18 ms·
Voyager 1 is back online: NASA spacecraft returns data from all 4 instruments
- gnabgib 2y agoDiscussion yesterday 45 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40676221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40676221
- NKosmatos 2y agoIt’s funny how yesterday’s submission (mine) only has 75 points and this one 441. Goes to show that the time and date you post something on HN plays an important role. I remember seeing an analysis on when is the best time and day to post something based on your country, but couldn’t find it now.
- secondcoming 2y agoI’d guess the best time is when the Californians wake up
- JohannesH 2y agoTiming is everything... and luck. :) Me and a colleague of mine once posted essentially the same video of us pushing a coke can across a table, making the sound vaguely similar to Chewbacca. His video got maybe 100-200 views, and mine got 1.7 million views on YouTube and somewhere between 50 and 100 million views across other platforms. The reason? I happened to post my video to reddit a few hours later, which happened to coincide better with people getting ready for Thanksgiving in the states. I'm from Denmark, so it didn't really cross my mind.
- qingcharles 2y agoThe headline is the other factor. The headline on this one is slightly snappier.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoYeah, it's a trend across all social media to maximize engagement when you're a professional influencer. No matter the site: - headline - time posted - target audience are the most important factors if you're aiming for the most eyeballs. A real shame, but I can't even begin to know how to address this.
- nnurmanov 2y agoAwesome!
- flextheruler 2y agoWhat are the theoretical risks to sending out these beacons… our we at all, as a species, significantly increasing the chance of another life form more advanced than us discovering us by doing this? If we come into contact with a significantly advanced life form it would certainly lead to ineffable destruction. Deep space probing without the ability to exert any sort of defense if discovered seems risky. I know the chances are low but what’s the ROI on sending this stuff out without being remotely prepared for contact. I think another comment was saying the data we’ve collected has mostly just been used to confirm preexisting theories. If that’s all we’re getting out of it I’m apprehensive. I’m just a layman but I’d feel much better if we can establish control, knowledge and dominance of our solar system and its celestial bodies first. I’m genuinely asking not a conspiracy theorist.
- onion2k 2y agoIf an alien species can spot something as tiny as Voyager but doesn't notice our activity on Earth which is just a stone's throw away, I doubt they're a threat. If an alien species finds Voyager in 10,000 years and tracks it back to our planet, they'll find some interesting remains of our civilization.
- shash 2y agoMore like 10,000,000,000 years at least. The closest star is 4.26 light years away. At current speeds (~65000 km/h) it’ll take 40,767,123 years to reach. _IF_ it’s going in the right direction. It’s doubtful they’ll even find the sun in its current phase
- The_Colonel 2y agoYou're off by a couple of magnitudes. Voyager travels the distance of one light year in about 18 000 years.
- iamgopal 2y agoThey could invent Tele transportation and Time Machine which essentially the same thing.
- neilfrndes 2y agoI loved watching "It's quieter in the twilight", a documentary about how a dedicated team of engineers are fighting to keep the Voyager mission alive. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
- Rinzler89 2y agoAnyone know which SUN workstations those techs were using to "talk" to Voyager? They seem to be running some sort of Unix yet look quite new ish with their widescreen LCD Displays.
- ricktdotorg 2y agothis -- fascinating -- document about porting the code for the Pioneer/Voyager Cosmic Ray Subsystem[0] does not specifically mention which _workstations_ were used, but the doc is hand-dated to be 4/15/93. so for servers maybe SPARCservers and SPARCcenters and if they had good budget Sparc 10s for workstations? probably had a ton of IPXs and IPCs around the place. this doc from february 1995[1] "a study of workstation computational performance for real-time flight simulation" used a variety of SPARCs as well as other workstations from HP, SGI, IBM etc. the Sun workstation benchmarks are not good! [0] https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/Pioneer_Software_port_to_Sun.pdf https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/Pioneer_Software_port_... [1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19950020821/downloads/19950020821.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19950020821/downloads/19... (edited to add 2nd link, derp)
- mrweasel 2y agoIn a brief moment in the trailer for the documentary linked above there is something that looks like an Ultra 24, 27 or 45. That would make it an Intel or AMD based workstation, but they reused that cabinet for a lot of models with minor variations. I believe they had one with an UltraSparc CPU as well.
- oldman_peter 2y agoI'd like to say Sun SPARCstation Voyager[0], but I have nothing on it but the name and its LCD screen. In the trailer some UltraSPARCs can be seen, as noted by others [0] https://www.oldsilicon.com/sparcstation-voyager https://www.oldsilicon.com/sparcstation-voyager
- sixdimensional 2y agoSeeing this news is a nice tribute to Ed Stone, who was one of the core project scientists for Voyager and recently passed [1] (and all those who work/worked on the program). I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Stone at a public NASA event many years ago. I asked him, perhaps a silly question: "what does it feel like to know you built the furthest man-made known object in the universe?". He paused for a moment, after which he responded, with a smile: "Pretty darn good". RIP, Dr. Stone and go Voyager go! [1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ed-stone-former-director-of-jpl-and-voyager-project-scientist-dies https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ed-stone-former-director-of-jp...
- yawpitch 2y agoNot so silly, considering it’s almost certainly always going be the furthest man-made object in the Universe.
- mlyle 2y agoI hope not-- it may take a long time, but I hope we laser accelerate some probes really fast.
- dmbche 2y agoEh - to send it where? Even laser accelerated, even if it gets to 0.1c, where is it gonna go? Edit0:typo
- robin_reala 2y agoAlpha Centauri. See Breakthrough Starshot and other such potential missions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
- dmbche 2y agoObviously, no need to answer further, I'm just being grumpy I imagine. Man - why go there? What are we looking to learn? Do they have the kilometer Gw phased array yet? The meterwide/gram weight sails? The chips that weight one gram with comms and cameras and all that? And just to clarify, they can't flip and slow down, so it's a 0.15c flyby of alphacentauri, entirely automated. So hopefully the code does't fuck up in this alien environnement without human help. What do they expect to learn at that speed and with such small sensors? Like a picture of the planet, like we get telescopes? I sure wonder the speed at which that's going to transmit data. I'm just seeing "proof or concept" but this is mostly concept and no proof. And if this is "step one" of interstellar travel, what's step two? Edit0: Just reading the wiki this is so absurd -atmospheric turbulence is a challenge to deliver te GW laserb- so were planning on building a km phased array in space to accelerate the swarm. Just this itself is way way beyond realistic. Doesn't this breakdown at napkin math levels?
- demondemidi 2y ago"speak" "package" "touch up" Odd that the writer called out these words in quotes in the midst of metaphors that were more obvious. I missed the article on the first read through because the writing was so bad. Anyway, on second read through: amazing they were able to keep teams on this project for nearly five full decades who can still debug this old hardware. Amazing longevity. Talk about maintenance of a code base. 15 billion miles to push a patch. Amazing.
- mrweasel 2y agoThe quality of the build of Voyager and the software is nothing short of amazing.
- fukpaywalls2 2y agoVoyager 1 was created in an long by gone era where technological obsolescence was unheard of.
- tchbnl 2y agoOr it was specced and engineered for a long life in the harshness of outer space. You can't compare it to a 1950s fridge.
- kleiba 2y agoAmazing! I have a feeling this thing is going to keep on trucking well into the 2270s...
- jeffrallen 2y agoPhysics agrees (momentum). Information theory (signal vs noise floor) would beg to differ with you.
- mnau 2y agoVoyager is powered by RTG, with half life 87.7 years. It's going to run out of energy before that.
- kleiba 2y agoAh, right, sorry. I confused it with Voyager 6.
- somat 2y agoI always joke that NASA should win the nobel prize in engineering for their work on the mars rovers. where the punchline is that there is no nobel prize for engineering... I didn't say it was a good joke. But the voyager missions... wow. NASA should totally win the nobel prize in engineering for them. What an accomplishment.
- westurner 2y agoAn annual Space Prize, for Engineering. Maybe people with bonuses these days could fund a prize committee in perpetuity like Alfred Nobel, who invented dynomite.
- enginoor 2y agoThe Voyager team did win the 1980 Collier Trophy which is the nobel prize of aerospace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collier_Trophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collier_Trophy
- mbs159 2y agoThat's a national prize, whilst the Nobel Prize is awarded globally.
- Dalewyn 2y agoHell yeah!
- torcete 2y agoSo, a memory chip was damaged? And if that is the case, a cosmic ray did it? [..] "Further sleuthing revealed the exact chip causing the problem, which allowed them to find a workaround. After the team relocated the code to a new location in the FDS, Voyager 1 finally sent back intelligible data on April 20, 2024"
- mritchie712 2y agomap of where Voyager 1 and 2 are currently: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/#where_are_they_now https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/#where_are_they_...
- beezle 2y agoSomeone at NASA/JPL might want to correct this page: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-they-now/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-they-now/ which has (as this writing) them "millions" of miles away instead of billions. Interestingly, it was only last July that Vger 2 passed Pioneer 10 to become the second furthest probe.
- kumarvvr 2y agoIs there any detailed technical write up as to how various issues with the Voyager, over the years have been resolved?
- willcipriano 2y agoWith the speed of light being a hard limit, should be sending out more probes like this with more and more advanced sensor tech so that our children can see far away things. They will need to know where to send the generation ships.
- shultays 2y agoVoyager 1 was sent using a slingshot that made it possible to achieve its speed. It was a rare opportunity during that time (I did a quick google but couldn't find how rare it was or when we would get such another opportunity)
- collinmanderson 2y ago“rare planetary alignment occurring once every 175 years” according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program
- kgeist 2y ago>After the team relocated the code to a new location in the FDS, I wonder what the protocol for sending update requests is. It sure must be encrypted? If so, what if the encryption algoritm is weak by modern standards, given Voyager 1 is 46 years old, and can be reverse engineered somehow? I.e. can someone outside of NASA send requests to Voyager to change its code?
- Schiendelman 2y agoPerhaps it’s theoretically possible. But honestly, it’s likely no one would. Most people hacking into systems are doing so for financial gain or reputational gain. Neither exists here - there’s especially no positive reputation to be had in hacking something 46 years old that likely can’t be fixed again after you do. There are plenty of vandals out there who don’t care about anything, but the probability one of them would have the skills and hardware necessary to do this is nil.
- sneak 2y ago> Perhaps it’s theoretically possible. But honestly, it’s likely no one would. > Neither exists here - there’s especially no positive reputation to be had in hacking something 46 years old that likely can’t be fixed again after you do. This is perhaps the most plainly wrong thing I have read in a long time. Being able to claim "I hacked Voyager" is one of the most ultimate hacker flexes one could possibly perform. A long long time ago I read an account (which may have been fiction, but had too many details to be casually dismissed) on a very private BBS of someone hacking a NASA space probe over many months. I think it is ridiculous to assume that nobody would try to do this.
- Schiendelman 2y agoIn any hacker community I’m aware of, I think you would be significantly ostracized for damaging a purely scientific effort that simply could not be repaired or replaced.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoThere will always be sabetours. But The effort to hack a sattelite farther from Earth than any spacecraft isn't the same as hijacking some wifi. Those lower effort trolls will be limited by skill and hardware, as the GP said. The effort to acquire both basically means you become an engineer at NASA and then go rouge one night. But why would you ruin your professional career, reputation, and livelihood for "the ultimate hacker flex"? And is it even hacking at that point? You already had the keys. You're just performing the ultimate social engineering experiment that has nothing but downsides for humanity.
- cancerboi 2y agoHow did the Voyagers avoid hitting asteroids when exiting the solar system? I thought there was a huge cloud of asteroids surrounding our solar system.
- tombert 2y agoI know nothing about astronomy, but aren’t the gaps between asteroids pretty huge? Like hundreds of thousands of miles? I would think if they were close they would just clump together under gravity.
- davidmurdoch 2y agoSpace is really really big. The astroids are tiny and not close to each other.
- analog31 2y agoEven the "dense" asteroid belt isn't all that dense, so the actual probability of getting whacked by something is pretty low.
- liversage 2y agoThe asteroid belt is between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter so the Voyagers traveled through this before reaching their first mission goal, Jupiter.
- furyofantares 2y agoYou're getting answers about the asteroid belt because you said asteroids, but I believe your question is about the Oort cloud (comets) since you said surrounding the solar system. From wikipedia; > Space probes have yet to reach the area of the Oort cloud. Voyager 1, the fastest[60] and farthest[61][62] of the interplanetary space probes currently leaving the Solar System, will reach the Oort cloud in about 300 years[6][63] and would take about 30,000 years to pass through it.
- Beldin 2y agoTo the best of our knowledge, for any of asteroid belt, Kuiper belt and Van Oort cloud, the trick is hitting, not missing. Space is vast; matter is (relatively) sparse. Moreover, matter tends to clump together, concentrating what little there is.
- arisAlexis 2y agoThe aliens fixed it
- liendolucas 2y agoHow they have achieved this to me is completely dark magic. Exotic wizardry. Kudos to the team for bringing it back to life! Meantime on planet earth we need to change our phones and technology gadgets faster than our underwear.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Some more on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40676221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40676221
- jazzgott 2y agoVoyager 1 is expected to shut down around 2025 because its power source, the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs), is running out of juice. These RTGs have been gradually losing power since the spacecraft was launched in 1977. As the power drops, Voyager will have to turn off its scientific instruments and other systems, eventually going silent after an amazing run.
- iso8859-1 2y agoIt's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHW-RTG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHW-RTG
- ck2 2y agoInstead of the next billion dollar war machine, let's build a railgun on the moon to launch tic-tac sized probes near 1% speed of light in all directions (including past voyager 1)
- citizenpaul 2y agoGreat idea probably not feasable. The military even with their effectivly unlimited budget recently ended their rail gun programs. One of the main reasons being they require too much maintenance/unreliable. I doubt the moon will be a place that can have effective repair trips.
- ck2 2y agoThey can build it using bots. Develop the bots in the deserts. If they can make them move about and assemble/repair things in a desert, they can handle moon dust. Granted it's at least a decade long project. But once we've got the bots with AI, they never get tired and can keep building. Alternately I guess we can slingshot stuff off the sun like the Parker Probe (0.06% speed of light, it's a start)
- richk449 2y agoGreat plan. Highly robust autonomous robots that build weapons by themselves.
- Muromec 2y agoSpace tech is byproduct of military research into ICBM, i.e. nuking the hell out of everyone all at once. Since the cold war end, it's all defunded and not cool. Now the hype is back, so is the funding.
- Sparkyte 2y agoThe ability of NASA to keep this system alive is remarkable. They had an expected expiration on Voyager 1 and this far exceeds it. If we could only get such reliability in stuff we bought today. :(
- Sporktacular 2y agoGreat, now it's back on track to return in a few centuries as a destructive sentient cloud entity and threaten civilisation. Thanks a lot NASA.
- icemelt8 2y agoIts mind blowingly shocking to me, how are they updating the software from so far away? how are they fixing the issues?
- hgyjnbdet 2y agoI remember reading an article years ago about how programmed, and what with, the voyager missions. Really with I could find it.
- ngcc_hk 2y agoNo emulator for these is really sad. That meant we never knew what happen when they decide to reprogram both of them for longer and maintain by remote debugging. This is one of the few production remote operating computer … and open source it and done an emulation so we can help (or just look) … and even if we want to we cannot hack it from earth. Safe with us.
- Vaslo 2y agoWas hoping it was starting the process to become vger