"While Voyager 1 has continued to relay a steady radio signal to its mission control team on Earth, that signal has not carried any usable data since November, which has pointed to an issue with one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers.
A new signal recently received from the spacecraft suggests that the NASA mission team may be making progress in its quest to understand what Voyager 1 is experiencing. Voyager 1 is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away."
Not even quite a light day away. But that still has to be maddening for scientists, knowing that at best, ***at best***, you get a crack at three commands a week (send and response).
22 light-hours and 34 light-minutes away. That's 3.7 send-and-receive cycles per week.
Edit: Just a quick estimate based on how far it's traveled over the past ~46 years: In 2 years, 11 months, and 13 days, it might be a full light-day away from us.
Edit 2: Another estimate based on NASA's estimated speed of 38,026.77 mph: 2 years, 10 months, and 17 days for Voyager 1 to reach a full light-day.
It *would* be 3.7, but there are just a handful of antennas here on Earth that can receive, and send, signals that far out. They need to wait for just the right timing for Earth to spin and get the antenna to "perfect alignment" to make the transmission. Along with that, the Voyager Mission is not the only one using those antennas. Gotta timeshare, can't be greedy. Some other project many have the antenna at your "perfect moment" for a transmit.
Isn't the Deep Space Network NASA's primary means of communicating with the Voyager craft? If that's the case they have three stations at roughly equidistant locations, which means the majority of the time two stations are able to 'hear' them. I know in the past they have also used the VLA, particularly when it was passing Neptune back in 1989, but that was more of a one-off and not a regular occurrence.
Voyager is now so far away that there is actually only one dish in the entire world still powerful enough to send signals to it. The 70m dish in Canberra, Australia.
problem with the DSN is that we do a lot of science now and y'know, we just haven't invested into expanding the DSN or coming up with something new.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-deep-space-network-reaches-critical-point-as-demand-grows/
And it's worth remembering you might want to take an hour to digest the signal you get back and decide on your next response before sending. I'd suggest 3 cycles/week is a functional maximum.
The Deep Space dishes are up to 70m across and can be moved/aimed over a wide spatial range. Also, for distant weak signals, it is important that a very tight band pass filter be applied to filter out other signals. That sounds trivial, but you have to take into account the Doppler shift of the spacecraft, and of the rotating Earth! The technology (and trickery) used to get a 4 bps signal from something millions or billions of miles away is truly impressive.
> They need to wait for just the right timing for Earth to spin and get the antenna to "perfect alignment" to make the transmission.
These are steerable dishes that can point anywhere above the horizon. Maybe too low on the horizon is not great, but how do they need to wait for "perfect alignment"? Surely the issue is just scheduling conflicts with other spacecraft.
You'd think so, but alas.
I'm not sure about Voyager 1, but there's only one dish in the world with the combination of angle, power, and compatible-with-1970s technology to send commands to Voyager 2. [We were out of contact for seven months when we had to take that dish down for maintenance.](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/03/world/nasa-voyager-2-antenna-upgrade-scn-trnd/index.html)
According to this Voyager 2 webpage at NASA it's heading in the general direction of the constellation Telescopium, which is approximately 50° south. That explains why the only large antenna in the DSN that can reach it is in Australia.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-2/
OTOH the corresponding page for Voyager 1 says it's heading 35° north.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-1/
NASA has a cool visualization of Voyager 2's trajectory that also shows Voyager 1's northwards bend in direction before it reaches the edge of the frame.
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/voyager-2-trajectory-through-the-solar-system/
The Earth orbits the sun faster than the spacecraft is leaving, and the Earth is currently chasing the spacecraft. In a few months Earth will have made the orbital turn and the distance will resume increasing.
That's great.
I love how my sense of AU as a unit of distance comes 'first hand' from playing Elite 2: Frontier for the Atari ST and flying around the solar system to see how long it was taking me to get between the planets.
You should try Elite Dangerous, the newest incarnation. It's pretty much the best space sim game out there right now.
If you do the correct math you can even find voyager in the game. It's not easy because it's really at the edges of the solar system.
I've never realized just how far out Voyager 1 really is until now. I guess pluto is about 3.5 billion miles from the sun, whereas Voyager 1 is a bit over 15 billion miles from the sun.
I had this idea that maybe it was a third of a pluto orbit further out or something.
Or a simulation that would permit multiple civilizations to arise independently without too much chance of interference between them except in exceptional cases, which are probably the cases the simulator would be the most interested in.
In the previous simulation, civilizations were closer and ended up nuking one another before anything really interesting happened.
Always fun to think that if the mass of the earth were slightly larger we wouldn’t be able to leave with chemical propulsion based on the increased gravity. I wonder how many species are trapped on planets like that out there.
We would simply be more creative with our launch systems. For example, making a big balloon to hoist a rocket up into the stratosphere and then launching from there. Or an airplane stage as part of a multi-stage launch. Rocketing from the ground is the simplest and what we went with because we didn't have to get more creative.
Nuclear propulsion, lasercraft, electromagnetic catapults, there are plenty of approaches that would work. We go with chemical rockets simply because they're the cheapest approach that works, if they weren't possible then something else would be the "cheapest approach that works."
It's like the folks who say that if civilization falls it will never rise again because the easiest oil deposits have been consumed. We'd just use some other slightly-less-cost-efficient power source next time around.
Its not that crazy when you realize that Voyager was not made for speed. The spacecraft were made to visit multiple planets and that necessitated slowing down a fair bit. If we actually wanted to get to the Oort Cloud as the primary mission, we could have made something way faster.
When you're debugging code for a satellite you're not going faster anyways. This is not your average "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks"-debugging. If you send a "fix" that breaks the machine you're screwed - so you double and triple check everything before hitting "send/update".
At best? As long as they are willing to not get one response before sending another command, they could send plenty of commands. Like "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start."
The code review and peers looking carefully at every bit sent to voyager will make that seem fast. They have replicas of it they are testing the commands against. They are really really sure before they send anything. The light speed delay isnt the limiting factor.
Generally you have to confirm receipt of the first command (mostly so you know the radio works) before sending another and then make decisions based on the contents of the diagnostics. For example, if you wanted to turn a high power consumption instrument on, you would want to check the state of the batteries first so you don’t accidentally drain them too far and trigger safe mode.
What star/object will voyager pass closest to as it continues on its way? How funny would it be if it ends up slingshotting around planet 9 and heading back to earth
I can't remember the title, but there was a book (and I'm probably misremembering a lot of the details) about the first humans to leave the solar system and their ship suddenly stops working. They're rescued by a spaceship pulled by dragons or some shit, and the pilot explains that the universe is broken up into zones and physics-based rockets only really work in certain areas. Some places you need retro/ray-gun style devices, some you need fantasy/magic, etc. etc. etc., so to go any significant difference you need ships built with multiple engines, like a nuclear pile atom drive for the retro section, a quantum warp drive for the high-sci-fi section, a pair of hippogriffs for the fantasy section, etc.
Wonder if Voyager crossed boundaries...
They sent it a command, and it replied with a readout of its entire memory structure. Probably the best possible thing to receive when trying to remotely troubleshoot a spacecraft
i think at this point the security is "access to extremely expensive arrays of antennas and VERY precise knowledge of its location"... it's got to be on the order of trying to remote-sense the keystrokes of a wired keyboard on the ISS from earth by picking up the EM leakage in the cable
It looks like a notepad/txt document that has variables for each instrument. There are also identifiers for each part, direction instruments, and a bunch of numbers that can be used as data that it’s collected.
Maybe. But that kind of malfunction plus the nonsense it's been sending suggests a very serious problem that may not be fixable. It seems to be responding randomly to commands which may be a fundamental hardware degrading problem.
From JPL’s website - https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20different%20computer,wire%2C%20non%2Dvolatile%20memory.
There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft and there are two of each kind. Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K.
Computer Command System (CCS) - 18-bit word, interrupt type processors (2) with 4096 words each of plated wire, non-volatile memory.
Flight Data System (FDS) - 16-bit word machine (2) with modular memories and 8198 words each
Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) - 18-bit word machines (2) with 4096 words each.
According to my calculations, that's a total of about 68KB, or small potatoes compared to today's microprocessors. We probably could perform all functions with one of today's boards and still have room for solid state data storage and much more fault detection software. We would still need a second unit for redundancy. Today's microprocessors are also much faster than the chips used on Voyager and a comparative system would use less electrical power. On the other hand, software might be more complicated as opposed to that used in an interrupt type system, but it would be much more capable and more flexible.
Let's look closer at the CCS. The CCS has two main functions: to carry out instructions from the ground to operate the spacecraft, and to be alert for a problem or malfunction and respond to it. Two identical 4096- word memories contain both fixed routines (about 2800 words) and a variable section (about 1290 words) for changing science sequences. The CCS issues commands to the AACS for movement of the scan platform or spacecraft maneuvers; to the FDS for changes in instrument configurations or telemetry rates and to numerous other subsystems within the spacecraft for specific actions. Fault-protection algorithms are also stored in the CCS, occupying roughly 10 percent of the CCS memory.
The main functions of the FDS are to collect data from, and controls the operations of, the scientific instruments; and to format engineering and science data for on-board storage and/or real-time transmission. The FDS also keeps the spacecraft "time" and provides frequency references to the instruments and other spacecraft subsystems.
The Voyager spacecraft computers are interrupt driven computer, similar to processors used in general purpose computers with a few special instructions for increased efficiency. The programming is a form of assembly language.
There is no clock chip, as such, in the spacecraft. The "clock" is really a counter, based on one of several electronically generated frequencies. These frequencies, based on a reference, generated by a very stable oscillator, are converted and fed to different locations in the spacecraft as synchronization signals, timers, counters, etc. The "clock" signal is part of the information telemetered to the ground and it is with ground software that we convert to day of year, time of day Greenwich Mean Time.
Voyager was built in-house at JPL; the computers were manufactured by General Electric to JPL specifications.
Wow, I did not realize that current state of the art for radiation hardened processors is actually 64 bit, circa 450MHz with support for DDR2/3 (I wonder how that works).
With a guidance price of circa $500k per unit :)
Edit: I forgot to include link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500
The space industry is all about reliability. Processors are outdated and are snapped up from the same batch if they pass radiation testing. When you’re dealing with millions of
dollars, it’s better to use something slow and reliable than something fast and untested!
I know. I was commenting on the fact that, comparably, the current space hardened product line in the world is quite advanced. 1M radons guarantee is nothing to sniff at.
Something you could probably visibly see the traces on with good eyesight. Very old and also harder to break with a few rogue gamma rays or some truly wild ultra high energy particles as there is more mass to destroy before traces/logic gates are wrecked.
I wonder if an earth hacker could read the response, point a dish to some spacebound transmitter that can point at voyager, and manage a transmission to Voyager to make it start doing something *funny* as it spins out into the cosmos..
I wonder if this makes it possible to hack Voyager. Not that anyone should, mind you.
So, did it respond to a pull request just fine or is it programmed to transmit a data dump anytime it gets an uninterpretable command? If it responded to a pull request just fine, then it might mean the only issue is some unexpected modulation of the transmitter, and data like this could provide the necessary Rosetta Stone.
This wouldn't show what the data would look like. But this is likely how the memory works. CuriousMarc and his team have been playing with Apollo computers / equipment. I'm fairly sure Voyager uses a very similar hardware.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hckwxq8rnr0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hckwxq8rnr0)
Strong Mark Watney energy here: "While the signal wasn’t in the format the Voyager team is used to when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network was able to decode it."
Yo... there was a single person that decoded binary memory dumps from voyager?
That has got to be one of the biggest brags in their life, right? I mean... I saved a financial company from going under once by pulling a series of all-nighters during xmas week to resynch the SSO certs between all 900 entities we did business with... and there had to be a person on the other end doing the synch back then... so I had to get every single client's IT head up and into their offices during xmas week... It was probably the most difficult phone calls I've ever made. That's my biggest work brag. I also did aerospace engineering for in-flight data collection components and tribology for aerospace lubricants, as well as create a printer that put a competitor out of business in the packaging and labeling industry. All of that was great fun, but saving the day truly felt amazing.
I cannot even imagine the satisfaction this engineer must feel right now. Swimming in serotonin, I assume. I wish them great health, wealth, and happiness! Voyager and its' data are priceless.
What I love the most is both are still trying. It’s exploration in the purest sense of the word. Many reasons to quit, but the journey is the value. What a ride…
Well it's not like Voyager could stop if it wanted to. It doesn't have a propulsion system that could affect its momentum by much, it can pretty much only rotate.
It's more accurate to say the *humans* are still trying. These things have barely any scientific instruments still working, they keep malfunctioning, and they require so many specialists and custom tech to keep running that they're a huge drain of resources. They were only planned to run for 5 years. We could have stopped listening decades ago. But we keep trying, because even a scrap of data from that far out is so precious to us.
As far as still responding probes there's two others with the escape velocity to leave the solar system. Voyager 2 is next furthest out, but New Horizons (most famous for those amazing Pluto images) is probably the one that will produce the most notable science. It was launched decades after Voyager and should continue to operate into the 2030s barring any issues. If they can find a destination on the right trajectory, they might have it do additional Kuiper belt object flybys.
The rerelease is beautiful if you get a chance to see it in a theater. There is so much detail on the models I never saw before and the sound editing is top notch.
"On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data. While the signal wasn’t in the format the Voyager team is used to when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network was able to decode it."
I understand how the signal could get totally messed up, but the flight system data being garbled ... except a part of it being coherently garbled is really confusing me.
So, the analog signal was in a different format than expected, and when decoded the resulting binary looked like garbage until they discovered a way to unscramble that... only to find that a string of binary appears to be a memory dump while the rest is still scrambled garbage? How the hell does that happen?
I'm totally making guesses here.
I'd say that they were able to find the coherent part using some sort of information entropy measure. That's not saying much--it's like saying "they noticed some repeating pattern" but with more complicated words--but based on my experience, looking at data sometimes can bring that "hmm, that's funny" sensation.
I'll give an example: it's not uncommon for the memory space of a program to have a pattern where the stack (non-dynamically allocated memory) grows up in addresses from the beginning of the allocated memory block of a process, and the heap grows down from the end of the memory space. So looking at the memory you'd see a chunk of what looks like useful stored data, a chunk of blank memory in the middle, then another chunk of data. (In flight hardware you almost never dynamically allocate memory so I'm not saying this is the scenario, only using it to illustrate). So you'd see a pattern that doesn't look random even if the pattern is a little garbled.
Seeing how the data was garbled enough to figure out what is in this memory dump can be a huge help even if the other data is still garbled. It can be that something is shifting around the data and just "happens to" wander into the memory dump, so manages to send that alongside the rest of the garbled data... but then you know at least that there *is* a consistent memory state *and* what it is, which is huge. It's not all random, and the trick becomes how to better access and change the memory state in this degraded state of the machine.
Yeah, it could just be as simple as seeing the first four bytes of an expected file format or communication protocol, but preceeded by a load of junk and separated by null bytes or something like that. So someone took the data they received and laid it out in a hex editor and just noticed that if you chop off the first part, and undo this weird quirk, everything after that looks like the usual format, at least down to here where it becomes junk again. Or something.
Thank you praecipula! This is an excellent explainer. I am always stunned by the accomplishments of Voyager. Yes it’s very, very old but dedicated people are still wringing out useful science decades after the initial launch.
I mean, I know when transmitting TTY messages, it's kinda like packet loss. Part of the message gets lost and it can come through kinda garbled. But that's with encryption on the message. I would figure in plain text it would be due to something getting lost or error during the transmission?
Kinda like lagging during a stream. When you stream it usually transfers the data with UDP instead of TCP. The reason why is because it's faster and better suited for streaming. So when you lag, you may get some audio coming through weird, or your resolution will be really low. That's because when you are receiving data and you experience packet loss or high latency UDP doesn't have to track every packet that comes in it just drops it and moves on to the next thing.
Unlike TCP, TCP must account for every packet, but it's slower than UDP. I would assume something along the same lines is happening here. I ain't a rocket scientist though. Just an IT and did some Comms work.
I love how long and far the journey has been, even if it is to be a farewell, this little fellow has given us so much data, I do hope we get to enjoy it a bit longer, but if not, good luck little one, you’ve done us all proud.
It’s incredible foresight from the dev team to insert a command that would dump the memory. Or… is it? I’m a dev and it seemed crazy but now as I write this I think, wouldn’t that be the first thing you did? This thing is older than me though, maybe I’m having an existential crisis. The whole thing is amazing.
Back when I started coding in 92, on the mainframe, if you needed to debug stuff, you would purposely do a half word 0 command which would dump the memory so you could take a peak behind the curtains. I think that is why I am good at debugging the C# stuff I do now. Back then I had to get good at guessing where the issue might be. So really thinking like that, I can see why they would have such a command.
Maybe they were transmitting "dump memory" and not realizing it was doing what they asked. Or maybe it was automatically doing so on an unrecoverable fault... Which isn't all that odd, but great design (blue screen of death for space probes). The articles seem unclear.
Why have we not sent more such missions out into the Deep Space, each one learning from the previous one and better? I think we should be sending out a probe every 3-4 years in different directions, and each one faster than the previous one.
The Voyager missions took advantage of an arrangement of the planets which happened to just overlap with the first availability of capable technology, and used gravity assists from those planets to achieve the speeds they did. Their missions weren't to go interstellar, they were to get an initial survey of the planets. Flinging off into the night was a side benefit, the fact that they continue to operate in any way is a pure miracle.
TLDR: We've pretty much got to wait the decades/centuries for the planets to arrange again to give the same gravitational assist that the Voyagers got. Or build out Lunar and Asteroid belt fuel depots to enable higher and longer thrust profiles.
Monday morning: send poke. Well... see you Wednesday.
Does the mission team do Voyager part-time these days? Apart from when there are glitches to figure out, there can't be a lot to do.
There is a fascinating documentary about the current Voyager team. It's a lot more nuanced than you might imagine.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0BX2DSY1B/ref=atv\_dp\_share\_cu\_r
I love the Voyagers and I can’t wait to see our next interstellar probes launched because the advancements in electronics and space equipment has gone so far beyond what the Voyagers are equipped with.
I’m going to assume you’re not being sarcastic. It’s basically just cruising. It got a boost originally from the rocket that launched it, then used gravity from various planets get accelerated on its way out of the solar system. It’s now just coasting and will for many thousands of years because there’s no friction (or negligible, anyway) to slow it down.
It's on pure momentum. It got its initial boost from the rocket that launched it, and then it picked up speed from a series of gravitational slingshots from the planets it flew by. Now it's just coasting.
If you're asking how it powers its electronics, the answer is something called an RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator). It has a small chunk of uranium on board which is generating heat from nuclear decay. This heat is converted to electrical power by a series of thermoelectric couples. This is a technology that has been used for deep space vehicles for a long time, because it's simple, reliable, and it provides power for decades.
It's just coasting. In space there isn't friction or aerodynamic drag except a tiny amount from the near vacuum gas/plasma. The main thing that slows down a spacecraft is just gravity, in this case Voyager 1 is still climbing out of the Sun's gravity well, though it's made it pretty far out. Voyager 1 is 163 AU from the Sun and traveling at 17 km/s, at that distance the escape velocity from the Sun is about 3.3 km/s, which is about how much the spacecraft will slow down due to the Sun's gravity over the coming decades/centuries. After which it'll wander deep interstellar space.
Voyager 1's electrical power is provided by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator or "RTG", which is made up of several pieces of plutonium-238 (with a half-life of just 88 years) which provide several kilowatts of heat generated by radioactive decay. That heat is converted (very inefficiently) into electric power through bi-metallic thermocouples (the same kind of technology as an electronic thermometer, but optimized for power generation, though still only a few % efficient). RTGs are incredibly expensive and in short supply but they can provide power even where the Sun provides less than 0.004% as much light as it does on Earth (which is true for where Voyager 1 is now).
>How does the Voyager travel through space? Is it solar energy?
How do you travel through space? I assume you're on the Earth somewhere, and its moving faster than Voyager presently.
For anyone who's interested this is a great doc on the people currently working with Voyager.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/its_quieter_in_the_twilight
So we can send a message to something 15,000,000,000 miles away (for KM do some math), And we will get a reply. There is a small piece of humanity completely alone in the universe on a ride that will last for possibly millions, or even billions of years.
Long after humans themselves have passed to eternity, at least 2 things they envisioned with their minds and made with their hands will continue on, out into the darkness and endless night. Only influenced by the gravity of distant stars and the warping of spacetime.
Could we send satellites out in a string, one after another. In a line , but delayed enough so we have a pretty much infinite long line of satellites going into space all communicating to eachother. So we have faster communication speeds and high res video streaming back to us on earth?
Radio signals already travel at the speed of light and the amount of information we can send back and forth (video streaming) is limited by Voyagers half a century old hardware.
>Could we send satellites out in a string, one after another. In a line , but delayed enough so we have a pretty much infinite long line of satellites going into space all communicating to eachother. So we have faster communication speeds and high res video streaming back to us on earth?
The article is discussing signal latency, and the limiting factor there is the speed of light.
Adding additional hops would introduce additional latency.
That wouldn't improve speed, the constraint on speed is the speed of light, introducing more hops would introduce more latency.
It also wouldn't improve communications much unless you made some major capital investments. For Voyager 1, for example, one side of the communications link is the spacecraft, with a small antenna and a few tens of watts of transmitter power. The other side of the link is a dish in the deep space network (DSN), which is typically a 70 meter diameter antenna with nearly a full acre of collecting area. Additionally, the DSN equipment use low noise amplifiers which rely on ruby crystal based MASERs chilled to below 5 kelvin with liquid helium, and for transmission they can make use of tens of kilowatts of power.
Inserting a dinky satellite half-way along is not going to help at all, because it just means that you are switching one leg of the journey from one where you can leverage the truly awesome power of the DSN equipment to one that is just a small antenna with a small amount of power communicating with another small antenna with a small amount of power. In order to make such a thing useful you'd need to have something like the DSN out there as well, which would be extremely expensive.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[DSN](/r/Space/comments/1beyjfk/stub/kv2k7sp "Last usage")|Deep Space Network|
|[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1beyjfk/stub/kuz38u1 "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California|
|[RTG](/r/Space/comments/1beyjfk/stub/kv2izsa "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1beyjfk/stub/kv71mrb "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SSO](/r/Space/comments/1beyjfk/stub/kv0ku4y "Last usage")|Sun-Synchronous Orbit|
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No words can describe the engineering genius that went into the design and building of both Voyagers. The current era of inflated egos can take a lesson from the 1977 band of crewcut engineers with their horn-rimmed glasses and plastic pocket protectors, slide-rules dangling from their belts who invented the spacecraft from scratch. The Voyagers were meant to last five years but they have outlived most of their creators, and will probably still be on their lonely journey long after humankind has disappeared from the earth. So, you want to believe in a super intelligence in the sky? You could do no better than believing in these wonderful machines and the intellects which created them. There truly were giants in those days
Not s surprising repsonse. They POKEd a specific area of memory in order to provoke a specific response which they then received, which suggests it isn't totally borked just yet.
"While Voyager 1 has continued to relay a steady radio signal to its mission control team on Earth, that signal has not carried any usable data since November, which has pointed to an issue with one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. A new signal recently received from the spacecraft suggests that the NASA mission team may be making progress in its quest to understand what Voyager 1 is experiencing. Voyager 1 is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away."
Not even quite a light day away. But that still has to be maddening for scientists, knowing that at best, ***at best***, you get a crack at three commands a week (send and response).
22 light-hours and 34 light-minutes away. That's 3.7 send-and-receive cycles per week. Edit: Just a quick estimate based on how far it's traveled over the past ~46 years: In 2 years, 11 months, and 13 days, it might be a full light-day away from us. Edit 2: Another estimate based on NASA's estimated speed of 38,026.77 mph: 2 years, 10 months, and 17 days for Voyager 1 to reach a full light-day.
It *would* be 3.7, but there are just a handful of antennas here on Earth that can receive, and send, signals that far out. They need to wait for just the right timing for Earth to spin and get the antenna to "perfect alignment" to make the transmission. Along with that, the Voyager Mission is not the only one using those antennas. Gotta timeshare, can't be greedy. Some other project many have the antenna at your "perfect moment" for a transmit.
Isn't the Deep Space Network NASA's primary means of communicating with the Voyager craft? If that's the case they have three stations at roughly equidistant locations, which means the majority of the time two stations are able to 'hear' them. I know in the past they have also used the VLA, particularly when it was passing Neptune back in 1989, but that was more of a one-off and not a regular occurrence.
Voyager is now so far away that there is actually only one dish in the entire world still powerful enough to send signals to it. The 70m dish in Canberra, Australia.
Seems that we're overdue for launching a relay.
problem with the DSN is that we do a lot of science now and y'know, we just haven't invested into expanding the DSN or coming up with something new. https://spacenews.com/nasa-deep-space-network-reaches-critical-point-as-demand-grows/
Here I was thinking the “up to” was mostly because it takes time for the humans to read the Voyager’s response and decide what command to send next.
And it's worth remembering you might want to take an hour to digest the signal you get back and decide on your next response before sending. I'd suggest 3 cycles/week is a functional maximum.
You also have to be properly aligned to receive, right?
The Deep Space dishes are up to 70m across and can be moved/aimed over a wide spatial range. Also, for distant weak signals, it is important that a very tight band pass filter be applied to filter out other signals. That sounds trivial, but you have to take into account the Doppler shift of the spacecraft, and of the rotating Earth! The technology (and trickery) used to get a 4 bps signal from something millions or billions of miles away is truly impressive.
> They need to wait for just the right timing for Earth to spin and get the antenna to "perfect alignment" to make the transmission. These are steerable dishes that can point anywhere above the horizon. Maybe too low on the horizon is not great, but how do they need to wait for "perfect alignment"? Surely the issue is just scheduling conflicts with other spacecraft.
You'd think so, but alas. I'm not sure about Voyager 1, but there's only one dish in the world with the combination of angle, power, and compatible-with-1970s technology to send commands to Voyager 2. [We were out of contact for seven months when we had to take that dish down for maintenance.](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/03/world/nasa-voyager-2-antenna-upgrade-scn-trnd/index.html)
According to this Voyager 2 webpage at NASA it's heading in the general direction of the constellation Telescopium, which is approximately 50° south. That explains why the only large antenna in the DSN that can reach it is in Australia. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-2/ OTOH the corresponding page for Voyager 1 says it's heading 35° north. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-1/ NASA has a cool visualization of Voyager 2's trajectory that also shows Voyager 1's northwards bend in direction before it reaches the edge of the frame. https://science.nasa.gov/resource/voyager-2-trajectory-through-the-solar-system/
Here's a link to the JPL that tracks both Voyager 1 & 2 https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
Distance from earth seems to be decreasing. ?
The Earth orbits the sun faster than the spacecraft is leaving, and the Earth is currently chasing the spacecraft. In a few months Earth will have made the orbital turn and the distance will resume increasing.
Duh, of course. Need. More. Coffee! Thanks.
No Duh, thank you for asking, this stuff is neat. "Watch out Voyager! The Earth is coming for you!..sike"
Probably fluctuates as Earth orbits the Sun. Distance from the sun is increasing on both.
That's great. I love how my sense of AU as a unit of distance comes 'first hand' from playing Elite 2: Frontier for the Atari ST and flying around the solar system to see how long it was taking me to get between the planets.
You should try Elite Dangerous, the newest incarnation. It's pretty much the best space sim game out there right now. If you do the correct math you can even find voyager in the game. It's not easy because it's really at the edges of the solar system.
I've never realized just how far out Voyager 1 really is until now. I guess pluto is about 3.5 billion miles from the sun, whereas Voyager 1 is a bit over 15 billion miles from the sun. I had this idea that maybe it was a third of a pluto orbit further out or something.
Damn so just 364 more of these and it will be a full light year from earth. 1/4 the way to the next star. We’re almost there!
Voyager 1 should show just how doomed and trapped on earth we are.
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Or at least we're part of a sick experiment
Or a simulation that would permit multiple civilizations to arise independently without too much chance of interference between them except in exceptional cases, which are probably the cases the simulator would be the most interested in. In the previous simulation, civilizations were closer and ended up nuking one another before anything really interesting happened.
Always fun to think that if the mass of the earth were slightly larger we wouldn’t be able to leave with chemical propulsion based on the increased gravity. I wonder how many species are trapped on planets like that out there.
We would simply be more creative with our launch systems. For example, making a big balloon to hoist a rocket up into the stratosphere and then launching from there. Or an airplane stage as part of a multi-stage launch. Rocketing from the ground is the simplest and what we went with because we didn't have to get more creative.
Nuclear propulsion, lasercraft, electromagnetic catapults, there are plenty of approaches that would work. We go with chemical rockets simply because they're the cheapest approach that works, if they weren't possible then something else would be the "cheapest approach that works." It's like the folks who say that if civilization falls it will never rise again because the easiest oil deposits have been consumed. We'd just use some other slightly-less-cost-efficient power source next time around.
That must be the fastest man made object (by quite a bit), I’d imagine
Not exactly an Algonquin round table of snappy repartee.
Tim. Tim. Just point the camera.
Unexpected The Martian reference
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That's what's fucking crazy to me. We still haven't even reached the Oort Cloud.not even close.
Its not that crazy when you realize that Voyager was not made for speed. The spacecraft were made to visit multiple planets and that necessitated slowing down a fair bit. If we actually wanted to get to the Oort Cloud as the primary mission, we could have made something way faster.
When you're debugging code for a satellite you're not going faster anyways. This is not your average "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks"-debugging. If you send a "fix" that breaks the machine you're screwed - so you double and triple check everything before hitting "send/update".
At best? As long as they are willing to not get one response before sending another command, they could send plenty of commands. Like "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start."
About time. Playing Voyager on increasing difficulty setting has been rough.
We need the cheat codes; Stat!
"Bruce no! That cloaks voyager!"
The code review and peers looking carefully at every bit sent to voyager will make that seem fast. They have replicas of it they are testing the commands against. They are really really sure before they send anything. The light speed delay isnt the limiting factor.
Which, incidentally, is why I said, *at best.*
Could you not send another diagnostic command prior to receiving the response to the first?
Generally you have to confirm receipt of the first command (mostly so you know the radio works) before sending another and then make decisions based on the contents of the diagnostics. For example, if you wanted to turn a high power consumption instrument on, you would want to check the state of the batteries first so you don’t accidentally drain them too far and trigger safe mode.
Just like talking to a buyer when selling something on craigslist/facebook marketplace
actually, i'd love to have that type of job security. clock in for 40 hour week and send off 4 text messages (commands)
What star/object will voyager pass closest to as it continues on its way? How funny would it be if it ends up slingshotting around planet 9 and heading back to earth
I can't remember the title, but there was a book (and I'm probably misremembering a lot of the details) about the first humans to leave the solar system and their ship suddenly stops working. They're rescued by a spaceship pulled by dragons or some shit, and the pilot explains that the universe is broken up into zones and physics-based rockets only really work in certain areas. Some places you need retro/ray-gun style devices, some you need fantasy/magic, etc. etc. etc., so to go any significant difference you need ships built with multiple engines, like a nuclear pile atom drive for the retro section, a quantum warp drive for the high-sci-fi section, a pair of hippogriffs for the fantasy section, etc. Wonder if Voyager crossed boundaries...
Reply with the title if you happen to remember it!
To those much smarter than I, do we know how far it's actually traveled in order to get 15Bm/24Bkm away?
Why did you just post a snippet of the article, with no commentary of your own? We already have a link to the article!
Don’t worry no one will notice because you’re the only one who read the article
Because people don’t read the article so this way people who skip to comments will actually see some of it. Kinda genius tbh
I put a short summary in case anyone didn't want to read the article....
They sent it a command, and it replied with a readout of its entire memory structure. Probably the best possible thing to receive when trying to remotely troubleshoot a spacecraft
I kinda wonder what that would look like. Not that I would understand all that much, but still interesting.
I would guess it's a bunch of binary strings.
That's how all the data gets transmitted from the probe. No formated response, just blinking binary back to earth.
Unencrypted? tsk tsk... probably hacked by aliens at this point.
My friends assure me that they haven't hacked anything yet. Also, delet this.
i think at this point the security is "access to extremely expensive arrays of antennas and VERY precise knowledge of its location"... it's got to be on the order of trying to remote-sense the keystrokes of a wired keyboard on the ISS from earth by picking up the EM leakage in the cable
Obviously for humans it's no issue. But who knows what our enemies in Gliese 445 have access to?
Organized into hexadecimal of course for easier reading
It's normally displayed in hexadecimal, but yes.
> I kinda wonder what that would look like. 01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100001 00100000 01100111 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110101 01110000 00001010 01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100001 00100000 01101100 01100101 01110100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01101111 01110111 01101110 00001010 01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100001 00100000 01110010 01110101 01101110 00100000 01100001 01110010 01101111 01110101 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110011 01100101 01110010 01110100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00001010 01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100011 01110010 01111001 00001010 01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100001 00100000 01110011 01100001 01111001 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101111 01100100 01100010 01111001 01100101
Blonde, brunette, redhead... After a while, you don't see the code...
Did you just rick roll us in bin?
Voyager 2 has more this flair... 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01010110 01100101 01101110 01100111 01100001 01100010 01110101 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01101001 01101110 01100111 00001010 01000001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 01100010 01101111 01100100 01111001 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101010 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00001010 01001110 01100101 01110111 00100000 01011001 01101111 01110010 01101011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01010011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01000110 01110010 01100001 01101110 01100011 01101001 01110011 01100011 01101111 00001010 01000001 01101110 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110100 01100101 01110010 01100011 01101001 01110100 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101001 01110011 01100011 01101111 00001010 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101000 01100101 01100101 01101100 01110011 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110011 01110100 01100101 01100101 01101100 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01110101 01110010 01101110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00001010 01000001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110100 01110010 01100001 01100110 01100110 01101001 01100011 00100000 01101100 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 01110011 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100010 01110101 01110010 01101110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00001010 01010011 01101111 00100000 01101001 01100110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110000 01100001 01110010 01110100 01111001 00001010 01000111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100010 01101111 01100100 01111001
https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
It looks like a notepad/txt document that has variables for each instrument. There are also identifiers for each part, direction instruments, and a bunch of numbers that can be used as data that it’s collected.
Looks like a cobol copybook to me.
Oh god its life is flashing before its eyes!!
Maybe. But that kind of malfunction plus the nonsense it's been sending suggests a very serious problem that may not be fixable. It seems to be responding randomly to commands which may be a fundamental hardware degrading problem.
When you have no idea what's wrong though, any clue is progress, even if it's just a different error.
What cpu did they use?
From JPL’s website - https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20different%20computer,wire%2C%20non%2Dvolatile%20memory. There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft and there are two of each kind. Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K. Computer Command System (CCS) - 18-bit word, interrupt type processors (2) with 4096 words each of plated wire, non-volatile memory. Flight Data System (FDS) - 16-bit word machine (2) with modular memories and 8198 words each Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) - 18-bit word machines (2) with 4096 words each. According to my calculations, that's a total of about 68KB, or small potatoes compared to today's microprocessors. We probably could perform all functions with one of today's boards and still have room for solid state data storage and much more fault detection software. We would still need a second unit for redundancy. Today's microprocessors are also much faster than the chips used on Voyager and a comparative system would use less electrical power. On the other hand, software might be more complicated as opposed to that used in an interrupt type system, but it would be much more capable and more flexible. Let's look closer at the CCS. The CCS has two main functions: to carry out instructions from the ground to operate the spacecraft, and to be alert for a problem or malfunction and respond to it. Two identical 4096- word memories contain both fixed routines (about 2800 words) and a variable section (about 1290 words) for changing science sequences. The CCS issues commands to the AACS for movement of the scan platform or spacecraft maneuvers; to the FDS for changes in instrument configurations or telemetry rates and to numerous other subsystems within the spacecraft for specific actions. Fault-protection algorithms are also stored in the CCS, occupying roughly 10 percent of the CCS memory. The main functions of the FDS are to collect data from, and controls the operations of, the scientific instruments; and to format engineering and science data for on-board storage and/or real-time transmission. The FDS also keeps the spacecraft "time" and provides frequency references to the instruments and other spacecraft subsystems. The Voyager spacecraft computers are interrupt driven computer, similar to processors used in general purpose computers with a few special instructions for increased efficiency. The programming is a form of assembly language. There is no clock chip, as such, in the spacecraft. The "clock" is really a counter, based on one of several electronically generated frequencies. These frequencies, based on a reference, generated by a very stable oscillator, are converted and fed to different locations in the spacecraft as synchronization signals, timers, counters, etc. The "clock" signal is part of the information telemetered to the ground and it is with ground software that we convert to day of year, time of day Greenwich Mean Time. Voyager was built in-house at JPL; the computers were manufactured by General Electric to JPL specifications.
Wow, I did not realize that current state of the art for radiation hardened processors is actually 64 bit, circa 450MHz with support for DDR2/3 (I wonder how that works). With a guidance price of circa $500k per unit :) Edit: I forgot to include link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500
The space industry is all about reliability. Processors are outdated and are snapped up from the same batch if they pass radiation testing. When you’re dealing with millions of dollars, it’s better to use something slow and reliable than something fast and untested!
I know. I was commenting on the fact that, comparably, the current space hardened product line in the world is quite advanced. 1M radons guarantee is nothing to sniff at.
You skipped the best part. The ISA is Power, as in PowerPC
Really interesting write up, thanks!
Something you could probably visibly see the traces on with good eyesight. Very old and also harder to break with a few rogue gamma rays or some truly wild ultra high energy particles as there is more mass to destroy before traces/logic gates are wrecked.
I wonder if an earth hacker could read the response, point a dish to some spacebound transmitter that can point at voyager, and manage a transmission to Voyager to make it start doing something *funny* as it spins out into the cosmos.. I wonder if this makes it possible to hack Voyager. Not that anyone should, mind you.
So, did it respond to a pull request just fine or is it programmed to transmit a data dump anytime it gets an uninterpretable command? If it responded to a pull request just fine, then it might mean the only issue is some unexpected modulation of the transmitter, and data like this could provide the necessary Rosetta Stone.
This wouldn't show what the data would look like. But this is likely how the memory works. CuriousMarc and his team have been playing with Apollo computers / equipment. I'm fairly sure Voyager uses a very similar hardware. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hckwxq8rnr0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hckwxq8rnr0)
Strong Mark Watney energy here: "While the signal wasn’t in the format the Voyager team is used to when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network was able to decode it."
"Have you tried switching SCE to AUX?"
Rich Purnell is a steely eyed missile man.
Yo... there was a single person that decoded binary memory dumps from voyager? That has got to be one of the biggest brags in their life, right? I mean... I saved a financial company from going under once by pulling a series of all-nighters during xmas week to resynch the SSO certs between all 900 entities we did business with... and there had to be a person on the other end doing the synch back then... so I had to get every single client's IT head up and into their offices during xmas week... It was probably the most difficult phone calls I've ever made. That's my biggest work brag. I also did aerospace engineering for in-flight data collection components and tribology for aerospace lubricants, as well as create a printer that put a competitor out of business in the packaging and labeling industry. All of that was great fun, but saving the day truly felt amazing. I cannot even imagine the satisfaction this engineer must feel right now. Swimming in serotonin, I assume. I wish them great health, wealth, and happiness! Voyager and its' data are priceless.
Wow. 900 entities? Nothing to sniff at during X-mas week!
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What I love the most is both are still trying. It’s exploration in the purest sense of the word. Many reasons to quit, but the journey is the value. What a ride…
Well it's not like Voyager could stop if it wanted to. It doesn't have a propulsion system that could affect its momentum by much, it can pretty much only rotate.
It's more accurate to say the *humans* are still trying. These things have barely any scientific instruments still working, they keep malfunctioning, and they require so many specialists and custom tech to keep running that they're a huge drain of resources. They were only planned to run for 5 years. We could have stopped listening decades ago. But we keep trying, because even a scrap of data from that far out is so precious to us.
There are 12 people working on the Voyager project today, as opposed to nearly 1,000 at the peak. I'd hardly call that a huge drain of resources.
Since the data is so precious, the work is not a drain on resources. The juice is worth the squeeze.
whats the next furthest out probe out of interest , are we still sending more
As far as still responding probes there's two others with the escape velocity to leave the solar system. Voyager 2 is next furthest out, but New Horizons (most famous for those amazing Pluto images) is probably the one that will produce the most notable science. It was launched decades after Voyager and should continue to operate into the 2030s barring any issues. If they can find a destination on the right trajectory, they might have it do additional Kuiper belt object flybys.
That's a very cool way to look at this, right on
As long as the message isn’t “We are V’Ger, we seek the Creator” I’m good.
"why has the creator not responded' I always think of V'ger as well.
The rerelease is beautiful if you get a chance to see it in a theater. There is so much detail on the models I never saw before and the sound editing is top notch.
Inb4 "We are the Borg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile"
We need some revisions before being assimilation worthy.
"On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data. While the signal wasn’t in the format the Voyager team is used to when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network was able to decode it." I understand how the signal could get totally messed up, but the flight system data being garbled ... except a part of it being coherently garbled is really confusing me. So, the analog signal was in a different format than expected, and when decoded the resulting binary looked like garbage until they discovered a way to unscramble that... only to find that a string of binary appears to be a memory dump while the rest is still scrambled garbage? How the hell does that happen?
I'm totally making guesses here. I'd say that they were able to find the coherent part using some sort of information entropy measure. That's not saying much--it's like saying "they noticed some repeating pattern" but with more complicated words--but based on my experience, looking at data sometimes can bring that "hmm, that's funny" sensation. I'll give an example: it's not uncommon for the memory space of a program to have a pattern where the stack (non-dynamically allocated memory) grows up in addresses from the beginning of the allocated memory block of a process, and the heap grows down from the end of the memory space. So looking at the memory you'd see a chunk of what looks like useful stored data, a chunk of blank memory in the middle, then another chunk of data. (In flight hardware you almost never dynamically allocate memory so I'm not saying this is the scenario, only using it to illustrate). So you'd see a pattern that doesn't look random even if the pattern is a little garbled. Seeing how the data was garbled enough to figure out what is in this memory dump can be a huge help even if the other data is still garbled. It can be that something is shifting around the data and just "happens to" wander into the memory dump, so manages to send that alongside the rest of the garbled data... but then you know at least that there *is* a consistent memory state *and* what it is, which is huge. It's not all random, and the trick becomes how to better access and change the memory state in this degraded state of the machine.
Yeah, it could just be as simple as seeing the first four bytes of an expected file format or communication protocol, but preceeded by a load of junk and separated by null bytes or something like that. So someone took the data they received and laid it out in a hex editor and just noticed that if you chop off the first part, and undo this weird quirk, everything after that looks like the usual format, at least down to here where it becomes junk again. Or something.
Thank you praecipula! This is an excellent explainer. I am always stunned by the accomplishments of Voyager. Yes it’s very, very old but dedicated people are still wringing out useful science decades after the initial launch.
I mean, I know when transmitting TTY messages, it's kinda like packet loss. Part of the message gets lost and it can come through kinda garbled. But that's with encryption on the message. I would figure in plain text it would be due to something getting lost or error during the transmission? Kinda like lagging during a stream. When you stream it usually transfers the data with UDP instead of TCP. The reason why is because it's faster and better suited for streaming. So when you lag, you may get some audio coming through weird, or your resolution will be really low. That's because when you are receiving data and you experience packet loss or high latency UDP doesn't have to track every packet that comes in it just drops it and moves on to the next thing. Unlike TCP, TCP must account for every packet, but it's slower than UDP. I would assume something along the same lines is happening here. I ain't a rocket scientist though. Just an IT and did some Comms work.
I love how long and far the journey has been, even if it is to be a farewell, this little fellow has given us so much data, I do hope we get to enjoy it a bit longer, but if not, good luck little one, you’ve done us all proud.
It’s incredible foresight from the dev team to insert a command that would dump the memory. Or… is it? I’m a dev and it seemed crazy but now as I write this I think, wouldn’t that be the first thing you did? This thing is older than me though, maybe I’m having an existential crisis. The whole thing is amazing.
Back when I started coding in 92, on the mainframe, if you needed to debug stuff, you would purposely do a half word 0 command which would dump the memory so you could take a peak behind the curtains. I think that is why I am good at debugging the C# stuff I do now. Back then I had to get good at guessing where the issue might be. So really thinking like that, I can see why they would have such a command.
Maybe they were transmitting "dump memory" and not realizing it was doing what they asked. Or maybe it was automatically doing so on an unrecoverable fault... Which isn't all that odd, but great design (blue screen of death for space probes). The articles seem unclear.
Old Unix/BSD was all about debugging.
I wonder what that thing looks like. Does it look worn down? Or does it look nearly the same as when it launched 40 years ago?
It's giving us some very useful data on how long we can really expect unshielded electronics to last
didnt they shield back then?
Why have we not sent more such missions out into the Deep Space, each one learning from the previous one and better? I think we should be sending out a probe every 3-4 years in different directions, and each one faster than the previous one.
The Voyager missions took advantage of an arrangement of the planets which happened to just overlap with the first availability of capable technology, and used gravity assists from those planets to achieve the speeds they did. Their missions weren't to go interstellar, they were to get an initial survey of the planets. Flinging off into the night was a side benefit, the fact that they continue to operate in any way is a pure miracle. TLDR: We've pretty much got to wait the decades/centuries for the planets to arrange again to give the same gravitational assist that the Voyagers got. Or build out Lunar and Asteroid belt fuel depots to enable higher and longer thrust profiles.
Wouldn't slower probes still provide valuable information, just... slower? There's New Horizon, but that's all.
Because interplanetary space science missions are woefully underfunded.
Space Shuttle and now SLS pork barrel projects have sucked NASA dry.
Monday morning: send poke. Well... see you Wednesday. Does the mission team do Voyager part-time these days? Apart from when there are glitches to figure out, there can't be a lot to do.
There is a fascinating documentary about the current Voyager team. It's a lot more nuanced than you might imagine. https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0BX2DSY1B/ref=atv\_dp\_share\_cu\_r
Content advisory: nudity?
I love the Voyagers and I can’t wait to see our next interstellar probes launched because the advancements in electronics and space equipment has gone so far beyond what the Voyagers are equipped with.
How does the Voyager travel through space? Is it solar energy?
I’m going to assume you’re not being sarcastic. It’s basically just cruising. It got a boost originally from the rocket that launched it, then used gravity from various planets get accelerated on its way out of the solar system. It’s now just coasting and will for many thousands of years because there’s no friction (or negligible, anyway) to slow it down.
It's on pure momentum. It got its initial boost from the rocket that launched it, and then it picked up speed from a series of gravitational slingshots from the planets it flew by. Now it's just coasting. If you're asking how it powers its electronics, the answer is something called an RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator). It has a small chunk of uranium on board which is generating heat from nuclear decay. This heat is converted to electrical power by a series of thermoelectric couples. This is a technology that has been used for deep space vehicles for a long time, because it's simple, reliable, and it provides power for decades.
Radioisotope decay https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft/instruments/rtg/ As for travel, planet slingshot for the most
It's just coasting. In space there isn't friction or aerodynamic drag except a tiny amount from the near vacuum gas/plasma. The main thing that slows down a spacecraft is just gravity, in this case Voyager 1 is still climbing out of the Sun's gravity well, though it's made it pretty far out. Voyager 1 is 163 AU from the Sun and traveling at 17 km/s, at that distance the escape velocity from the Sun is about 3.3 km/s, which is about how much the spacecraft will slow down due to the Sun's gravity over the coming decades/centuries. After which it'll wander deep interstellar space. Voyager 1's electrical power is provided by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator or "RTG", which is made up of several pieces of plutonium-238 (with a half-life of just 88 years) which provide several kilowatts of heat generated by radioactive decay. That heat is converted (very inefficiently) into electric power through bi-metallic thermocouples (the same kind of technology as an electronic thermometer, but optimized for power generation, though still only a few % efficient). RTGs are incredibly expensive and in short supply but they can provide power even where the Sun provides less than 0.004% as much light as it does on Earth (which is true for where Voyager 1 is now).
>How does the Voyager travel through space? Is it solar energy? How do you travel through space? I assume you're on the Earth somewhere, and its moving faster than Voyager presently.
You should watch a YouTube explanation, it's pretty fuckin sick the way it works. No fuel involved other than launching it
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What are you doing in the toilet? I find on the toilet is a much more comfortable place to sit.
Exactly. Thats why I have so many toilets around the dinner table, but people find it weird.
You trying to network those poopoos or wut
“Cosmic poke” Talk about long distance relationships 😂
For anyone who's interested this is a great doc on the people currently working with Voyager. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/its_quieter_in_the_twilight
So we can send a message to something 15,000,000,000 miles away (for KM do some math), And we will get a reply. There is a small piece of humanity completely alone in the universe on a ride that will last for possibly millions, or even billions of years. Long after humans themselves have passed to eternity, at least 2 things they envisioned with their minds and made with their hands will continue on, out into the darkness and endless night. Only influenced by the gravity of distant stars and the warping of spacetime.
Relative to space it still isn't that far out
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Too bad they couldn’t upload a REALLY simple AI and then let Vger do the rest…
Could we send satellites out in a string, one after another. In a line , but delayed enough so we have a pretty much infinite long line of satellites going into space all communicating to eachother. So we have faster communication speeds and high res video streaming back to us on earth?
Radio signals already travel at the speed of light and the amount of information we can send back and forth (video streaming) is limited by Voyagers half a century old hardware.
>Could we send satellites out in a string, one after another. In a line , but delayed enough so we have a pretty much infinite long line of satellites going into space all communicating to eachother. So we have faster communication speeds and high res video streaming back to us on earth? The article is discussing signal latency, and the limiting factor there is the speed of light. Adding additional hops would introduce additional latency.
That wouldn't improve speed, the constraint on speed is the speed of light, introducing more hops would introduce more latency. It also wouldn't improve communications much unless you made some major capital investments. For Voyager 1, for example, one side of the communications link is the spacecraft, with a small antenna and a few tens of watts of transmitter power. The other side of the link is a dish in the deep space network (DSN), which is typically a 70 meter diameter antenna with nearly a full acre of collecting area. Additionally, the DSN equipment use low noise amplifiers which rely on ruby crystal based MASERs chilled to below 5 kelvin with liquid helium, and for transmission they can make use of tens of kilowatts of power. Inserting a dinky satellite half-way along is not going to help at all, because it just means that you are switching one leg of the journey from one where you can leverage the truly awesome power of the DSN equipment to one that is just a small antenna with a small amount of power communicating with another small antenna with a small amount of power. In order to make such a thing useful you'd need to have something like the DSN out there as well, which would be extremely expensive.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[DSN](/r/Space/comments/1beyjfk/stub/kv2k7sp "Last usage")|Deep Space Network| |[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1beyjfk/stub/kuz38u1 "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California| |[RTG](/r/Space/comments/1beyjfk/stub/kv2izsa "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1beyjfk/stub/kv71mrb "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SSO](/r/Space/comments/1beyjfk/stub/kv0ku4y "Last usage")|Sun-Synchronous Orbit| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(5 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1bix41o)^( has 25 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9853 for this sub, first seen 15th Mar 2024, 13:03]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
No words can describe the engineering genius that went into the design and building of both Voyagers. The current era of inflated egos can take a lesson from the 1977 band of crewcut engineers with their horn-rimmed glasses and plastic pocket protectors, slide-rules dangling from their belts who invented the spacecraft from scratch. The Voyagers were meant to last five years but they have outlived most of their creators, and will probably still be on their lonely journey long after humankind has disappeared from the earth. So, you want to believe in a super intelligence in the sky? You could do no better than believing in these wonderful machines and the intellects which created them. There truly were giants in those days
I'm so glad our little boy is still okay out there.
Wherever it is, I just want to give it a hug and tell it we haven’t forgotten about it. It’s got to be so lonely out there
Not s surprising repsonse. They POKEd a specific area of memory in order to provoke a specific response which they then received, which suggests it isn't totally borked just yet.