• @[email protected]
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    693 months ago

    Respect to the computer scientist who sorted that out. That has got to be an extremely satisfying bug to fix.

    • @[email protected]
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      323 months ago

      As a software engineer, I’m still trying to figure out their build pipeline. That thing has got to be interesting.

      • @[email protected]
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        273 months ago

        No documentation, imagine! The original designers–dead. This person had to reverse engineer every aspect of that system, though I can’t imagine that it has more than, say, 64KB of RAM. Still an enormous amount of work but not like trying to figure out how an iPhone works without any documentation.

        • palordrolap
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          173 months ago

          https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/

          According to the above, the software was written in FORTRAN.

          There’s probably at least one warehouse somewhere full of green bar sprocketed teletype / dot matrix paper with the source code on it, if not also magnetic tapes. And that assumes they haven’t archived it in other places and formats in the last ~50 years.

          70kB though. That’s a huge amount of memory for 1977. Low-end personal computers were still selling with less than that 10 years later.

          That said, the article doesn’t distinguish ROM and RAM, so I wonder how much of that is ROM. ROM is and was far cheaper.

          Also, that 70 might be a rounding up of 65536 bytes, which is 64k, so you might be spot on with your guess there.

          • @[email protected]
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            3 months ago

            Ha my sister had to learn FORTRAN for her research science work. Lot of long-term, old survey tools use it still. Apparently it was… not a pleasant experience to learn the language haha.

          • @[email protected]
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            13 months ago

            Yeah, I had a Sinclair spectrum with 48k ram. Later on I had a BBC B computer that iirc had 32k. It was actually a pretty powerful machine, you could do a lot with it.

  • @[email protected]
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    433 months ago

    This legitimately made me sad when I heard they might lose this satellite. It’s the farthest humans have ever sent anything beyond Earth, and it might always be the case. The science data coming back from this is invaluable.

    • @[email protected]
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      53 months ago

      We’ll surely get faster. Remember that Voyager 1 actually made a pass around one of the planets (Jupiter?) specifically to slow it down so that it could start gathering data. It would not be (relatively speaking) hard to send something out at a far greater velocity.

        • @[email protected]
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          43 months ago

          I am always fascinated by the magnitudes nasa overengineers their missions. The Mars rovers for example. They always get so much more out of it.

          • @[email protected]
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            23 months ago

            I’m glad they do, a lot of the missions I work around have been flying for 20 years when their original mission duration was supposed to be 5 years. The science they do is fantastic.

      • @Scubus
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        53 months ago

        We can absolutely go way faster. The fastest thing we’ve ever built is currently the parker solar probe. Relative to the sun, it’s traveling so fast it could do a flyby of earths entire width in (I’m just guessing, don’t quote me) probably a couple seconds.

        • @[email protected]
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          83 months ago

          I just did the math. Parker’s top speed is around 430,000mph. So with the earth being a bit over 7900 miles across it would take a minute for Parker to traverse the width of the earth.

  • @[email protected]
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    303 months ago

    Incredible that we can still receive the signal after all this time over such a vast distance. I wish we made our current devices with such longevity in mind 😉😄

    • @[email protected]
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      253 months ago

      Voyager is the Nokia of space probes: practically obsolete, code written in ancient runes almost nobody can still decipher and read… yet still keeps on ticking.

      • @[email protected]
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        113 months ago

        I just don’t get how it doesn’t get destroyed by random space shit. I get space is infinitely empty but it’s also infinitely full too, right…

        • @[email protected]
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          53 months ago

          Infinitely empty AFAIK.

          Interstellar space is similar to atoms and the electron cloud, some tiny amount of matter and a whole heap of SFA.

          (Someone get at me with the actual numbers, but I’m leaning toward space being more sparse by percentage than an atom.)

          The main solar system objects were accounted for and closely avoided, now it’s a very roomy area to float through alone.

          • @[email protected]
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            23 months ago

            But aren’t there like a bunch of little rocks from like asteroids and stuff? That’s what I never got even for launches from earth, why isn’t everything up there just getting peppered nonstop from debris. I guess space is really just that empty

            • @[email protected]
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              13 months ago

              Debris like that will tend to concentrate around a gravitational focus. There’s a lot more of the space rocks and stuff you’re worried about within the inner solar system than towards the edges where there’s little gravity to keep those objects from falling further into the solar system. That’s why JWST had micro meteor impact damage so early after its launch.

      • @[email protected]
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        33 months ago

        Apparently it’s on a 12 foot antenna. That’s crazy. I thought for sure they’d be communicating on a much larger dish.

        I’d wager the data rate is pretty low, to increase the fidelity.

      • @[email protected]
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        33 months ago

        Get a big enough dish and you can do wild shit. Arecibo observatory was able to use radar to map the surface of Venus to like 1km resolution.

  • anar
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    203 months ago

    Headline implicates that it was returning non-science data so far lol

  • @[email protected]
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    143 months ago

    This makes me genuinely happy. Not much uplifting news actually uplifts me these days. This is one of the rare headlines that does.

    • @[email protected]
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      313 months ago

      They figured out how to resolve it weeks ago.

      It has taken this long to implement the results, and to get usable data flowing again

      • @[email protected]
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        193 months ago

        They’re basically rewriting the software, and if it goes horribly wrong, the probe will just stop talking forever. So no one was in a big rush to push this into production.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 months ago

      That’s what I thought too, until I read

      The announcement that Voyager 1’s instruments were returning data again came two days after JPL announced the passing of Ed Stone, who served as Voyager’s project scientist from the mission’s inception in 1972 until 2022.

      And realized it was the ghost of Ed Stone.