- cross-posted to:
- crumbgrabber@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- crumbgrabber@lemm.ee
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It’s hard to explain how significant the Voyager 1 probe is in terms of human history. Scientists knew as they were building it that they were making something that would have a significant impact on humanity. It’s the first man made object to leave the heliosphere and properly enter the interstellar medium, and this was always just a secondary goal of the probe. It was primarily intended to explore the gas giants, especially the Jovian lunar system. It did its job perfectly and gave us so many scientific discoveries just within our solar system.
And I think there’s something sobering about the image of it going on a long, endless road trip into the galactic ether with no destination. It’s a pretty amazing way to retire. The fact that even today we get scientific data from Voyager, that so far away we can still communicate with it and control it, is an unbelievable achievement of human ingenuity and scientific progress. If you’ve never seen the image the Pale Blue Dot you should see it. That linked picture is a revised version of the image made by Nasa and released in 2020. It’s part of a group of the last pictures ever taken by Voyager 1 on February 14th 1990, a picture of Earth from 6 billion kilometers away. It’s one of my favorite pictures, and it kinda blows my mind every time I see it.
The pale blue dot photo always makes me tear up. We’re so small and insignificant in such a grand universe and I’m crushed that I can’t explore it.
There will always be a “step further we’d love to see but won’t”. Let’s be glad we’re in that step which included this photo and the inherent magnificence in it.
It totally beats being one of the earlier humans who just wondered what the lights in the sky might be. Probably gods or something.
I was already impressed when they managed to diagnose a single bit flip a few years ago.
Keep in mind too these guys are writing and reading in like assembly or some precursor to it.
I can only imagine the number of checks and rechecks they probably go through before they press the “send” button. Especially now.
This is nothing like my loosey goosey programming where I just hit compile or download and just wait to see if my change works the way I expect…
they almost certainly have a hardware spare, or at the very least, an accurately simulated version of it, because again, this is 50 year old hardware. So it’s pretty easy to just simulate it.
But yeah they are almost certainly pulling some really fucked QA on this shit.
People always underestimate the high level NASA works at. Everyone bitches and moans, especially Musk simps, about how long SLS took to make and its expense, but it worked right the first time. In the case of the Voyager spacecraft, they are working with tech so old, all the original engineers are retired or dead. NASA rocks.
I understand your point and completely agree that NASA has produced some amazing technological feats, but we could probably use a different example than the SLS to highlight their accomplishments. Even with supposedly repurposed rocket engines and technology from the Shuttle era, that project is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. If you want to highlight how amazing it is that SLS has actually flown with all the political manipulations associated with it, then I’d probably agree with you in that sense. This is no criticism of the engineers, but to completely ignore the issues of this project as a whole, not just financially related, seems to be a bit disingenuous.
Here’s a good article from Berger talking about what the Government Accountability Office thinks of the project: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/nasa-finally-admits-what-everyone-already-knows-sls-is-unaffordable
The budget wasn’t really relevant to my point. And it did work correctly the first time.
All I’m saying is you could choose a better example, which NASA is full of them.
But lets say I built you a car that already came with an engine and some other important things, just to make it quicker and cheaper to get that car in your hands. Unfortunately, you want me to complete work on the car in five different states and use components from those areas. Guess what, the car is now about $5 million over budget and 5 years behind schedule. Not only that, but we encountered issues during the first test that are going to require more fixes ($$$) and more delays for the second test.
In this situation, you’re saying it’s great, it ran correctly the first time because it went down the road and back, and budgets and timelines don’t matter. I’m saying ehhhh, not really - we’re over budget by millions, delayed by years, and there were issues, even though we repurposed stuff that was in a car that actually ran a few years back. It’s great we built the car, but the project itself isn’t something that I would showcase as my best work.
I think they’re saying intellectually the work is amazing.
Ignoring all other factors they do shit right
Man I can’t even get my stupid Azure deployment to work and that’s only in Germany.
As someone who recently switched from AWS to Azure I feel your pain.
Best part is when you finally have a working solution, Microsoft sends you an email that it’s being deprecated.
What’s wrong with AWS in your usecass?
Chances are that Microsoft won management over with discounts.
Oh I switched jobs, so not switch as in migrate.
The industry I work in now is very conservative, so Microsoft is a brand people know and “trust”. Amazon is scary and new.
Rejected : please comment your changes
My understanding is that they sent V’Ger a command to do “something,” and then the gibberish it was sending changed, and that was the “here’s everything” signal.
And yeah, I’m calling it V’Ger from now on.
They specifically sent it a command to send a full memory dump after it went haywire. It wasn’t a fluke.
Sure - I didn’t know what “something” was. And what I’d read was that someone had to figure out that they were receiving a full memory dump, which suggested to me that they hadn’t specifically asked for that.
And yeah, I’m calling it V’Ger from now on
Have my upvote.
Why haven’t we been doing this already? I’m with you, let’s make this happen!
From what I read there was damage to the memory in certain places so they’ve had to move the code into spare places in memory.
It’s an astounding feat tbh.
One specific chip had damaged memory
Why do Tumblr users approach every topic like a manic street preacher?
There’s a significant overlap between theatre kids and Tumblr users.
That ven diagram is maybe 3 degrees away from a circle.
Thank you, now I can’t stop hearing them in Alan Tudyk’s Clayface voice from the Harley Quinn series…
I wonder how it is secured, or could anyone with a big enough transmitter reprogram it at will…
I think the security is adequately managed by the need for a massive transmitter as well as the question “what is there to gain via a hostile takeover and re-programming the probe?”
I bet there’s actual security of some kind going on, but those two points seem like a massive hurdle to clear just to mess with a deep space probe.
You may be interested in learning about its downlink: https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
Lol.
Why is it only sending back dickbutt memes?
I just have to imagine how interesting of a challenege that is. Kinda like when old games only had 300kb to store all their data on so you had to program cool tricks to get it all to work.
**This also means that aliens can reprogram all of our satellites. **
Yes if they can track them in middle of space.
It’s impressive that we can still send data to the satellite. I mean you need to send the signal to the place where the satellite will be in 24 hours.
No, it doesn’t. Commands could be authenticated using a pre-shared secret. Even public cryptography existed prior to Voyager 1’s launch (by a year).
Based on the state of computer security at that time I would guess that’s unlikely, but then again it was the Cold War.
Anyway, just because it is possible it doesn’t mean anyone can do it.
you say that like aliens wouldn’t just acquire the hardware itself. If there are aliens, and they know about the probe, chances are they’re probably in a better position to fuck with it than we are. From a computing power angle (i.e. it’s easy to crack) as well as hardware level.
Wasn’t there a documentary about this?
Star Trek the Motion Picture
SWEs have new standards now, and i think we should hold them to it. Considering how shit most modern websites are these days. I think it’s only going to be beneficial.
Say that to corporate. I’m perfectly willing (eager, even) to write actually good software, but I’m forced to work within a budget and on top of the pile of despair we call “tech stack”. Everything is about 20 orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be, nobody has time to do anything properly and everything is always kind of burning.
username checks out
Let’s hope the over-the-air update didn’t get Man-In-The-Middled…
Voyager is a boomer and could more easily be phished
And the IT support service can’t even fix a computer problem of an customer 20 km away.
Meanwhile here on Earth, we need to login using two accounts to access Helldivers 2. And even got pulled from many countries. What a time to be alive.
Sony has agreed to remove psn requirements for pc users now
