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I highly recommend "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022), a documentary about the team maintaining these spacecraft as the end of their mission draws nearer. It

I highly recommend "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022), a documentary about the team maintaining these spacecraft as the end of their mission draws nearer. It adds a tremendous amount of context to articles like this. The engineering involved in making these spacecraft durable for as long as they have been is truly awe inspiring. As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years. I wish it wasn't.

CharlesW 2y ago
Trailer: https://itsquieterfilm.com/trailer https://itsquieterfilm.com/trailer
- ListeningPie 2y ago
  Look like it's part of an Apple TV subscription https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/its-quieter-in-the-twilight/umc.cmc.1d5x2oojccd97k3va00gqwrla https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/its-quieter-in-the-twilight/um...
ndiddy 2y ago
That documentary was fantastic. Another good resource is this paper from 2016 on what all the equipment/computing systems on Voyager do and what the team had done to keep the mission going as of that point. https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf
procarch2019 2y ago
As an OT systems architect I am totally floored. We design and plan for systems lifecycle on a ~20yr scale, with OT hardware (not the controls hardware, that’s closer to 10-20) lifecycle much shorter (~5 yr). Obvious on Earth we can afford luxuries of adopting new things, which actually shortens a total system lifecycle since new tech drives new designs. I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.
- turtledragonfly 2y ago
  Video games used to be like this. Once you built the "gold master" CD/DVD/cartridge/etc it was out of your hands. It was kinda nice to have a concrete end to the project [1]. Nowadays, everything is on the 'net, you can send patches, dlc, etc and the notion of a game being "done" is murky. [1] There was, however, one game I worked on where they had to pull the boxes from stores (delivered, but not yet for sale) and swap out the disk in order to release a critical fix that was discovered too late. Fun times (:
  - cazum 2y ago
    I'm curious, what was the bug that was so critical the publisher decided it was best to perform such a (what I assume was) costly operation post-distribution?
    - elzbardico 2y ago
      The cynical in me thinks that probably it was bug in the anti-piracy code.
    - turtledragonfly 2y ago
      It was a crash bug, but I'm not really sure the details (and it has been some years...). Even at the time, I wasn't personally involved in it, just heard about it through the grapevine. But yes, my understanding is it was quite expensive and the publisher was none too pleased (:
    - gambiting 2y ago
      I'm aware of one game that the company I worked for made that nearly released and that would have broken every GameCube that played it, Nintendo had to pull 50k discs from distribution just before they were sent to retailers and destroy them. The issue was that one programmer used an unauthorized system call to make the disc drive spin twice as fast, as they thought it was a great way to resolve some of the data streaming issues the game had. And yeah it worked - but after few hours of playing it would kill the GameCube. It wasn't really noticed because no one tests the game on actual discs right until actual gold master is made(usually), and then when the devkits died it was considered a random hardware fault and Nintendo just replaced them.
ge96 2y ago
The error correction on the signal must be great for 15 billion miles+ distance
- ForOldHack 2y ago
  Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away. Voyager 2 is over 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) from Earth. In fact, due to this distance, it takes over 23 hours to get a radio signal from Earth to Voyager 1, and 19½ hours to Voyager 2.
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  The signal we receive is about one RF photon per second per square meter.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    That's too incredible to be true. I'd love to quote it though - where does it come from?
    - ahazred8ta 2y ago
      Ah. This writeup https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240604-voyager-1-photons-per-bit https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240604-voyager-1-photons-... says that the 70m dish collects 240,000 photons per second, which is about 60 per second per square meter. The 1/sec figure was from the recent outage when Voyager's transmitter glitched and fell back to S-band. Received energy per bit is 4.5e-21 Joule across the whole dish, or 1e-24J per square meter.
      - mmooss 2y ago
        Too bad; it was a great story. Still, they managed to communicate, in an emergency, using 1 photon/sec/m^2 !?
jamesfinlayson 2y ago
> As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years. Yep - at my least job I worked on three products, only one of which is still running. The job before that still has their main product running, so I guess I'm at 50% (not including my current job).
BSDobelix 2y ago
The best Voyagers documentation (long form) i ever seen: >>NASA's Voyager Mission: Remastered [4K] https://youtu.be/M62kajY-ln0 https://youtu.be/M62kajY-ln0

CharlesW 2y ago

Trailer: https://itsquieterfilm.com/trailer https://itsquieterfilm.com/trailer

ListeningPie 2y ago
Look like it's part of an Apple TV subscription https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/its-quieter-in-the-twilight/umc.cmc.1d5x2oojccd97k3va00gqwrla https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/its-quieter-in-the-twilight/um...

ndiddy 2y ago

That documentary was fantastic. Another good resource is this paper from 2016 on what all the equipment/computing systems on Voyager do and what the team had done to keep the mission going as of that point. https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf

procarch2019 2y ago

As an OT systems architect I am totally floored. We design and plan for systems lifecycle on a ~20yr scale, with OT hardware (not the controls hardware, that’s closer to 10-20) lifecycle much shorter (~5 yr). Obvious on Earth we can afford luxuries of adopting new things, which actually shortens a total system lifecycle since new tech drives new designs. I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.

turtledragonfly 2y ago
Video games used to be like this. Once you built the "gold master" CD/DVD/cartridge/etc it was out of your hands. It was kinda nice to have a concrete end to the project [1]. Nowadays, everything is on the 'net, you can send patches, dlc, etc and the notion of a game being "done" is murky. [1] There was, however, one game I worked on where they had to pull the boxes from stores (delivered, but not yet for sale) and swap out the disk in order to release a critical fix that was discovered too late. Fun times (:
- cazum 2y ago
  I'm curious, what was the bug that was so critical the publisher decided it was best to perform such a (what I assume was) costly operation post-distribution?
  - elzbardico 2y ago
    The cynical in me thinks that probably it was bug in the anti-piracy code.
  - turtledragonfly 2y ago
    It was a crash bug, but I'm not really sure the details (and it has been some years...). Even at the time, I wasn't personally involved in it, just heard about it through the grapevine. But yes, my understanding is it was quite expensive and the publisher was none too pleased (:
  - gambiting 2y ago
    I'm aware of one game that the company I worked for made that nearly released and that would have broken every GameCube that played it, Nintendo had to pull 50k discs from distribution just before they were sent to retailers and destroy them. The issue was that one programmer used an unauthorized system call to make the disc drive spin twice as fast, as they thought it was a great way to resolve some of the data streaming issues the game had. And yeah it worked - but after few hours of playing it would kill the GameCube. It wasn't really noticed because no one tests the game on actual discs right until actual gold master is made(usually), and then when the devkits died it was considered a random hardware fault and Nintendo just replaced them.

ge96 2y ago

The error correction on the signal must be great for 15 billion miles+ distance

ForOldHack 2y ago
Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away. Voyager 2 is over 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) from Earth. In fact, due to this distance, it takes over 23 hours to get a radio signal from Earth to Voyager 1, and 19½ hours to Voyager 2.
ahazred8ta 2y ago
The signal we receive is about one RF photon per second per square meter.
- mmooss 2y ago
  That's too incredible to be true. I'd love to quote it though - where does it come from?
  - ahazred8ta 2y ago
    Ah. This writeup https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240604-voyager-1-photons-per-bit https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240604-voyager-1-photons-... says that the 70m dish collects 240,000 photons per second, which is about 60 per second per square meter. The 1/sec figure was from the recent outage when Voyager's transmitter glitched and fell back to S-band. Received energy per bit is 4.5e-21 Joule across the whole dish, or 1e-24J per square meter.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      Too bad; it was a great story. Still, they managed to communicate, in an emergency, using 1 photon/sec/m^2 !?

jamesfinlayson 2y ago

> As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years. Yep - at my least job I worked on three products, only one of which is still running. The job before that still has their main product running, so I guess I'm at 50% (not including my current job).

BSDobelix 2y ago

The best Voyagers documentation (long form) i ever seen: >>NASA's Voyager Mission: Remastered [4K] https://youtu.be/M62kajY-ln0 https://youtu.be/M62kajY-ln0