6 ms·
How NASA Repaired Voyager 1 from 15B Miles Away
- 6mian 3y agoIt's astonishing they managed to debug and fix this, given how old and how far away Voyager is. I wonder if currently created designs are so robust in terms of repairability. Obviously, everything is much higher-level now; is it possible to fall back to something like low-level, direct memory access communication if something in higher layers fails? I'm glad to see so many senior engineers on the team; it must be an exciting lifelong journey to work on the mission.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago> Obviously, everything is much higher-level now; is it possible to fall back to something like low-level, direct memory access communication if something in higher layers fails? I have a feeling that code for NASA spacecrafts is not so high-level, for a reason.
- davedx 3y agoFrom what I understand current flight control systems are still written in relatively low level languages like C++, with extremely careful memory management strategies.
- luc_ 3y agoYes, C++ may even be too far. Writing C in a very regimented way to run on very old processors by today's standards is 'aerospace grade (tm)'.
- seydor 3y agoLet's not be overly pessimistic. Even today's phones have a low-level debug backdoor. I imagine Voyager3 with today's tech would provide much more interesting data, but it's a matter of time, who wants to wait another 50 years
- adezxc 3y agoI'm in awe that it's maintainable even though it launched almost 50 years ago, while there is software deployed right now that won't be maintainable in the next 5 years.
- sealeck 3y agoBecause it makes economic sense to apply extremely rigorous standards when writing software for a space probe, but not for a web app for expense reclaims?
- TacticalCoder 3y agoOr maybe because we are, literally, talking about rocket scientists?
- resource_waste 3y agoPerks of direct control over your systems. When you inherit some random security update to an obscure library and it causes things to break, you were never expected to understand that edge-case. However, if you spin up your own safety critical embedded system, you should be able to follow the logic completely. Different costs. One is in the billions of dollars, one is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- adezxc 3y agoTrue, yet I feel the expectation regarding software has shifted from expecting much better quality even 10-15 years ago to things we have now, where nobody is surprised about web apps crashing your browser etc.
- TomMasz 3y agoI totally lack the patience to be able to deal with sending a command and having to wait 2 days to see the result. Everything about this is awe-inspiring for me.
- robertlagrant 3y agoImagine opening Vim and gradually typing the commands in to edit a file with a 2-day time lag. Only at the end to notice the fateful words at the bottom of the editor: [read-only].
- Faaak 3y agoThis reads like a great opening to a geek-sci-fi book!
- rubslopes 3y agogeek-sci-fi-horror book
- _flux 3y agoI wonder if you could teach millions of terminal sessions to an LLM and then have mosh run the inference algorithm to hide the latency (and eventually correct when it gets the real data)..
- lostlogin 3y ago> Imagine opening Vim Imagine being able to close Vim. And yes, I’m hopeless. Nano please.
- marban 3y agoDon't get into GenAI then.
- FerretFred 3y agoIt sounds like my old company (not NASA) when we submitted tickets to offshore tech support - 2 days response time was the norm, and sometimes we never got a response back at all...
- Poudlardo 3y ago111001111011110010000011000111101111110111111101100
- lebuffon 3y ago2 BASE ! ok 111001111011110010000011000111101111110111111101100 ok CONSTANT X ok ok HEX X U. 18F7EFEC ok DECIMAL X U. 418901996 ok 8 BASE ! X U. 3075767754 ok ok I give up. What does this number represent?
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoI interpreted it as an answer to the question "How NASA repaired Voyager 1 from 15 Billion Miles Away." Ie they did it with ones and zeros.
- jebarker 3y ago> Due to its age, Voyager doesn't have any ground simulators Has anyone attempted to build this? Assuming the documentation is available
- rvnx 3y agoThe doc is on paper, not properly organized, and the people who wrote it are mostly dead: https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-voyager-one-space-probe-lost-contact/ https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-voyager-one-space-probe-los... So they test in production, and they see what happens. It's a really cool job they have (I'm not sarcastic), life-balance at NASA is known to be great ( = low to no pressure ) + since it's publicly funded, no clients, no profit to make, and if politics ask for feedback, you can claim anything and they can't verify it, and you can play with tech that others don't have the chance to see.
- crispyambulance 3y ago> It's a really cool job they have (I'm not sarcastic), life-balance at NASA is known to be great ( = low to no pressure ) + since it's publicly funded, no clients, no profit to make [...] I've known some NASA folks and they would not describe it as "low to no pressure". It's highly bureaucratic, constantly under budget pressure, and contractors get much of the cool work. Don't know about voyager, but I expect that many of those folks have been there decades-- like a closed society. I am sure it's awesome for them, more power to them, but it's certainly not the norm.
- rvnx 3y agoI guess it depends on the team, and I tend to believe what you describe as well. I didn't know about the contractors. It still seems like a great place to work for, even in terms of social recognition.
- xbmcuser 3y agoIt hit me just now that most of the people that designed programmed and launched this satellite are already dead
- Vagantem 3y agoWould anyone be able to hack Voyager? Just wondering - if the software is that old, as long as you can get a signal to it anyone should be able to hack it / wipe it right? Is the biggest barrier the enormous satellite dish you'd need to contact it or do the commands have a auth header with some key you'd need to brute force?
- rcxdude 3y agoI think the big radio telescope is the main barrier. At this point there's only one in the world with enough transmit power to talk to it, and a handful that can receive the signal.
- perihelions 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra_Deep_Space_Communication_Complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra_Deep_Space_Communicat... (pdf) https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/files/820-100-H.pdf https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/files/820-100-H.pdf 70 meter antenna, 80 kW X-band transmit power (122 dBW EIRP)
- thunderbong 3y agoI posted a Reddit link earlier asking the same question [0] HN thread [1] [0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1cbhvwg/eli5_why_hasnt_voyager_i_been_hacked_yet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1cbhvwg/... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40141836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40141836
- mavili 3y agoSo they essentially repaired 'hardware' from 22 light hours away, that's just insane! I love engineering.
- hrunt 3y ago22.5 light HOURS. Imagine pressing a button on your old desktop calculator and waiting 2 days for the number to show up.
- hooby 3y agonasa@earth:~$ ping voyager.1 PING voyager.1 (###.###.###.###) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from voyager.1 (###.###.###.###): icmp_seq=1 ttl=inf time=44.8 hrs 64 bytes from voyager.1 (###.###.###.###): icmp_seq=2 ttl=inf time=45.1 hrs 64 bytes from voyager.1 (###.###.###.###): icmp_seq=3 ttl=inf time=44.9 hrs 64 bytes from voyager.1 (###.###.###.###): icmp_seq=4 ttl=inf time=45.2 hrs 64 bytes from voyager.1 (###.###.###.###): icmp_seq=5 ttl=inf time=45.0 hrs
- seydor 3y agoIPv4 didnt even exist when it was launched. They should have waited for ipv6
- dirkc 3y agoSomething very wrong is going on with voyager, your terrestrial network or the universe!!! The spread of that ping is 0.4 hrs which I take to be 24 minutes! During that time a radio signal would travel 3 times the distance between the sun and the earth (AU). The only thing I can think of that could possibly be causing that delay is having to wait for a deep space network dish to aim properly.
- dpcx 3y agoSomething I always wonder about when Voyager has these issues is this: how long would it take for a probe launched today to catch up to Voyager? I assume there are better engines now, better capability for payload launch, better fuels, etc. I then wonder how long it would take to get that probe ready to be launched assuming that it was given the green light.
- bregma 3y agoMost of the Voyager acceleration was done by using gravity assist ("slingshot flybys" -- effectively falling toward a large mass like Jupiter and missing). As far as I know gravity has not improved or become better since the 1970s.
- consp 3y agoThough calculations about gravity assists have improved and the knowledge about the application as well.
- sfn42 3y agoIt's a bit more complicated than falling and missing. Getting out of the gravity well takes the same amount of energy as you gain from falling into it, so those two things alone would be pointless. I'm not an astrophysicist but I think you have to do it in such a way that you "steal" some of the planet's orbital momentum.
- probably_wrong 3y agoThis exact question has been tackled by Randall Munroe in his "What If?" section: https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/ Barely related, but on the same spirit, I recommend Kafka's short story "The city coat of arms" for his perspective on the "there are better engines" line of reasoning: https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Kafka%2C_Franz-1883/Das_Stadtwappen/en/34825-The_City_Coat_of_Arms https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Kafka%2C_Franz-1883/Das...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117599
- tivert 3y ago> Through their investigation, Voyager's ground team discovered a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory stopped working, probably due to either a cosmic ray hit or a failure of aging hardware. This affected some of the computer's software code. IIRC, the Voyagers have redundant FDS computers, but I believe the non-active ones have been considered bad for decades. Now that they're seeing hardware failures on the active one, I wonder if they're evaluating the problems in the inactive ones to determine if they might actually be in better shape.