not wrong, it’s just not very helpful. It’s also a good illustration of why we call some forces strong and others weak.
  - baseballdork 3y ago
    > gravity assist doesn't fundamentally rely on gravity I'm not sure how you can make that claim. If you were to bounce off the surface, that would likely not be considered a "gravity assist", no?
  - dctoedt 3y ago
    > If we could somehow "bounce" a spacecraft off a planet's surface, it would impart momentum similar to that of a gravity assist. When my kids were little, I showed them by holding a basketball in one hand and a tennis ball in the other, with the tennis ball on top of and touching the basketball. When I dropped them simultaneously, they fell together and bounced off the driveway — and the tennis ball took off like a rocket (no pun intended).
Sharlin 3y ago
You can take a look at the New Horizons to get an idea of what a moderately capable trans-Neptunian probe costs today (~$700M). If you made several, economies of scale would of course lower marginal costs somewhat. But the money isn’t even the main bottleneck (although it absolutely is a huge one) – power is. Specifically, the RTG radioisotope generators that are our only reasonable way of powering things at distances beyond Jupiter. Synthesis of radionuclides (eg. Pu-238) suitable for RTG use was originally a nice side effect of nuclear weapons production, but these days availability is very low even though the DOE recently restarted production after a long pause. In the 21st century NASA has launched exactly three RTG-powered missions: New Horizons (2006), Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity (2012), and Mars 2020/Perseverance. The next will be the (very awesome) Dragonfly mission to Titan, planned to launch in 2027. So given a cadence of roughly seven years, and one out of four missions targeting trans-Neptunian space, you could expect to launch an interstellar probe every 30 years or so, barring significant advances in power technology. The next one will most likely be a sorely-needed Uranus or Neptune flyby mission that would possibly launch in the mid to late 2030s. There are maybe a dozen reasonable mission proposals submitted for every mission that actually ends up at the launch pad. The competition is fierce, and any proposal has to argue its return on investment incredibly convincingly to get selected for implementation. We now know many interesting Kuiper Belt objects that would definitely deserve a closer look – but we also know many other things that are much more accessible and would also deserve a closer look! No amount of extra money would realistically allow NASA (or any space agency) to fly missions simply "because we might discover something" because there are always many, many other mission proposals in the pipeline with vastly better justification than merely "because we might discover something".
Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
Because the inverse square law applies to probes too. We can send them out by the millions, but by the time they get far enough out to see something interesting the probe density will be practically zero.
xnorswap 3y ago
"Every direction" isn't what you think it is. Even if we had a voyager travelling the "opposite" direction, once outside the solar system they'd appear to be travelling at almost the same speed with respect to the orbit of the solar system around the milky way. The solar system is estimated to orbit ~200km/sec around the centre of the milky way. Even with a perfect ejection, at the estimated speed of Voyager you'd end up with one probe going ~180km and the other ~220km, which isn't a huge difference. And that's without the fact that getting Voyager to that speed required some unique planetary alignment.
- daynthelife 3y ago
  On a related note, starting from a circular orbit, it takes 1/(2sqrt(2) - 3) ~ 5.83 times more energy to throw an object to the center of a gravity well than it does to throw it out of orbit. It doesn’t matter how close your initial orbit it, or whether you’re orbiting around the Sun or Sagittarius A*. The ratio is always the same, though gravitational assistance from other bodies often affects the calculations in practice. I expect we’d send a satellite outside the Milky Way long before we get one anywhere near the center of the galaxy. Not that either mission seems particularly feasible with current technology.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Doing a % comparison makes little sense. Everything in this arm of the Milky Way is moving along with us. The key metric is that their locations would spread by ~40km/sec. Whether that is an interesting amount of distance in an interesting amount of time is debatable, but that's the number.
Yizahi 3y ago
The probes are handcrafted from the unobtanium by the very expensive engineers, and designed individually due to this. We need a heavy lift platform flying for a few years before we could start making much more crude larger probes, with cheaper or even massmarket components. Then it may work.
tg16 3y ago
The cost is the fuel. It takes an insane amount of energy to leave Sol. The voyager probes were able to save 30km/s worth of Delta-V by performing a ton of gravity assists during the "Grand Tour" launch window planetary alignment that occurs once every 175 years. For context, getting something to low earth orbit is about 9.4km/s of Delta-V. From LEO to mars is another 4.3 km/s of Delta-V. Getting from LEO to any solar escape trajectory adds is about 18km/s. As you can see, 30km/s of fuel savings is extremely significant, and that required the 175 year Grand Tour alignment.

throwaway888abc 3y ago

Love the Voyagers story. Just get me thinking: Why there is not more missions like this ? It takes significant time to cross "somewhere there", every year one launch could not hurt ? Edit: *Obligatory video: "Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager" by Aaron Cummings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62hZJVqs2o Also here on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=voyager https://hn.algolia.com/?q=voyager

pkaye 3y ago
The Interstellar Probe is something the Johns Hopkins APL has been proposing. I don't think its been funded yet. https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Interstellar-Probe-Executive-Report.pdf https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Interstellar-Probe-Exec...
- thombat 3y ago
  The difficulty of long range communications is nicely demonstrated there: "X-band with 5-m fixed antenna capable of sufficient downlink (~10 Mbit/week) at 1000 au using Next Generation Very Large Array or equivalent resource" ... "Two Next Generation Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators for 300 W (electric) at end of mission" So with twice the area of radio dish and a power supply that after 50 years is still double what Voyager launched with, the data rate will be two bytes per second.
  - m4rtink 3y ago
    That's still a lot faster than FT8 or WSPR & both are perfectly usable for things like 16g solar powered balooon probes with a RPi Pico and a GPS, flying around the globe. :) https://www.zachtek.com/post/a-new-wspr-transmitter-for-balloons https://www.zachtek.com/post/a-new-wspr-transmitter-for-ball... Should be similar out there & also likely not much stuff to take photos of.
dotancohen 3y ago
The answer is money. Starship will both greatly reduce the cost to orbit, and the cost to design spacecraft (far wider mass budgets). I do not know how much C3 it will have, but very likely a kicker stage will come along for interplanetary and possibly interstellar craft.

xvilka 3y ago

I hope they will publish firmware/source code at some point in the future. It would be definitely interesting to look into.

az09mugen 3y ago
I could be able to find out the code is a mix between assembly and fotran. I wonder how percentage of it is for sensor, navigation, communication
withinboredom 3y ago
I suspect they can’t. It is quite possible security was not on anyone’s mind back then and the last thing they want are rouge signals from some amateur fucking up generations worth of work.
- HappyDaoDude 3y ago
  That is true now, but maybe once the probes go completely dead with no chance of revival and there is no risk of tampering?
  - jzwinck 3y ago
    NASA have a history of reusing bits and pieces when they develop new vehicles and systems. If someone learns how to control Voyager there may not be much left to figure out if they want to control New Horizons etc.
    - HappyDaoDude 3y ago
      That is a fair call. If that is the case, robably best to just leave it.
- boricj 3y ago
  I highly doubt an amateur has the means to contact the probes. Heck, I'm not even sure any organization besides NASA has antennas big enough for the job.

Faaak 3y ago

@dang: NASA's official release: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-team-focuses-on-software-patch-thrusters https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-team-focuses-on-...

layer8 3y ago
Previously submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37984202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37984202

andyp-kw 3y ago

Were unit tests a thing back when the probes were built? I wonder how new engineers learn about the intricacies of such ancient tech, without breaking them.

wannacboatmovie 3y ago
Sadly the "megabytes of JavaScript to 'hello world'" culture of today could not even begin to comprehend how this even works
- hef19898 3y ago
  It funny, usually people on HN diss NASA et all hard for being those big, inept governkent agencies, with SpaceX being so so mich better because SpaceX get SW"engineering". And then NASA does something like this, and all of sudden it so cool! Coupd it be that those orgs aren't even nearly as incompetent as people have a tendency to think?
  - thiago_fm 3y ago
    It definitely doesn't, maybe there are some jerks that think badly of NASA, but I doubt they make the majority of us. They do a lot of engineering and science, but have been underfunded for so many years, with the government siding with private companies. For many, like me. It would be a dream to work at NASA, whatever the salary or bureaucracies it might involve. It was my childhood dream, but given I wasn't American, that would never happen.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Depending on where you live, ESA would be an alternative. The quite constantly look for people at their Oberpfaffenhofen site near Munich, if memory serves well they do some Galileo related work there.
      - thiago_fm 3y ago
        I'll keep my eye on it. ESA is awesome as well.

imranhou 3y ago

This is simply dope! I know this comment doesn't add value, but still, Pluto is "only" 4.5 billion miles away from sun at its farthest point and it takes 247 years to loop around the sun.

pxeger1 3y ago
I think you mean 4.5 billion miles.
nso 3y ago
Pretty sure you got one of those measurements horribly wrong
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I'll have you know that commenter was units lead on the Mars Climate Orbiter[0] mission! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
speps 3y ago
Pluto is 3.7 billion miles away, not "light years". New Horizons probe wouldn't have taken "only" 11 years to reach Pluto otherwise.
- imranhou 3y ago
  Yup, effect of late night posting.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

Windows 11

fevangelou 3y ago
The cumulative patch.
robertlagrant 3y ago
Sir, we've just had a response for Betelgeuse! They say...can they have the old Start Menu back?
- atemerev 3y ago
  Ah, so that’s what Betelgeuse dimming was about, a few years ago
  - gstrike 3y ago
    [dead]

vasco 3y ago

To a spacecraft and to whoever else was listening.

kaptainscarlet 3y ago

I hope this update doesn't come with ads and data collection to "improve my experience"

donmcronald 3y ago
Sometimes I wonder if the Win11 start menu search is running on something 12B miles away. Lol.
- kaptainscarlet 3y ago
  Feels like a webpage from the days of AOL with blinking images and marquees.
leokennis 3y ago
VoyagerOS Updated yesterday 529B Bug fixes and improvements, watered the plants, took out the trash. Keep VoyagerOS up to date to always have the best experience!
- 72deluxe 3y ago
  Depressingly accurate. How I hate these useless "changes" paragraphs accompanying YouTube and the daily Netflix app update on iOS and Android (why would a video player need so many updates to do exactly the same thing for years: show a selection, permit selection of a video, scrub, pause?!)

bhaak 3y ago

How much is that in metric units?

OnlyMortal 3y ago
1931256466260489.5 centimetres or, if you prefer, 3167950339119.439 giraffes.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Yeah, but how many football fields for us common people?!
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    Metric or freedom football?
    - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
      Yes.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Soccer, football? And how much is this in Empire State buildings, depending on the average soze of a giraffe? Either way so, that SW update of Voyager is some seriously impressive stuff!
    - BoxOfRain 3y ago
      Rugby football, which went metric some decades ago.
  - nashashmi 3y ago
    How about earth equator-meter as a unit? or Equatometer?
- bhaak 3y ago

qrybam 3y ago

This is incredible. Not just because of the engineering that went into such a long lived machine, but also because of the ingenuity of the teams that have looked after this mission and those currently working on it. Half a century of operation. Bits of data, like gold dust, peppering our radio telescopes with telemetry from the edges of our protective solar shell, and beyond. Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated, but the pushing of boundaries of our understanding is awe inspiring. It carries the symbolism of some of the best parts of humanity’s desire to explore. This sort of news, at least for me, is an antidote to the darker side of our species. It reinvigorates my hope in what we can achieve when working together. Thank you to NASA and the scientific community at large.

pantulis 3y ago
> Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated Only the _documentation_ effort must be monumental.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
  Yes, and JPL makes it available. Voyager Telecom: https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_new.pdf https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_n... A lot more at the top-level site and the links on the right-hand side: https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/ https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/
- quietpain 3y ago
  Lets hope the _archival_ effort can match or in 50 years time we’ll have another one of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rocks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rock...
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    Even with those problems, those are still far better than the (complete lack of) documentation I see in software workplaces these days.

tguvot 3y ago

i wonder if NASA is the first "company" ever that implemented OTA updates ? (ok, not exactly air, mostly, space)

2rsf 3y ago

Assembly software, Launched in 1977 with link speed of a few hundred bps

asicsp 3y ago

Another discussion on the same story: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/nasa-wants-the-voyagers-to-age-gracefully-so-its-time-for-a-software-patch/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/nasa-wants-the-voyager... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37993969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37993969

midasuni 3y ago

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37993969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37993969

fuzzythinker 3y ago

To put the 12B miles in an easier grasp, Pluto's average distance is 3.7B miles. So Voyager 2 is a hair under 3.3 Plutos away, and Voyager 1 at 15B miles is slightly over 4 Plutos away. Another point of reference is the heliosphere, at 100AU. 1AU (earth to Sun) is 93M miles, so the heliosphere is around 2.5 Plutos away.

physicles 3y ago
On some other YouTube channel, I recently saw a diagram where the width was 0.01 light-year. That’s “only” about 59 billion miles; surely we can’t be too far from the moment we can conceive of Voyager 1’s distance in light-years. Nope. At its current speed, we’ve got another 129 years. That’s an underestimate because the spacecraft will continue to decelerate a bit as it pulls farther away from the sun. That’s about 60,000 years to the nearest star.
- lawlessone 3y ago
  >That’s about 60,000 years to the nearest star. Assuming it doesn't hit a rock or eventually fall into something. How long could it physically last with cosmic rays etc hitting it? will it eventually just an unrecognizable metal lump?
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    > How long could it physically last with cosmic rays etc hitting it? Likely a long, long time. Neanderthal cave paintings have lasted upwards of 60,000 years.
    - Natfan 3y ago
      Surely there's a difference between cave paintings on a planet with an atmosphere, and a spacecraft travelling void?
      - paulddraper 3y ago

kristopolous 3y ago

it really illustrates just how incredibly empty space is that these probes have survived operational and unmolested for this long.

deepGem 3y ago

What got me intrigued was how did they send the update and what was the size of the update. Sadly no mention of those aspects in the article. Is there any way to find out ? I was feeling so low today that I just switched to HN to tune things off of my mind, saw this headline and right off the bat, am in a better mood. What an incredible feat of engineering !

perilunar 3y ago
https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

xbmcuser 3y ago

It takes around 22+ hours for 1 way communication to Voyager if I recall correctly. It takes 8 min for light to reach earth from the Sun. The closest star is 4.24 light years away. These kinds of distances are hard wrap your mind around.

otteromkram 3y ago
Not distance related, but here's another terrifyingly fun fact: The sun accounts for ~99.9% of total mass of the solar system.
- api 3y ago
  “It’s called space for a reason.” We live on what barely qualifies as a dust particle, orbited by a much smaller dust particle. The next dust particle over, Mars, is far enough to require something like 12 minutes for light to make a round trip.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  * 99.8% Don't underestimate yourself!

rich_sasha 3y ago

They are doing it all wrong. Who runs on-prem hardware these days??? They should put it all in the cloud, they can replicate and have many instances of virtual Voyagers, not the measly 2. CDN should help with latency too, I hear their latency is measured in many hours, and is getting worse every day! Also, software update, big deal - use CI/CD! They probably don't have a Kanban board either... Dinosaurs!

worthless-trash 3y ago
I both love and hate it at the same time, well done.
sgt 3y ago
Their latest patch was actually converting the entire app to use npm. Let's hope the poor probe has enough memory.
- rahen 3y ago
  With npm, 64GB ought to be enough for everyone.
  - kosolam 3y ago
    A rust rewrite from scratch is already in process
    - girafffe_i 3y ago
      Lol
    - gorbachev 3y ago
      A Go rewrite from scratch soon to follow.
      - jtvjan 3y ago
        A rewrite in Scratch is in the early planning stages.

skirge 3y ago

Tested on staging?

thanatos519 3y ago
Sent to Voyager 2 first, since Voyager 1 is further out so its readings are more valuable. So... testing in production in a secondary market.
- atemerev 3y ago
  They have staging too (an on-Earth copy of the Voyager probe, with all relevant parts fully duplicated).

autoexec 3y ago

I really have to hand it to NASA. Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 and it's still getting updates but we're supposed to be okay with the cell phones that launched 5 years ago no longer being updated.

coldtea 3y ago
Long-term updated devices might be OK for your wallet and the environment, but they're not good at making profits. They also slow down "innovation", and what would we be without 100s of useless ("necessary") functions in our modern phones? We'd have to (gasp) talk to each other at restaurants or also use proper dedicated devices like a camera and would miss some selfies!
- jen729w 3y ago
  Old mobile phones aren’t transmitting priceless scientific data. Long-term updates to old devices are a drain on the people updating them. You start a hardware company and let’s see how long you and your little team of really expensive engineers keep updating last year’s product.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > Old mobile phones aren’t transmitting priceless scientific data. Aren't they though? Clearly it's not on the same scale, but a 5 year old phone is still perfectly capable of transmitting very valuable data and providing utility to the user.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >Old mobile phones aren’t transmitting priceless scientific data. No, they just have (Apple 2022 iPhone revenues alone vs 2023 NASA budget) 10x the amount of money of NASA's budget (or 3x, if we stick to net profit), and around 1000x more money are depended on them. >You start a hardware company and let’s see how long you and your little team of really expensive engineers keep updating last year’s product. As long as the law mandates updates and bugfixes for older products, which, in a civilized society that actually did care for waste and the environment would be decades.

coldtea 3y ago

Before: In 1994 JPL started working on the Remote Agent (RA), an autonomous spacecraft control system. RA was written entirely in Common Lisp despite unrelenting political pressure to move to C++. At one point an attempt was made to port one part of the system (the planner) to C++. This attempt had to be abandoned after a year. Based on this experience I think it's safe to say that if not for Lisp the Remote Agent would have failed. We used four different Common Lisps in the course of the Remote Agent project: MCL, Allegro, Harlequin, and CLisp. These ran in various combinations on three different operating systems: MacOS, SunOS, and vxWorks. Harlequin was the Lisp that eventually flew on the spacecraft. Most of the ground development was done in MCL and Allegro. (CLisp was also ported to vxWorks, and probably would have been the flight Lisp but for the fact that it lacked threads.) We moved code effortlessly back and forth among these systems. The Remote Agent software, running on a custom port of Harlequin Common Lisp, flew aboard Deep Space 1 (DS1), the first mission of NASA's New Millennium program. Remote Agent controlled DS1 for two days in May of 1999. During that time we were able to debug and fix a race condition that had not shown up during ground testing. (Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.) The Remote Agent was subsequently named "NASA Software of the Year". https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

ykonstant 3y ago
There's some pretty depressing stories in the second half of that article. But more interestingly, the author articulates beautifully one of the main reasons I chose pure mathematics over a programmer career in the late 90s: "One of the reasons I stayed at JPL for twelve years was that I was appalled at what the software industry had become. The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components. The "interface specification" for these "components" usually involves a list of tools in which an engineer has received "training." (I really detest the use of the word "training" in relation to professional activities. Training is what you do to dogs. What you should be doing with people is educating them, not training them. There is a big, big difference.)"

imdsm 3y ago

Is this considered OTA given space is a vacuum? Also, I've had some scary deployments in my time but this would take the biscuit!

dredmorbius 3y ago
Well, "over the aether" works ;-)
mdaniel 3y ago
According to the sibling link to the Deep Space Network <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37995866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37995866>, the updates did in fact travel through our air first :-D

zakki 3y ago

What will be more ... (I don't know the word in English) is, once Voyager 2 completed the update it sends the same update to Voyager 1 (I read online it has the same computer system).

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matrix12 3y ago

KnowledgeWorks update most likely.

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tjrgergw 3y ago

Anyone else disappointed they didn't mention the actual number of bytes in the update?

pyeri 3y ago

That's cool. My Redmi phone makers won't even send it a few miles across this same planet!

misja111 3y ago

From Wikipedia: > There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft, two of each kind, sometimes used for redundancy. They are proprietary, custom-built computers built from CMOS and TTL medium-scale CMOS integrated circuits and discrete components, mostly from the 7400 series of Texas Instruments.[34] Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K. 32K memory to manage such a complex device for 46 years .. Nowadays the size of an OS is measured in GB's.

Someone 3y ago
> 32K memory to manage such a complex device for 46 years Word size was 18 bits, so 32k words is an enormous 72 kilobytes. Google also gives me 69.63 kilobytes, for example in https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15iaox2/nasa_has_reestablished_full_communications_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15iaox2/nasa_ha... https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html says the CCS had 8k words (“Along with the new chips, the memory changed with an expansion to 8K”) I guess the confusion is because the hardware has multiple (¿3?) computers.

jdblair 3y ago

If you want to learn about how the Voyager flight data system is designed, read Nasa's historical document Chapter 6: Distributed Computing On Board Voyager and Galileo [1]. The whole read is gripping, but the most interesting part for me is the section "Developing Voyager's Flight Data System Computer " describes the choice to use CMOS memory and DMA from instruments. [1] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html

jdblair 3y ago
It was a different world in 1975: After determining requirements, Wooddell examined possible hardware and software tradeoffs. In an insightful memorandum, John Morecroft explained the concept of "soft logic" as a complement to the "hard logic" in the Flight Data System44. Writing in 1975, when the actual flight software began to be prepared, Morecroft pointed out that the program for the computer was actually a soft representation of hard-wired circuits. Conceptually, the memo stands as an explanation of the essential meaning of firmware in general.
- flkenosad 3y ago
  Damn, that's cool. Do you have a link to the whole document?
  - jdblair 3y ago
    To the memorandum? No! That would be fun to track down.
    - cenazoic 3y ago
      Looks like this, although a quick search doesn’t find it: 43. J. Wooddell, "Design of a CMOS Processor," pp. 2-3, files of J. Wooddell. 44)J. Morecroft to K. Frewing, "FDS Programming," January 14, 1975, files of R.J. Rice, Jet Propulsion Lab.
      - 3y ago

seydor 3y ago

People jest the quality of our current software, but it's a real concern. The programmer of the '2023 update' is conditioned to bundle too much unneccesary bloat to the update that could eventually slow down and obsolete the device.

leptons 3y ago
You don't know that. And this is one device that it really isn't possible to "bloat". Every byte and every bit in the voyager system needs absolute awareness. Bloat happens when programmers are unaware.

zelphirkalt 3y ago

I guess their code for signal correction for the case of package loss or data loss on in transit has to be fascinating. Or it is some simple, yet always working method. Anyway, would be cool to read about the details of that logic/implementation.

infinitedata 3y ago

I wonder which checksum algorithm they use at those ultra low latencies. Amazing work

dredmorbius 3y ago
There are some papers discussing this, e.g.: "Polar Coding for Forward Error Correction in Space Communications with LDPC Comparisons", Naveed Namipour, Haleh Safavi, & Harry Shaw. <https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190032244/downloads/20190032244.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190032244/downloads/20...> Also "Design of Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) Codes for Deep-Space Applications" <https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-159/159K.pdf https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-159/159K.pdf> The first specifically discusses early missions.

jedisct1 3y ago

Firmware update in progress, do not unplug your computer...

verisimi 3y ago

It's unbelievable.

wwader 3y ago

Can recommend the documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/ that follows the engineers working with voyager 1 and 2

egberts1 3y ago

Evolution of long-delay error correction in Voyager also evolved a bit, given their 32KB firmware size constraint. NASA went down to k=7 (from k=9) for convoluted coding. Not only were Golay and Reed-Solomon ("a special subset of [Bose-Chadhuri-Hocquehem] codes" which are "a powerful class of Hamming code", Brown, Elements of Spacecraft Design) used, convolutional coding was also used. Sources: - Figure 3 - https://i.stack.imgur.com/z5F1p.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/z5F1p.png - paper -https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/615317 https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/615317

alcal74 3y ago

Does anyone else say “V-ger” in their head when they read about these missions?

quenix 3y ago
I say “Voyager” in my head personally.

stuckkeys 3y ago

And yet. I cannot get good cellular service next to Tmobile HQ lol. Always on wifi calling. Amazing.

ngcc_hk 3y ago

Still not accepted we do not have v3 and v4 every decade or a few decade. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37983710#37983731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37983710#37983731

prmph 3y ago

I'm amazed at the sheer sensitivity of technologies man can create. An object billions of miles away is able to sense and pick out our communication from the EM radiation noise hanging out in the vastness of space...

TimTheTinker 3y ago

Original news article (from JPL) here: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-team-focuses-on-software-patch-thrusters https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-team-focuses-on-...

AnonC 3y ago

These two probes are mind blowing achievements. It would be lovely to read about the code and the various things it does, along with a description of the computing hardware (which machine code or assembly language or other language was used), etc. > The update, which took almost 18 hours to complete, was transmitted to help Voyager 2 avoid the same problem that its sibling, Voyager 1, experienced last year. > … > If there aren’t any issues, it will trigger the Voyager 2 update on October 28. Correct me if I’m wrong. The wording is a bit confusing. I presume the first paragraph above, when it says “to complete”, refers to just transmitting the update (and acknowledgment that it has been saved). The patching with this updated code will be triggered on October 28 after some verification checks are done.

js2 3y ago

How do either of these still have any propellent left? If they were originally scheduled to last only four years, how did they manage to get launched with enough propellent to last decades and billions of miles past their original mission? According to this article from 2003, the probes have enough hydrazine to last until 2034 and 2040: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/11/what-voyager-1-uses-for-fuel.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/11/what-voyager-1-u... Edit: this "Voyager Backgrounder" paper from 1980 is terrific: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19810001583/downloads/19810001583.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19810001583/downloads/19... The probes were launched with 104 kg (230 lb) of hydrazine. But I'm still not clear why they were so obviously overbuilt for a four year mission.

wolverine876 3y ago
Possibly, they underpromised and overdelivered.
pipe01 3y ago
They usually have the mindset of "let's put enough propellant so that even if our estimates are orders of magnitude off the mission will live long enough", and normally their estimates are correct so they end up with tons of fuel
KyleBerezin 3y ago
I believe the mission length is just how long it takes to complete the mission goals. It isn't necessarily an estimation of the spacecraft's lifespan.

dangerface 3y ago

The real question is did they do it with a java applet?

deleted 3y ago

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dang 3y ago

Recent and related: NASA's Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963826 - Oct 2023 (48 comments)

strangesmells02 3y ago

And it stresses me out just submitting code to github.

babelthuap 3y ago

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Bvlynicole 3y ago

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scionthefly 3y ago

They're about the same age as me, and they're aging better than I am.