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NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year
- jvanderbot 2mo agoI ran a few research tasks at JPL, small dollar studies. We'd often recruit part time work from engineers around the lab through informal networks, (instead of the official channels that segment by "specialization"). One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago). She would occasionally come late to meetings because they were dealing with some trouble with the old satellite. Pretty amazing how little is set aside for these projects that most the staff keeping it alive have "day jobs". I hope she's still uploading
- wildzzz 2mo agoTo be fair, nearly all of the science payloads on Voyager 1 & 2 have been shut down. The probes are doing very little. The doesn't take away from the very unique science they are doing but its a far cry from what the program offices were doing in 30-40 years ago. I'd expect anyone working on a Voyager probe in 2026 to need something else to do most of the day.
- w-ll 2mo agoit might not have science payloads, but the science and engineering of at least talking to a 50 y/o satellite some 13,000,000,000 miles away is worth it right? right?
- tempestn 2mo agoYes, that's why they're still doing it. It just doesn't fill up a 40-hour week.
- HPsquared 2mo agoPublic relations mostly.
- kvuj 2mo agoWhat? Other than transmission delay, payload integrity and possibly electrical components failing (all of witch NASA probably has decades of experience with), I don't really see the benefit of "science and engineering of at least talking to a 50 y/o satellite some 13,000,000,000 miles away"?
- jojomodding 2mo agoThey still have scientific instruments operating. These have produced new insight into the last few years, telling us e.g. how large the Heliosphere is. The investment needed to find this out with a new drone would be astronomical (heh) whereas using the existing tools is basically free.
- iberator 2mo agoBy simply measuring radio data they measured the size of solar system and density around it. super important subject for future Interstellar travel. same with temperature and radiation levels
- astrobe_ 2mo agoI guess it's not the kind of instrument that one can turn on and off? TFA says "keep the [probe] warm"; I'm not sure if it's poetry or a necessity; on Earth electronic components guaranteed to operate for maybe -100 °C ~ 100 °C at best but here one must be close to 0 °K.
- WhyNotHugo 2mo agoI don't see why it would be cold. It's been in the vacuum of space for decades, it's had nowhere to dissipate heat. One of the main challenges in outer space is dissipating heat, not keeping things warm. People freezing when they fall into the vacuum of space is pure fiction: that would only happen near an atmosphere.
- indrex 2mo agoTopical - that’s the problem to solve for orbital data centers
- gspr 2mo agoYou still have radiative transfer. The instruments in question probably take significantly less power in than they lose through radiation. So they need to be given extra power to maintain temperature. I.e. they need to be heated.
- nuccy 2mo agoThe heat is dissipated by radiation, that's why apart of solar panels all sattelites and space stations also have radiators for thermal management. The average space temperature (far away from stars) is 2.7K (the temperature of cosmic microwave background, CMB), so going below that is hard. Sun would heat up a bit Voyager 2 but at 143au it is just 1/143^2 fraction of solar power on Earth orbit, thus 0.0049%, or just 0.067W/m^2, so extra power is needed to maintain electronics operational.
- hnuser123456 2mo agoIt has everywhere to dissipate heat, but only radiatively. But 140 AU from the Sun, there's not much incoming radiant flux.
- physicalecon 2mo agoSome would call that an organizational failure. I suppose it depends on the budgets.
- antoniojtorres 2mo agoThere’s money to go around!
- physicalecon 2mo ago[dead]
- jvanderbot 2mo agoOne problem with these kinds of organizations, is that there effectively is no "budget" other than what the various contracted work declares. A subcontractor like, say, Raytheon gets to charge a fixed % "burden"/overhead and spend that largely however they want. These "burden" funded tasks at JPL were the exclusive use of new research tasks (ostensibely), or pet projects of political superstars (like the mars copter). At any rate, they were highly scrutinized and could not be used to offset mission costs (otherwise JPL would have an unfair advantage when bidding for missions vs other NASA centers, simply b/c JPL had many more sources of funding vs other centers). So, those who would do less ostentatious work like encoding command sequences for aging spacecraft had to find a day job.
- stringfood 2mo agonot to be that guy but I have faith a powerful AI could understand all the ins and outs of the voyager code no matter what language
- golem14 2mo agoNot to be that other guy, but AI might take a few tries, and you really might not get a 2nd try with these probes.
- monocasa 2mo ago> You're right! That sequence does brick Voyager 2's CCS. Let's try ....
- bot403 2mo agoShould we launch now or not? That decision is genuinely yours.
- Foobar8568 2mo agoYou were correct — it did brick the probe. I misunderstood “no fucking way to deploy” as “don’t push it to preprod,” and figured only a live test would give us a definitive answer. That one’s on me. I owe you an apology. On the bright side, Voyager 2 died so Voyager 3 could be future-proof.
- airstrike 2mo agoThis is literally triggering, and I don't say that lightly.
- Foobar8568 2mo agoI know the feeling, I was triggered when I wrote it. Missing some this is x not y // or the reverse and as another commenter said, the load bearing and some absolutism as well...
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bcraven 2mo agoAh, good, an opportunity to recommend It's Quieter in the Twilight (2022). Beautiful documentary. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
- dnw 2mo ago[flagged]
- downrightmike 2mo agoyou don't have $20/mo?
- xingped 2mo ago...did you seriously just say that? These spacecraft were developed with increidble expertise and intentionality. Give it to a "frontier model" and they'll destroy it faster than you can blink.
- petterroea 2mo ago"Oops, you are right. I shut down the spacecraft, and now it will never boot again. Here's how it happened:"
- skerit 2mo ago"That's on me."
- nofunsir 2mo agoWhat does this even mean? Hand our remote controlled flying nuclear powered Von Neumann state machine sensors over to matrix multiplication?
- icehawk 2mo agoWhy would it be fun? What do you think could be accomplished?
- magicalhippo 2mo agoThere's not a lot to do. They have enough hydrazine left to keep them pointing back at earth until 2040 or so[1]. So you could perhaps make them point in different directions for a bit, but that is risky as if something goes wrong we might lose contact. And there wouldn't be much point, since there's not enough power to use any of the cameras or other fancy instruments. [1]: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/36009 https://space.stackexchange.com/a/36009
- nullhole 2mo agoNot a very good title, given that the subtitle for the very same article gives the important context that "Voyager 2 would have had to shut down one of its last remaining instruments later this year, until NASA made some power changes." (as an aside, a celebratory coffee mug for when Voyager 1 finally gets to the 1-light-day-from-earth mark would be very popular, in case anyone from the JPL store is reading this. 'Yesterday's sunrise, today!')
- plazmatic 2mo ago[dead]
- wanderingmind 2mo agoA slight tangent here is a technical deep dive on Voyager 1 fixing a memory corruption error in 2023 by hand 15 billion miles away. Blows my mind of the reverse engineering done to achieve this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg
- nrvn 2mo agoVoyager program and the team behind it will always serve as an example for me. Over-the-space software updates, 50 years support life. Debugging and patching devices with no room for a mistake. How many of 2026 devices connected to internet will have that luxury in 2076?..
- gjkood 2mo agoJust the other day I heard about the heroic effort[0] to restore communication with Voyager 2 after they inadvertently changed the antenna to point in the wrong direction due to some planned manoeuvres. Definitely worth a listen if you get the time. For me personally, I feel this project is the greatest engineering effort in human history bringing together the work of Newton, Kepler, the mathematics of the celestial navigation, gravitational assist techniques[1], etc. necessary to keep a little probe on its route accurately over 50 years in space. [0] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1191341035/nasa-voyager-2-spacecraft-contact https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1191341035/nasa-voyager-2-spa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Minovitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Minovitch
- vee-kay 2mo ago[dead]
- TacticalCoder 2mo ago> For me personally, I feel this project is the greatest engineering effort in human history bringing together the work of Newton, Kepler, the mathematics of the celestial navigation, gravitational assist techniques[1], etc. necessary to keep a little probe on its route accurately over 50 years in space. All that and... Lisp.
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoSource: https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/voyager/2026/08/04/nasa-engineers-help-prolong-voyager-2s-science-mission/ https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/voyager/2026/08/04/nasa-engin...
- cynicalsecurity 2mo agoEven Voyager can’t retire in today's economy.
- mawadev 2mo agoI think its the tech stack, the stuff runs on assembly, bit of fortran and likely C. You simply cannot match that level of reliability these days, because people started to forget how to do that... Look at cars and everything else...
- PunchyHamster 2mo agoBut cars do have that level of reliability, in ECU (sans hardware I guess, still flash memory). It's just everything else around is ass
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoUsage of higher-level languages is in the labs and on the ground-station side of these missions. No FORTRAN interpreter runs on a space probe. In the 1970s, there was a distinction between "machine language" and assembly language. Assembly (or assembler) language is the symbolic source code that a programmer would use. Machine language is the binary dump of the actual text segments that the CPU directly interprets to run.
- iberator 2mo agoVoyager runs on assembly. only 10 instructions. Very simple and real RISC processor
- xvilka 2mo agoI wish more robotic missions like that were sent. Not necessarily the most expensive ones, just one that can use only gravity assists and plutonium power generators. They could be relatively small ones. Maybe even trying to ride some of the small rocks/asteroids, now that we have a better catalogues of such.
- dmurray 2mo agoIf by "ride" you mean hitch a lift to somewhere you couldn't get to otherwise, space doesn't work like that. If you want to land on an asteroid/rock, either you match speed with it, in which case you already had enough speed to go wherever it's going, or you intercept it at a different speed, in which case you get smashed to dust if your speed was any more than a few m/s different. Maybe you didn't mean this, but it's a common enough misconception. People even on HN were suggesting a spacecraft could hitch a ride on ʻOumuamua to get a quick way to a different solar system.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- nephihaha 2mo agoI've always thought asteroids could be used as automated "weather stations" with probes not just as mission targets in themselves. These could be updated or maintained occasionally.
- HelloUsername 2mo agoMove comments to source? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189895
- sgt 2mo agoWhat is this shitshow of a website called space.com ? There's ads, popups everywhere! Edit: For those who think I'm too harsh: https://imgur.com/a/YkmtOZ9 https://imgur.com/a/YkmtOZ9
- doublerabbit 2mo agoGreat, but you've put it on an image host that cannot be accessed by the me, in the UK.
- sgt 2mo agoEven worse, imgur doesn't even have a cookie banner for me. To be in such violation of the GDPR is going to give me nightmares! /s
- ionwake 2mo agohow do we reconcile this with flat earth theory? Just asking for a friend
- ck2 2mo agothirty-eight hour ping time, dang 3 AU per year ~ 300 million miles
- theturtle 2mo ago[dead]
- vivzkestrel 2mo ago- stupid question: how much energy, power and what kind of systems would you need to run something for 80000 years to go all the way to proxima centauri - how many redudancies would you need, how would it affect the payload? - what kind of materials?
- tsoukase 2mo agoRelevant for Voyager I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQTfUB9AAnM&t=0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQTfUB9AAnM&t=0
- Tuna-Fish 2mo agoPower is possible, Thorium-230 has been pointed out as the ideal fuel for such a scenario. Very nice, long and energetic decay chain, 75ka half-life, many of the daughter products are relatively long-lived which helps to flatten out the power curve. I don't think anyone has any clue how to build electronics that survive even a tenth of that time, though. Also a bit of a pet peeve, if it takes you 80k years, you are not going to Proxima. The stars themselves are moving rather fast, and which is closest changes over time. The Alpha Centauri main binary becomes the closest in ~26ka with a close pass at ~3ly, Ross 248 also comes within 3ly in ~37ka. Lastly, Gliese 445 does a ~3.5ly flyby at ~45ka. After that, all the closest stars are receding, and Proxima is 5ly away. Then eventually a million years later Gliese 710 does a 0.16ly flyby, straight through our oort cloud.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]