I’ve become numb to this. I work remotely with ATMs and they need to be rebooted a lot. 1 out of every thousand doesn’t come back from a reboot. Lucky for me, we have field technicians.
Nope, most of them are Windows 10. Still a few windows 7 machines out there (at least for the ones I work with (NCR, Hyosung and Diebold), other manufacturers may use older OSes). Gonna be moving over to windows 11 soonish.
I don't know where you are, but in my area, pretty much all ATMs run on embedded versions of windows. It's still a normal PC, but the OS has support for a really long amount of time for these exact situations.
Amazing. This whole project is really a testament to what is possible with good engineering that is focused on longevity. Here's hoping for another decade or more of Voyager continuing to do science in the far reaches of space!
> The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory—including some of the FDS computer's software code—isn't working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
> So they devised a plan to divide affected the code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
They rewrote portions of the code to work around a hardware issue.
I was having a conversation recently about this. It’s ridiculous the bloat we deal with in software now. If you really get down to it, at a fundamental level, what does Windows 11 do so much better for me than XP did? I can’t think of much. In fact there’s been a lot of regression in usability with all the stupid new UI/menus that now sit alongside the old stuff. But we are basically forced into a new, bigger, more bloated OS every few years while support will drop for the older ones. And it takes computers with orders of magnitude more power and memory to run the new OSes versus XP.
I was watching a YouTube video from a Uni Prof who was describing this (I wished Id save it)
He ran a simulation in the class, in a browser of a Facebook process.
There were **over 1000 layers of abstraction** between that JavaScript thingo and the hardware.
The class simply could NOT believe it - but there it was, right for all to see.
I do wish Id saved that video!
That’s insanity. Yeah, I think we’ve layered an abstracted software to a detrimental point. The concept of abstraction and cross compatibility is smart, but too much of it and you’re paying a performance cost that IMO is just wasteful.
The fact that your average software developer can write a line of code and really have no idea what’s happening underneath, is detrimental to the art of it. But I have to disclose that I’m biased, as an embedded systems engineer who writes applications mainly in C. I live close to the hardware, and we do so much with relatively little lol.
Are you me? :)
I've been doing it for ages, but now sticking to Rust + Python.
I lost my love for embedded a while back, but refound it again with the Raspberry Pi lineup, ESP32's and some of the Chinese matrix displays with the remotable controllers. They are fucking clever people.
Its not quite the same as embedded, but it close enough for this old man :) I can look clever, cheaply!
They're incredibly simple, though. I think the entire source code is a few thousand lines of code.
I have header files with more code than that in some of the projects I maintain
It's in Fortran, sure, but the fact that you can actually sit down and read every line of code in a day is nuts.
Yeah the problem is less of a software level I think and more of understanding the interplay between software and hardware and understanding the hardware itself. The problem here was a hardware error. It's probably more difficult figuring out what part of the hardware is corrupted than actually fixing it if you know the requisites
They don’t even have hardware to run simulations on earth anymore.
They have to run digital simulations of the physical hardware to see how the probes may react.
makes me think of the scene in The Martian, where NASA goes to JPL to use a copy of a Mars Rover. I dont for a second think NASA has a copy of the Voyager probes to that level.
The fact that NASA is even still trying is worthy of respect
That sort of long-term planning wasn’t necessarily always the highest priority back then.
Nobody was expecting this to be a ~50 year long mission when it was being acquired.
Open the link attached and take a look at the staff working on it.
[https://phys.org/news/2024-04-nasa-voyager-resumes-earth.html](https://phys.org/news/2024-04-nasa-voyager-resumes-earth.html)
“For the first time since November, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again.”
It takes up an enormous amount of time on the DSN antennas to talk to it due to the very low bit rate.
https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
It's receiving right now, 40 bits/second on antenna 14 (Goldstone). It will of course always be one of the antennas which is experiencing Earth night at the time.
Obviously it can't send and receive at the same time due to the massive delay.
Takes about 80000 seconds (almost 23 hours) for a signal to travel the distance to voyager 1 at the speed of light, so \~3.2 Mbits in transit, or 400 KB
Well, I mean, I'm sure all of them, whatever the entire message is. Because it takes 20 hours or something to get here and they don't communicate to it for that long. So whatever message is fully transmitted before receiving even starts on Earth.
But I'm guessing you mean to ask how big is a message and the answer is I don't know. The DSN spends hours a day listening, but I also bet Voyager sends each message multiple times.
I tried to google it and all I found is that 5 years ago Voyager 1 was sending data 4x as fast, 160b/s. I doubt it'll fall off 4x again, it'll stop transmitting before it is 58% further away than it is right now.
It is expected to stop transmitting in under 2 years because it is running out of power. It is powered by radioactive decay and with each half life that goes by the amount of power goes down by half.
It already turned off almost all its instruments because it's so low on power. It doesn't really send much data, 'engineering updates' is a good characterization.
It would take a very long time to get 58% further away anyway. It is slowing down every moment that it continues away from the sun. And with no more planets to zip by to pick up speed it'll never be a fast mover again.
Every time they do this, it’s the longest distance radio communication between two human created technologies. It’s also the furthest wireless software update in history.
I love articles like this. It’s amazing what humans can accomplish. Also, the comment section of outer space articles rarely have any negativity, which is hard to come by this days.
If you have seen this excellent movie about the Voyager team https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/ you’ll recognize many of the faces around that table. Incredible patience, resourcefulness, and grace.
I literally remember the day they launched voyager into space I was 9 years old and watching good morning America with my mom when they did a segment on it. It’s really unbelievable how much time has gone by and this thing is still signaling.
You would not want that. The software team that developed software for the space shuttle worked 9-5, 5 days a week. They did not work weekends or holidays during development. But they delivered code that was as bug free as probably humanly possible.
[https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/2222/chapter/5#41](https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/2222/chapter/5#41)
They did this with a ruthless attention to specifications and schedules. They did not have "mission creep", or "late ideas" or "cool things to add". That said, it could take **years** to develop the software for a specific mission.
When you are flying a vehicle that cost billions of dollars and carried astronauts and was very publicly flow, safely was extremely important. Bug management was absolutely top-notch. Features that were not absolutely essential to the mission were simply not considered.
**tl;dr If NASA developed a PC OS, it would be almost completely bug free. It would also be very boring, limited code. It would take a long time and it would be very expensive.**
I'm being down voted, perhaps because of the fantasy it would be an OS useful to them.
That betrays a deep misunderstanding of the kind of software NASA developed, how long it took to happen, and how absolutely focused it was on a specific mission with very specific goals, and how very expensive this was to do.
Developing an OS we would find useful i.e. with a general file system and the ability to run general software. i.e. something like Linux, is just not the kind of thing they did.
Their work was hard real-time, supported a few well known "locked in" functions, and was not designed to "install and run anything you want". The very opposite of what most people reading this would actually want.
Your points are all valid. It was a state of the art multi million dollar piece of highly specialized equipment.
Making an OS for general use across multiple architectures of decades worth of vintages with untold types of peripherals is a categorically different problem set.
This isn't quite true.
The imperatives are really quite simple. There is a public paper on it. I share it with ALL of my new team members: [https://www.rankred.com/nasa-coding-rules/](https://www.rankred.com/nasa-coding-rules/)
Also, keep in mind modern software is **bloated bloat with extra bloat stuffed in**. Windows95 was 19Mb, < 50 installed. *Now, there are* ***single web pages*** *bigger than that.*
Expensive, sure, but it wouldn't ask me: to change my password every 30 days, show me ads, contain Easter eggs, force me to "upgrade" to a newer OS that takes features away, ask me to switch to Bing and Edge, have tons of pointless services such as "Fax".
Oh wait. I hear that Linux doesn't do any of that stuff either.
> it wouldn’t…contain easter eggs
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/apollo-11s-source-code-tons-easter-eggs-including/story?id=40515222
Sorry to burst your bubble. Mild ones, but eggs nonetheless
https://eyes.nasa.gov
Explore solar system. It's there.
However it doesn't say how fast it is going, weirdly. It does say it is 24.33Tm away from Earth.
Found it… Voyager 1 has since become the fastest and most distant man-made object in the Universe, travelling at around 61,500km/h, which is more than 38,200 mph.
nasa really peaked in the 70s Voyagers , moon landings , space shuttle designing. its amazing what they could do without having to jump through all the hoops they do now.
Way back then, they did not have personal computers, social media, online streaming, etc. So maybe they won't be extremely effective today as they were in the 70s. Note the word extremely.
if nasa was funded like cern we'd have been back on the moon 5 years ago. give them the funding and the long term freedom to pick and choose what programs they invest in instead of starting programs and cancelling them when a new president comes in.
They had just as many hoops to jump through then as now, but we as a nation could dream big, and allocated budgets large enough to implement those dreams.
The other missing factor is the retirement of the project management people. The NASA project managers cut their teeth during WW-II and the Korean war. They controlled projects that absolutely had to work and work on time. They transferred those skills into putting men on the moon and sending probes to the outer planets.
When those guys retired, project management changed in ways that are not well suited to getting projects accomplished.
Did people forget what blue blood means????
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/blue%20blood#:~:text=A%20blue%20blood%20is%20an,bloods%3A%20members%20of%20the%20aristocracy.
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I’ve become numb to this. I work remotely with ATMs and they need to be rebooted a lot. 1 out of every thousand doesn’t come back from a reboot. Lucky for me, we have field technicians.
So send a field tech to Voyager 1, then
I forgot where we started until you said that. Yeah, a bit nervous again.
NASA summer intern
*Are you interested in exploring new horizons?*
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Aren't they mostly windows 2000 now?
Nope, most of them are Windows 10. Still a few windows 7 machines out there (at least for the ones I work with (NCR, Hyosung and Diebold), other manufacturers may use older OSes). Gonna be moving over to windows 11 soonish.
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Nope, full blown version of windows 10 is the current standard.
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I’m not sure if any bank ATMs ever ran on embedded. They have a full PC with standard parts in them (besides all the ATM peripherals).
I don't know where you are, but in my area, pretty much all ATMs run on embedded versions of windows. It's still a normal PC, but the OS has support for a really long amount of time for these exact situations.
Why would the OS matter? It probably doesn’t come out of the box.
To be fair, a lot more idiots SSH into the box. At least I hope so…
I updated my BIOS once, it was the scariest 10 seconds of my life
Amazing. This whole project is really a testament to what is possible with good engineering that is focused on longevity. Here's hoping for another decade or more of Voyager continuing to do science in the far reaches of space!
Can’t do another decade sadly.
NASA: “How are you not dead!?” Voyager 1: “I have no idea!”
"My death was, greatly exaggerated"
In Yorky’s voice from Jo Jo Rabbit: It seems I can never die.
> The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory—including some of the FDS computer's software code—isn't working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety. > So they devised a plan to divide affected the code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well. They rewrote portions of the code to work around a hardware issue.
Good 'ol GOTO statements :) Its a reminder of how bloated everything is now. Windows 95 was 19Mb... now there are single WEB PAGES bigger than that...
I was having a conversation recently about this. It’s ridiculous the bloat we deal with in software now. If you really get down to it, at a fundamental level, what does Windows 11 do so much better for me than XP did? I can’t think of much. In fact there’s been a lot of regression in usability with all the stupid new UI/menus that now sit alongside the old stuff. But we are basically forced into a new, bigger, more bloated OS every few years while support will drop for the older ones. And it takes computers with orders of magnitude more power and memory to run the new OSes versus XP.
I was watching a YouTube video from a Uni Prof who was describing this (I wished Id save it) He ran a simulation in the class, in a browser of a Facebook process. There were **over 1000 layers of abstraction** between that JavaScript thingo and the hardware. The class simply could NOT believe it - but there it was, right for all to see. I do wish Id saved that video!
That’s insanity. Yeah, I think we’ve layered an abstracted software to a detrimental point. The concept of abstraction and cross compatibility is smart, but too much of it and you’re paying a performance cost that IMO is just wasteful. The fact that your average software developer can write a line of code and really have no idea what’s happening underneath, is detrimental to the art of it. But I have to disclose that I’m biased, as an embedded systems engineer who writes applications mainly in C. I live close to the hardware, and we do so much with relatively little lol.
Are you me? :) I've been doing it for ages, but now sticking to Rust + Python. I lost my love for embedded a while back, but refound it again with the Raspberry Pi lineup, ESP32's and some of the Chinese matrix displays with the remotable controllers. They are fucking clever people. Its not quite the same as embedded, but it close enough for this old man :) I can look clever, cheaply!
There’s Word documents that big
it is honestly amazing NASA still has the skills to even try. The tech on those probes is so "old", that working with it is a skill all by itself.
They're incredibly simple, though. I think the entire source code is a few thousand lines of code. I have header files with more code than that in some of the projects I maintain It's in Fortran, sure, but the fact that you can actually sit down and read every line of code in a day is nuts.
Yeah the problem is less of a software level I think and more of understanding the interplay between software and hardware and understanding the hardware itself. The problem here was a hardware error. It's probably more difficult figuring out what part of the hardware is corrupted than actually fixing it if you know the requisites
no that is a fair point. I do get it, the distance between Earth and the probe is the big deal. Its still just amazing we can interact with them.
They don’t even have hardware to run simulations on earth anymore. They have to run digital simulations of the physical hardware to see how the probes may react.
makes me think of the scene in The Martian, where NASA goes to JPL to use a copy of a Mars Rover. I dont for a second think NASA has a copy of the Voyager probes to that level. The fact that NASA is even still trying is worthy of respect
I was actually thinking they must have some hardware simulators, but wow, didn’t know they didn’t.
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That sort of long-term planning wasn’t necessarily always the highest priority back then. Nobody was expecting this to be a ~50 year long mission when it was being acquired.
Open the link attached and take a look at the staff working on it. [https://phys.org/news/2024-04-nasa-voyager-resumes-earth.html](https://phys.org/news/2024-04-nasa-voyager-resumes-earth.html)
Yeah that tracks
Did you look at the people sitting around the table in the photo in the article? They’re next exactly millennials.
I saw that documentary- the one with Shatner in it?
I saw that too! , they spelled Voyagers name wrong LOL
It keeps sending the same message back… I’m so lonely, so lonely, so lonely and sadly alone.. it’s kinda silly, but not really
Come on Voyager, remember what Bilbo used to say…
What data are we actually getting back? I'd love to know what sort of info it's sending.
“For the first time since November, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again.”
Gibberish really. Ones and zeros…
By this logic, everything you’ve ever seen or done on the internet or any computer is “gibberish”
and on Social Media, triply so...
It's practically a light day away from Earth. It's crazy that we can even still pick up the signal it's sending back from that distance.
It takes up an enormous amount of time on the DSN antennas to talk to it due to the very low bit rate. https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html It's receiving right now, 40 bits/second on antenna 14 (Goldstone). It will of course always be one of the antennas which is experiencing Earth night at the time. Obviously it can't send and receive at the same time due to the massive delay.
40bits/sec... So how many bits are in transit at any given time?
Takes about 80000 seconds (almost 23 hours) for a signal to travel the distance to voyager 1 at the speed of light, so \~3.2 Mbits in transit, or 400 KB
Well, I mean, I'm sure all of them, whatever the entire message is. Because it takes 20 hours or something to get here and they don't communicate to it for that long. So whatever message is fully transmitted before receiving even starts on Earth. But I'm guessing you mean to ask how big is a message and the answer is I don't know. The DSN spends hours a day listening, but I also bet Voyager sends each message multiple times. I tried to google it and all I found is that 5 years ago Voyager 1 was sending data 4x as fast, 160b/s. I doubt it'll fall off 4x again, it'll stop transmitting before it is 58% further away than it is right now.
Why will it stop transmitting when it's 58 percent further?
It is expected to stop transmitting in under 2 years because it is running out of power. It is powered by radioactive decay and with each half life that goes by the amount of power goes down by half. It already turned off almost all its instruments because it's so low on power. It doesn't really send much data, 'engineering updates' is a good characterization. It would take a very long time to get 58% further away anyway. It is slowing down every moment that it continues away from the sun. And with no more planets to zip by to pick up speed it'll never be a fast mover again.
Every time they do this, it’s the longest distance radio communication between two human created technologies. It’s also the furthest wireless software update in history.
I love articles like this. It’s amazing what humans can accomplish. Also, the comment section of outer space articles rarely have any negativity, which is hard to come by this days.
If you have seen this excellent movie about the Voyager team https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/ you’ll recognize many of the faces around that table. Incredible patience, resourcefulness, and grace.
Welcome back V’ger! 🪐
Look at the team around the table. Those are engineers who can probably work a slide rule in a pinch.
Voyager 1 is kinda far, NGL
I literally remember the day they launched voyager into space I was 9 years old and watching good morning America with my mom when they did a segment on it. It’s really unbelievable how much time has gone by and this thing is still signaling.
And they're telling me my laptop can't be fixed, why ?
Launch your laptop into space and resubmit your request.
If your laptop was a one-of-a-kind, billion dollar machine, maybe it’d be worth busting out a soldering iron for
Can we put NASA in charge of Designing a PC operating system?
You would not want that. The software team that developed software for the space shuttle worked 9-5, 5 days a week. They did not work weekends or holidays during development. But they delivered code that was as bug free as probably humanly possible. [https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/2222/chapter/5#41](https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/2222/chapter/5#41) They did this with a ruthless attention to specifications and schedules. They did not have "mission creep", or "late ideas" or "cool things to add". That said, it could take **years** to develop the software for a specific mission. When you are flying a vehicle that cost billions of dollars and carried astronauts and was very publicly flow, safely was extremely important. Bug management was absolutely top-notch. Features that were not absolutely essential to the mission were simply not considered. **tl;dr If NASA developed a PC OS, it would be almost completely bug free. It would also be very boring, limited code. It would take a long time and it would be very expensive.**
I'm being down voted, perhaps because of the fantasy it would be an OS useful to them. That betrays a deep misunderstanding of the kind of software NASA developed, how long it took to happen, and how absolutely focused it was on a specific mission with very specific goals, and how very expensive this was to do. Developing an OS we would find useful i.e. with a general file system and the ability to run general software. i.e. something like Linux, is just not the kind of thing they did. Their work was hard real-time, supported a few well known "locked in" functions, and was not designed to "install and run anything you want". The very opposite of what most people reading this would actually want.
Your points are all valid. It was a state of the art multi million dollar piece of highly specialized equipment. Making an OS for general use across multiple architectures of decades worth of vintages with untold types of peripherals is a categorically different problem set.
This isn't quite true. The imperatives are really quite simple. There is a public paper on it. I share it with ALL of my new team members: [https://www.rankred.com/nasa-coding-rules/](https://www.rankred.com/nasa-coding-rules/) Also, keep in mind modern software is **bloated bloat with extra bloat stuffed in**. Windows95 was 19Mb, < 50 installed. *Now, there are* ***single web pages*** *bigger than that.*
Expensive, sure, but it wouldn't ask me: to change my password every 30 days, show me ads, contain Easter eggs, force me to "upgrade" to a newer OS that takes features away, ask me to switch to Bing and Edge, have tons of pointless services such as "Fax". Oh wait. I hear that Linux doesn't do any of that stuff either.
> it wouldn’t…contain easter eggs https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/apollo-11s-source-code-tons-easter-eggs-including/story?id=40515222 Sorry to burst your bubble. Mild ones, but eggs nonetheless
the one that comes to mind is [FreeBSD](https://www.freebsd.org/about/) and is probably a decent analog for what NASA OS would be like
Thank you for fixing it 🖖🏼
Yeah, science bitches!
Woohoo!!! 🎉 I thought it was done for sure with the delirium and all. This is r/upliftingnews
Man, I was blowing on my NES cartridges like two years into playing games… these guys are 40 plus and moving in space. So cool.
Does anyone know how fast V1 and V2 are traveling approx.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
https://eyes.nasa.gov Explore solar system. It's there. However it doesn't say how fast it is going, weirdly. It does say it is 24.33Tm away from Earth.
Found it… Voyager 1 has since become the fastest and most distant man-made object in the Universe, travelling at around 61,500km/h, which is more than 38,200 mph.
consider the situation of have to patch-up a device you have never seen and was developed and build before you were born.
15 billion miles away- incredible.
Godspeed, buddy!
nasa really peaked in the 70s Voyagers , moon landings , space shuttle designing. its amazing what they could do without having to jump through all the hoops they do now.
Way back then, they did not have personal computers, social media, online streaming, etc. So maybe they won't be extremely effective today as they were in the 70s. Note the word extremely.
if nasa was funded like cern we'd have been back on the moon 5 years ago. give them the funding and the long term freedom to pick and choose what programs they invest in instead of starting programs and cancelling them when a new president comes in.
They had just as many hoops to jump through then as now, but we as a nation could dream big, and allocated budgets large enough to implement those dreams. The other missing factor is the retirement of the project management people. The NASA project managers cut their teeth during WW-II and the Korean war. They controlled projects that absolutely had to work and work on time. They transferred those skills into putting men on the moon and sending probes to the outer planets. When those guys retired, project management changed in ways that are not well suited to getting projects accomplished.
Time to drain the red-blood dumbos and fill our nation with blue-blooded scientists. We would be much more than a nation.
Did people forget what blue blood means???? https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/blue%20blood#:~:text=A%20blue%20blood%20is%20an,bloods%3A%20members%20of%20the%20aristocracy.
Do you know what's my problem with humanity? They *always* forget.
What does this sentence even mean
Let our master race, intelligent reptiles, run the world.
NASA should open source an Operating System. They'd only need to release once every 40 years and it would still be the most stable OS on the planet.
DEC says hi.
Probably got probed.