Sometimes it’s hard to read the tea leaves of what’s going on with high-profile space missions. Weighted down as they are with the need to be careful with taxpayer money and having so much national prestige on the line, space agencies are usually pretty cagey about what’s going on up there. But when project managers talk about needing a “miracle” to continue a project, you know things have gotten serious.
And so things now sit with Voyager 1, humanity’s most distant scientific outpost, currently careening away from Mother Earth at 17 kilometers every second and unable to transmit useful scientific or engineering data back to us across nearly a light-day of space. The problem with the 46-year-old spacecraft cropped up back in November, when Voyager started sending gibberish back to Earth. NASA publicly discussed the problem in December, initially blaming it on the telemetry modulation unit (TMU) that packages data from the remaining operable scientific instruments along with engineering data for transmission back to Earth. It appeared at the time that the TMU was not properly communicating with the flight data system (FDS), the main flight computer aboard the spacecraft.
Since then, flight controllers have determined that the problem lies within the one remaining FDS on board (the backup FDS failed back in 1981), most likely thanks to a single bit of corrupted memory. The Deep Space Network is still receiving carrier signals from Voyager, meaning its 3.7-meter high-gain antenna is still pointing back at Earth, so that’s encouraging. But with the corrupt memory, they’ve got no engineering data from the spacecraft to confirm their hypothesis.
The team has tried rebooting the FDS, to no avail. They’re currently evaluating a plan to send commands to put the spacecraft into a flight mode last used during its planetary fly-bys, in the hope that will yield some clues about where the memory is corrupted, if indeed it is. But without a simulator to test the changes, and with most of the engineers who originally built the spacecraft long gone now, the team is treading very carefully.
Voyager 1 is long past warranty, of course, and with an unparalleled record of discovery, it doesn’t owe us anything at this point. But we’re not quite ready to see it slip into its long interstellar sleep, and we wish the team good luck while it works through the issue.
I’m not sure what you’re suggesting, do you mean like a digital twin?
Ah good, the armchair expert is here to tell us how it should have been done.
Well duh, obviously they should have got an extended warranty with next day on-site service.
We’ve been trying to reach you about your space probe’s extended warranty…
Next day, or next light-day? ;)
Very close, given that by my math of voyager being 24.4 billion KM away (163 AU), Voyager 1 is 0.942 light days away!
Crunching more numbers, it will be out of the range of the 1 Light Day service window on roughly January 19th, 2026.
Once the moisture dries from behind his ears……
I’ve done some basic work in modeling the effect of radiation on a system and its generally not possible to emulate how a device is gonna act in a rad heavy environment after such a long time. The original mission plan was to go for only 5 years, its gone more then 45 year now.
The work I did was to look at a small system for an absolute max of 10 years, I can’t imagine doing such a lengthy model in the 70s.
Doesn’t this Voyager have core- or rope-memory? I don’t know but I can imagine that radiation has less effect on that sort of memory.
If it is indeed semiconductors then radiation might have effect but I guess the memory would be shielded for that.
Less of an effect may be true, but all that means is that it takes longer for the effect to manifest. In the case of space radiation, what this means is that the critical fluence of particles that hits the part required to cause the bit-flip will take longer to build up, and some non-linear effects may dampen the process so it takes longer.
All radiation shielding does is attenuate/block low energies. The thicker/denser you make it the higher the energy the particle/ray needs to penetrate. In deep space you will get a full spectrum of energies, you may only encounter a little of the really high-energy stuff, but it’s still there, and it can penetrate your shielding. It’s just a matter of time.
Rope-core memory may be more robust compared to the tiny transistors in CMOS devices, but they’ll reach a point where you flip the bit.
As far as modelling goes, the data at either ends of the energy spectrum is poor, and with really low fluxes of particles you are dealing with low-number statistics, so the margin for error is huge. You could perfectly well simulate the radiation interaction with the entirety of the electronic systems in the craft, and get a precise-looking number out the end (e.g.17.548yrs), but the statistical uncertainty would simply be too large to say anything more than: “maybe more than 10 years if you’re lucky”. That’s one of the reasons why it has ‘lasted’ this long, to get it to definately last as long as it needed, it was overengineered. At the time we were quite ignorant to what was up there so the safety (or ignorance) factor was massive. We’ve been living on that factor up until November last year.
One of the discoveries was that the radiation outside the solar system is heavier than was expected wasn’t it?
Its generally not possible to model such radiation heavy environment on device over such a lengthy period. The original mission was meant to last for only 5 years, we’ve passed 45 years of operation.
I’ve done some very basic radiation modeling on a very small and much simpler device. The longest window we looked at was 10 years. I can’t imagine doing anything like this back in the 70s.
A simulation, emulation, digital twin seems like an easy way to solve this, but after such a long time, the model will in no way to be reliable. At some point you just lose the fight against probability and physics.
They actually built and updated a thermal model for the spacecraft just a few years ago, because that’s really the only thing that mattered at that point – they had to start turning off heat to instruments and just hope they’d survive, but they wanted to make sure that the hydrazine lines wouldn’t freeze.
Modeling the behavior of the FDS is pretty pointless at this point: the spacecraft is already dying, they’re barely getting data, and the latency from command to data back is day-scale. It’s just not worth the effort.
I wish the self-appointed experts were confronted with problems with software that they developed 46 years ago or 46 years from now for today’s developments. I think they’d be sweating bullets and would most likely fail because of the operating system, not to mention the lack of hardware.
It’s really tragic, kind of. I mean, the mission wasn’t planned to last for 5 decades.
On the other hand, after just a few years it became pretty obvious to everyone were the journey was going.
Voyager and Pioneer were already legends by then.
NASA/JPL didn’t seem to have spent much efforts to start to archive documents from this time on, though.
Not in the way the Voyager fans had hoped in retrospect, at least.
It’s like with the moon landings.
A lot of historical stuff had been dumped, being it AGCs or radio equipment.
Or original tapes with telemetry and photographs.
(Luckily, observatories in other countries had been following the landings independently on their own, like they did with Sputnik.)
I suppose, the situation happened either because of space limitations or because it seemed to be unnecessary at the time, not sure.
Maybe some stuff had to be recycled, also.
(In hand-drawn animation, cels had to be cleaned and re-used frequently, which now caused a lot of original material to be lost for HD transfers.)
If memory serves, for a while, there was just one satellite dish with the old school transceiver left thatbcould communicate with Voyager or Pioneer probes.
To be fair, it’s not much different with other projects.
The constructors of the various ham satellites also had kept their documents at home, so they would finally end up in a worn cardboard box in someone’s garage.
So all in all, considering this, it’s not so bad now. Could have been worse.
But it’s still not understandable wgy there’s no simulator around.
Decades ago when the success of the Voyagers became obvious,
the remaining parts could have been used to build a stationary probe that reacts like the real thing.
Minus the RTGs and the maneuver nozzles, of course.
A battery and and some light bulbs could have been used as replacements.
For debugging reasons alone this wpuld have been rational to do.
Considering the delay in communication.
But that’s just my point of view. Speaking under correction, thus.
“I mean, the mission wasn’t planned to last for 5 decades.
On the other hand,”
No, there isn’t an “other the other hand.” Both the Voyagers are *past* the point where they’re doing full power science. They’ve been shutting things down on the spacecraft for *years* now. No gyros. Science instrument heaters off.
Both the Voyagers have been dying since 2020. This was *always* going to happen. They’ve been taking calculated risks for years on this stuff. There’s no point to having an instrument simulator: I know for a lot of people the Voyager spacecraft are points of pride, but it costs a lot of money, effort, and people to keep them going, and the science returns have been dropping continually.
I mean, jeez, Voyager 1 is just about at the limit of its transmitter for everything except engineering data. If this had happened next year, they’d be trying to debug this at 40 bps!
The Ars article has it dead on: “Voyager 1 and 2 have an outsized public profile compared to the resources NASA commits to keeping the spacecraft going.” It does *not make sense* to devote a huge amount of resources to this. Voyager 1 was *always going to die* within the next few years. It’s a freaking miracle it got this close to its ultimate end-of-life.
I meant to say that the success of Voyager was noticeable early on and that by that time,
the people involved could have had begun to document/archive things properly.
Not in a rush, but within months or years.
By a few years later, I didn’t mean 2020.
Rather around 1985 or 1990. By that time, most of the instruments were still in operation, including the heaters. The Voyager sisters weren’t dying yet, even the Pioneers (10,11) were still active for a couple of years. The engineers involved were still relatively young, too.
“the people involved could have had begun to document/archive things properly.”
They did! There were *tons* of contingency plans built!
Let me try to be clear: V1/2 hit their power limits for full science operation in *2020*. That’s __four years__ ago. So how have we gotten 4 more years of science data out of them? Because the engineers involved realized *years* ago that the easiest way to get more life out of the spacecraft was to figure out what heaters could be turned off and you’d *likely* be able to keep going. They built an updated thermal model for it. And it worked!
I mean, we’re talking about tricks like “if you need to transmit back to Earth, shut off this other heater, spin up the gyros, transmit as long as you can until $#!+’s gonna freeze, shut it off and turn the heater back own quick.”
Documenting the FDS would *not* have been a good return on investment because the number of failure paths is absurd, and it’s probabilistic, not deterministic. You cannot predict everything that’s going to go wrong on a 40+ year old spacecraft that is literally out of power.
One of the main tenets of Buddhism is, “Everything passes away” . That applies to the Voyager spacecraft , as well as you and I. I’m now 71 and have spent most of my adult years in awe of the Voyager project and I grieve that they are at the end of their voyage, but also know they will continue traveling through the universe, in silence. I will miss them and not blame generations of engineers for failing to keep it on life support when it is functionally dead. I ask to be treated the same when my turn comes around.
EVERYTHING passes away.
17km per second absolutely blows my mind!! Just imagine what say a plane travelling overhead at that velocity would look like.
… not to speak of what *you* would look like after that ;-)
You won’t be able to see it
I’m going to 1ˢᵗ say, as a matter of “disclaimer” that I’m in no way connected with the relevant Teams, nor an Expert on any of the systems, but…
Even if there is a significant chance of Data Loss, notwithstanding the potential of said data being Unique (regarding the unprecedented environment near/past the Termination Shock and/or Solar Bow Shock) as long as there’s no significant potential of causing some kind of Power Drain Cascade from errently restarting ALL of Voyager’s now shut off instruments, it would seem to my little mind that a Full System Reboot (FSR) could possibly be that previously discussed ‘miracle’.
That, or, the possibility of sending a FSR w/a properly timed Resend of the complete “whole-modified-OS” from the time period of the last known “good” operation set.
Again, you might lose some unique data, but that might be the price to pay for a “hail mary” attempt.
And in my little mind, worth it as opposed to a Final Fail/Shut the Lights Off & Go Home.
I mean, at that point, what’ve you got to lose? 🤷♂️
Hard disagree if you think $5M/year is “huge resources” – it is a *bargain* even for the engineering data, possibly even to see signal effects over those distances and in that region of space.
The cost to build and launch a mission to get there today would be huge, not least necause that would have to be supported for at *least* a decade or two at similar levels, just to get to a similar distance/location.
Sure, I understand your point. I think NASA run into a trap. At the time it became clear Voyager
would last somewhat longer, they had little to none resources, neither manpower nor money
for this ‘old’ project.
Of course, from todays point of view they could have done better.
My own moderate experience with writing code is, that I find it hard to understand what I coded
few years ago. For professional satellites different rules should apply, but again nobody could ever imagine it would survive that long.
I guess only a few involved in the development are still available for trouble-shooting.
True, with some of the Ham satellites it’s even worth, at least NASA seems to have some old
documents – I don’t envy the guys, who have to work their way through it :-)
I agree with the things you said, they make sense to me.
I can imagine they wanted to quit the extended mission,
but couldn’t because of publicity reasons.
So it’s essentially because of volunteers that things lasted so long.
Otherwise, Voyager wouldn’t have had become the multi generation mission it’s today.
Hm. Looking back from a 2024 perspective, I just wonder why they didn’t have founded a non-profit organization for the Voyagers. Or old space craft, in general.
In co-operation with universities and museums, maybe.
Or other cultural or technological organizations.
Astronomy societies around the globe could have had been participating, maybe.
Especially by providing financial support.
I mean, Pioneer 10 and 11 were being used as training objects for the newbies at NASA.
Monitoring these probes was part of their job as a trainee.
Or so I heard (read) once.
“Of course, from todays point of view they could have done better.”
No! No, they couldn’t have! There are __so many things__ wrong with Voyager that it’s insane that it’s lasted this long.
Once Voyager’s prime mission was completed, in 1990, they created the “Voyager Interstellar Mission” (VIM). They basically rewrote a huge portion of the onboard software to delete stuff needed for the cameras, etc. that were no longer needed.
They hoped to get to the 2010s. They planned for a 30 year span, because they knew that power would cut below minimum needed for operation by that point. 1990 plus 30 is 2020. That was __four years__ ago.
I mean, you magically transport the engineers forward in time 30 years, and they’d look at the current state of the spacecraft and be like “what… the hell.”
I had the privilege of working “with” (by wich I mean far below, but still in a position where we had some chances to chat) one of the scientists who was a PI for something on Voyager 2. When the Voyagers hit landmarks in the heliopause, it was phenomenal even then. These probes have exceeded expectations by a nearly unimaginable amount, which is of course part of why they have captured so many imaginations, but if you think of other famous NASA projects, there’s simply nothing that gave us data for a full quarter of a century or more after the original mission, and only a few things with original missions that lasted as long as those as well. The fact that we are sad to see them go is reasonable, but the reality that we can get useful data from something so incredibly unimaginably far away, and based on technology that is not just technical generations old, but also -human- generations old, is as close to a true miracle as human technology is capable of. Compared to, say, Hubble, or Kepler missions that also exceeded expectations, it’s like saying someone who just climbed a mountain at 90 but said it’s their last one should have done a better job managing their health when most people are lucky to live that long. Compared to, say, the space shuttle program, it’s so much more successful it’s hard to believe they came from the same agency. It’s
He’ll, I have problems remembering what code I wrote yesterday.
I hardly think you could say the DSN array is “one satellite dish with an old-school transciever”, have you seen any of them? Google “DSN array” and check ‘em out 🤣
Space is just mindblowing
To me, there’s a huge difference between corrupt bit (the storage is malfunctioning in that sector) vs flipped bit (temporary electro/magnetic/quantum interference caused the data to be stored incorrectly one-time).
They maybe have, kind of. At least one of the remaining Voyager models is hanging in a museum down from the ceiling or something along these lines.
Not sure if it’s a replic/dummy or a left over model.
There are two problems with this argument:
First of all when the probe was built the only practical way to simulate it was to build another one. By the time of launch congress had lost some amount of enthusiasm that made funding possible in the first place. A working replica would have been a near unanimous “No”.
Second, when simulation and emulation became both financially feasible and technically practical the probe had already completed the bulk of its original mission. With its primary objectives nearly fulfilled it was concluded that any such attempt at replication of already sorely outdated equipment was redundant and impractical.
“By the time of launch congress had lost some amount of enthusiasm that made funding possible in the first place. A working replica would have been a near unanimous “No”.”
That US congress.. To me as an foreigner/European, that congress seems to be very shortsighted or incompetent in that field, at least.
Not to say penny wise and pound stupid. On eye level with EU parliament, at least. ;)
They did pull such stunts not only once, I suppose?
Weren’t they also indirectly responsible for China’s space program, because they decided them not to be allowed to be on ISS?
If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress ?
+1
+2
For contrast, how far out has the longest-operating European probe managed to get?
Romania
I love our little space probe but I’m disappointed that we aren’t putting dedicated communication sat in a high orbit of each planet. It seems like doing this wouldn’t be too expensive (given recent rocketry advancements) and doing so would enable future missions to send back without worrying too much about getting a signal all the way back to Earth. Voyager 1 and it’s successors have taught us enough about failure conditions that I think we could build something robust enough to last for at least a century (or until it gets hit by a large asteroid).
I don’t think recent rocketry advancements would be a huge help for something which needs to enter a regular orbit around Neptune. We are basically at the same point we were in the 1970s with regards to that. We’ve gotten one craft in orbit around Saturn, anything farther out than that has been flybys. No propellant left to burn for capture, just dregs to slightly nudge a solar escape trajectory. If you wanted to orbit Uranus or Neptune, the transfer would be less hyperbolic than that and thus it’s going to take many decades.
And comms aren’t the problem with Voyager (amazingly), just gradual failure of hardware which has already exceeded all rational expectations tenfold. There’s a lot of hard radiation out there.
“And comms aren’t the problem with Voyager (amazingly), ”
It’s actually really close: V1’s close to falling out of range of most of the DSN for anything but the very low bit rate engineering data.
But a relay satellite around a giant planet wouldn’t help, because the original poster is forgetting that planets aren’t in a line: they orbit the Sun! There’s a hilarious study out there that shows that the planet that is closest to *every other one*, on average, is Mercury.
And this is why the Pioneer and Voyager missions were launched when they were: at that time, the outer planets _were_ in a line. The next such opportunity will be in the 2150s.
“Voyager 1 and it’s successors have taught us enough about failure conditions that I think we could build something”
Uh, no. Absolutely not. Voyager 1 and 2 did flybys of the giant planets. We’ve since put survey satellites around Jupiter (Galileo, Juno) and Saturn (Cassini) for many years, but they could *never* stay there as long as Voyager 1 and 2 have lasted.
Why? Because you *need propellant* to maintain orbit around those monsters. Voyager 1 and 2 zipped by using gravity assists (which are no longer available, because that alignment won’t happen until the 2200s!).
Um… Why?
Say the problems for getting and keeping things in orbit around all the planets were all easily solved… *chuckle* How does that make it any easier to talk to spacecrafts like the Voyagers? Or the Pioneers? I don’t think you grasp how far out they are!
Here on Earth we can make a really big dish antenna and support it on the ground. How big of an antenna do you want to orbit around Neptune? How much mass do you think you can even get there?
Even if another planet of the Sol system IS closer to the spacecraft you want to communicate with. The difference compared to the total trip isn’t enough to get away with any antenna small enough to launch.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
Now maybe if we could build a large radio telescope on the far side of the moon. That would eliminate terrestrial interference. But at least for this purpose I don’t think there is any advantage to satellites farther out than that.
“How does that make it any easier to talk to spacecrafts like the Voyagers? Or the Pioneers?”
It definitely doesn’t, because a relay satellite around Jupiter would be *farther away* from a remote probe, on average, than Earth.
How about another Voyager type vehicle that let’s go of relay cubes as it travels? Each gets its own power. I don’t know how large the antennas would need to be.
I recognize my comment was hasty and quite thoughtless. I could blame it on something but it’s my error and I apologize.
S’all good
Everyone makes mistakes, but few own them as honestly and humbly as you sir. You are a rare bird indeed, and there should be more people that emulate these actions.
I agree. I often see this with my own parents and family members.
They can’t apologize, at least not in a clear direct way.
Personally, I admit I also have a bit of trouble doing so.
The commenter had the courage to say he thinks he was wrong. Thumb up.
It’s a good character trait, I think.
Blame it on the Goa’uld symbiote
+1
You’re all right afterall
I was part of a small group of engineers at Watkins-Johnson in Palo Alto, CA that won the contract from JPL to design, build and qualify the TWTA’s and power supplies for was was initially called MJS77 flyby. NASA decided that was the wrong name for the project and renamed it Voyager. Our deep space design minimum life time goal was 10 years. I was the MTS magnetics design engineer for the power supply and hoping the high voltage magnetics would survive at least 10 years was a challenge, but our work has proven to have been spot on! What I can relate about spares/parts left over from the program is JPL used several magnetics on the following Galileo space craft, launched in 1989.
“Our deep space design minimum life time goal was 10 years.”
That’s kinda hilarious because one of the X-band TWTs on V1 failed in October 1987… ten years and *one month* after launch.
Wonder why it wasn’t Eitel McCollough that got that contract?
No matter, you kicked ass!
It’s the klingons.
I never liked them.
The klingons are responsible of the Pioneer probe, not the Voyager :-P
You’re right, we rather see the birth of V’ger.
The power output of the radioisotope thermoelectric generators puts out 4 watts less each year, but did have a few more years of extended life left.
From NASA’s Jet Propulsion FAQ:
” Engineers expect each spacecraft to continue operating at least one science instrument until around 2025.”
“Even if science data won’t likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth.”
They’ve been extending those limits for years now: 2020 used to be the science cutoff until they were like “what if we just shut off the heaters? how cold could it get? do we *really* need the gyros?”
It’s amazing that they eked out as much life as they did but 2024 is even *past* the point where they were originally saying ‘max life.’
But the long lifetime wasn’t extraordinary in comparison to the other probes that flew to outer planets. They all lasted notable long.
The simpler Pioneers transmitted up until 95 and 97, while being launched 5 years before the Voyagers.
So in the 90s, it already was expectable that the Voyagers would live as long as the Pioneers, at very least.
My English isn’t best, what I meant to say is:
The Pioneers and even older probes could be used as indicators.
If the Pioneers had developed problems after a certain time, the Voyager team had enough time to keep an eye at something that may fail in near future.
And think about countermeasures.
“the Voyager team had enough time to keep an eye at something that may fail in near future. And think about countermeasures.”
They did! Things have failed on the Voyagers! Lots! On V1 alone, they lost the backup X-band amp, one of the star trackers, one of the onboard oscillators, all of the primary pitch/roll/yaw thrusters, a large portion of the secondary FDS memory, and a bunch of other components were showing signs of severe degradation.
They are *past the point* where that mattered. If they had just kept operating by the book, the spacecraft would’ve been out of power in the mid-2010s. The best bang-for-the-buck in terms of preparation was figuring out how to deal with the loss of power, which they’ve done *incredibly* well.
No matter what, they only had a few years left. They’re hoping to keep one of the spacecraft going until the 50th anniversary, but it’s just for PR. Debugging a multiply-broken computer functionally 48 hours away is just not practical. I mean, note what I said above – they’ve *already lost* portions of the FDS. The fact that they’re even saying “well, **maybe**…” is a testament to how prepared they’ve been.
“Debugging a multiply-broken computer functionally 48 hours away is just not practical.”
Great to put on the resume though.
Voyager 1 where are you now
Looking back at home and weeping
Cold and alone in the dark void
Winding down and bleeping
Ever dimmer ever thinner
Feebly cheeping in the solar winds
I’ll turn you up
Sail on sail on sail on
On past the howling storms
Through electric orange skies
And blinding methane rain
Sail on
I’ll turn you up
*applause*
Bravo Maestro!
One wonders where their journey will end. And will Johnnie B Good rock another part of the universe when something finds the gold record and puts it on the turntable and turns the speakers up…
It turns out the corrupt bits of memory happen to be storing the self ident information..
Voyager now identifies itself as V’ger
We’ll just have to build a replacement, then. Better equipment, intended to last long enough for an interstellar mission… Maybe we can call it Nomad ;)
Roykirk is already working on it
You should do a little homework before you criticize. The system is 46 years old. There is (or was when I worked there) a bread board FDS in a back room somewhere at JPL. It is also 46 years old. These were custom hand made (including the spacecraft hardware) computers. There is probably no one left alive who was on the design team. I 1960’s when these were designed, there was no simulation capabilities like we have today, just the breadboard. How much stuff do you have that is 46 years+ in age still working.
I was On the mission control team as DSE (Data Systen Engineer) and monitored (in real time) the FDS as one of my tasks. The design team did the best they could on the reduced budget they had and limited tech of the time.
JPL-ACE, Retired
You mean you didn’t run SPICE on your slide rule?!?! :-)
Putting aside the radiation effects of the equipment has anyone considered micro impacts striking voyager and what kind of damage that could have caused? I’m not a specialist of any kind but just pointing out another possibility for failure.
Hey, tech hasn’t always grown on trees like it does today. Voyager 1’s development was a long time ago!
Are they talking about a simulation of the FDS in particular, or the entire spacecraft?
Regarding the FDS alone: I’d be amazed if one doesn’t already exist. It’s easy. I mean, send me the specs for the FDS and _I’ll_ do one. I’ve already done a crude emulator for the OBP, one of the computers the Hubble used, for fun. http://cowlark.com/2021-07-03-obp-simulator/index.html
In fact, it’s so easy that I’m sure they’ve thought of this. You could use such a thing to test for some failure modes — i.e. if you hold a given memory bit high or low, does the simulation reproduce the same symptoms that we’re seeing from the real thing? But chances are it won’t, because the fault is probably interacting with other systems. (The Voyagers have three different computers: the FDS, the CCS, and the AACS, all redundant. The other FDS is faulty, unfortunately, so they can’t just switch to it.) (Fun fact: the FDS was one of the first computers in space to use CMOS RAM rather than core rope. They were so worried about power loss that there’s a hard line from the radiothermal generator to the RAM.)
Ref: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19880069935 (Computers in Spaceflight: the NASA experience. 400 very dense pages.)
The Apollo systems are now so thoroughly understood that you can do moon landings in Orbiter with a virtualised AGC running the original software. So producing a full system simulation of Voyager is perfectly doable. You’d just have to get the full software dumps and specs for the systems, assuming they still exist…
BTW: seems the Voyager software was written in Fortran V and assembler. It was done on contract by Caltech, who still owns the copyright, and _that’s_ why it’s not readily available. Also why we can’t have nice things.
Hey if worse comes to worst, buy a cake, have a retirement party and shoot a gold watch at it at 18km/s. Voyager has done far more than it was meant to so if it finally does pack it in let’s just be glad of all the extra we got out of it.
Vacuous gibberish. Voyager was designed in the 70s using 60s technology. It’s planned mission life was about 12 years. It was still operating for over 45 years and it’s mission changed remotely multiple times. in the harshest of environments with extreme difficulty. To suggest that somehow the engineers failed at anything is to self-admit to remarkable degree of shortsighted ignorance.
Dude, what are you even talking about?
Voyager is one of the most successful science missions ever. Personally, I think it is the single most successful, but I’m a bit oldschool. When this flight was launched, they didnt even have the error correcting decode hardware on earth. (It was developed inflight, the hardware didn’t exist).
Cost saving admins were not the limitation. In 1977 these folks were almost smelting the sand to make the semiconductors…
SMH
New Horizons is still worth checking in on:
https://pluto.jhuapl.edu/
There is something going on… Couple hours ago DSN received Voyager1 at whooping 160 bps (instead of 40bps like since problem occurred). The hope is on.
“Science data are returned to earth in real time at 160 bps.” https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/
FWIW as I write this data return is at 14 bps. https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
Oh noes! Our thoughts goes out to Voyager.
With any luck it will receive and act on them in 20 hours and 33 minutes.
My hat off to the engineers that designed a spacecraft that lasted 46 years so far, has gone farther than anything else humans created, survived a hostile environment like no other all while feeding data back to earth.
Anyone brave enough to build something like that today?
Bring it in, fix it and put it back. It’s a simple problem.
Have they tried unplugging it and plugging it back in again?
All jokes aside, I remember at least one potentially “serious failure” was fixed with a system reset.
The planned 5 year mission turned into 45 years. I hope they’ve launched or are planning a 100 year mission.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” -Greek Proverb
I probably won’t live long enough to see data returned from a probe sent to the heliopause, and I don’t know what use future generations would have for such data, but I think we should try to collect it for them.
I’d say we got good value out it. It’s like when you buy a new car and it lasts 3x the life you anticipated it to live; it’s exciting and you enjoy it. But no matter how much you glue and tape those old slippers, at some point you have to come to terms with the fact that they are gone beyond their expected life.
So long V1. May your eternal sleep be peaceful and comfortable. Hopefully you’ll cross paths with someone/something who can revive you so you can share more on who sent you out I the first place.
I’m sad to see our connection to Voyager is about to be lost.
On my wall is what I feel is the greatest image ever taken. The Pale Blue Dot – February 14 1989.
Whenever I feel things overwhelming me, I take a moment to examine that photo – realizing that how small my problems are.
Good luck and Godspeed, Voyager!
The boy sat cross-legged on the floor of his family’s starship, poring over the strange metal disc in his hands. His parents had found it drifting between the stars, plucked it from the void, a shining curiosity.
The symbols etched into its surface were like none the boy had seen. He traced a finger along the radiating lines, the pulses and dashes, the crude silhouette of the craft that had borne this disc across the galaxy. What manner of beings had sent forth this message in a bottle?
The disc’s golden surface shimmered under the starlight. The boy held his breath. Tiny images danced across the foil – bipedal figures, great cities, diagrams of atoms and DNA. A record of an entire world, an entire species. Their wisdom, their folly, their hopes crystallized and cast into the endless night.
The boy’s hearts raced. In his hands he held a mirror of all he dreamed the cosmos contained. All the adventure and discovery that called him from home out to the beckoning stars. The wonders and dangers and possibilities.
He closed the disc and held it tight, an emissary from the infinite. No matter how far he roamed, he would carry a part of that uncharted world with him always. As the ship sailed on through strange skies, the boy dreamed of life.
I think a lot of people are missing some very important points. It is bloody AMAZING that it is still going — even in a diminished capacity. The Voyager space crafts were originally designed to last *at least 5 YEARS* not *5 DECADES*. This is on par with having your grandfather’s 1975 Ford F-150 pickup turn the odometer to 5,000,000 *original* miles! What I have to say is GOOD GOING NASA FLIGHT ENGINEERS! Just say’n…