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I highly recommend "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022), a documentary about the team maintaining these spacecraft as the end of their mission draws nearer. It adds a tremendous amount of context to articles like this.
The engineering involved in making these spacecraft durable for as long as they have been is truly awe inspiring. As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years. I wish it wasn't.
Trailer: https://itsquieterfilm.com/trailer
Look like it's part of an Apple TV subscription https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/its-quieter-in-the-twilight/um...
As an OT systems architect I am totally floored. We design and plan for systems lifecycle on a ~20yr scale, with OT hardware (not the controls hardware, that’s closer to 10-20) lifecycle much shorter (~5 yr). Obvious on Earth we can afford luxuries of adopting new things, which actually shortens a total system lifecycle since new tech drives new designs.
I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.
Video games used to be like this. Once you built the "gold master" CD/DVD/cartridge/etc it was out of your hands. It was kinda nice to have a concrete end to the project [1]. Nowadays, everything is on the 'net, you can send patches, dlc, etc and the notion of a game being "done" is murky.
[1] There was, however, one game I worked on where they had to pull the boxes from stores (delivered, but not yet for sale) and swap out the disk in order to release a critical fix that was discovered too late. Fun times (:
> As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years.
Yep - at my least job I worked on three products, only one of which is still running.
The job before that still has their main product running, so I guess I'm at 50% (not including my current job).
The best Voyagers documentation (long form) i ever seen:
>>NASA's Voyager Mission: Remastered [4K] https://youtu.be/M62kajY-ln0
That documentary was fantastic. Another good resource is this paper from 2016 on what all the equipment/computing systems on Voyager do and what the team had done to keep the mission going as of that point. https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf
The error correction on the signal must be great for 15 billion miles+ distance
The signal we receive is about one RF photon per second per square meter.
Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away. Voyager 2 is over 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) from Earth. In fact, due to this distance, it takes over 23 hours to get a radio signal from Earth to Voyager 1, and 19½ hours to Voyager 2.
I have a special place in my heart for the Voyagers. They were launched just a few weeks after I was born, so I never have to remember how long they've been flying.
And when I was 9 or 10, I took a tour of JPL. They sent me home with an envelope of about 300 8x10 pictures, many of which were from the Voyager missions (but no Neptune pics because it hadn't gotten there yet!).
Those pictures decorated my walls until I left for college.
I'll be sad when they finally shut down the last instruments and the Voyagers go silent, speeding through space with a message of peace.
Yup, and “pale blue dot.” Knew I wanted to work in that field at ~7 and ~47, but somehow forgot at ~17. Guess I didn’t appreciate at the time how computers and internet would work their way into everything. Believe/thought I needed to become a physicist, an interesting subject but not as a career.
Both voyagers have golden records on them - a copper disk that is gold-plated that has a bunch of images and messages from earth. Carl Sagan was the lead on picking what was on the disk. It shows some basic math, phoots, and has recordings of people saying hello from across the world in different languages- https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
Created by NASA with consulting from Carl Sagen, and his wife, Ann Druyan, contained two culturally important works of music: Johnny B. Good, and The Well-Tempered Clavier - Bach, by Glenn Gould.
There was a cartoon, in OMNI magazine, were two scientists look at each other after decoding the first S.E.T.I Message: "Send More chuck Berry."
Reminds me of the opening to one of my favorite games of my childhood!
To motivate deep space travel we should decide these records are dangerous and try to track them down (after voyager is out of range for radio control).
It's mind blowing that engineering that took place almost 50 years ago is still floating through space, giving us valuable data. It's depressing to realize that the style of engineering that accomplished such a feat is all but dead.
Look up golden age fallacy. Different projects have different requirements. You're selectively remembering the pieces of software that survived 50 years and forgetting the ones that didn't. I'm sure some projects written today will survive 50 years.
I don’t know that it’s a Golden Age fallacy here.
Few people wax poetic about the IRS master file or Air Traffic Control systems. These systems are/were crucial and ancient but survived with hardware upgrades and love and care of dedicated staff.
The Voyager was deployed once and the hardware has survived for decades. NASA flight control software of that era is a different league of fault tolerance and engineering.
Writing it is also painful by modern software standards.
No, I'm well aware of those and appreciate them. There's just very few examples of anything resembling that being created today (the social and professional incentives to do so have been phased out of the culture).
Nearly everything now is fast and cheap "money money money." We're living in a collapsing civilization. It's uncomfortable to think about, certainly, but it's a reality nonetheless.
The very values that have brought us here have been abandoned in favor of delusional thinking, greed, and shortsightedness in pursuit of ephemera like money and status. Where you do see some flicker of these values, more often than not, it's just marketing disguised as sincerity.
A negative outlook aside, I think it's very possible to do things in a way that have a time horizon of decades. I'm trying to do that with the things I'm building, but there's far less "ra ra" for that then there is for the inverse.
yeah... but there is a counterargument. we can't go back to the moon. We did, now we can't.
> It's depressing to realize that the style of engineering that accomplished such a feat is all but dead.
The engineers behind the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter operating overhead may like to have a word with you.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mars-reconnaissance-orbite...
Unfortunately, that word is probably going to be "Are you hiring?"
The style... the right stuff, the get it done, so many inspiring challenges, and tragic accidents. Amazing. I went to Kennedy, and spent the whole time looking up, except when I was on the bus, and the bus driver was mentioning my hat which said "Radius Rocket" on it.
Love everything about Voyager, but some lazy editing in the article. It opens with them "cruising through interstellar space for more than 47 years" and then later mentions that they only reached interstellar space in 2012 and 2018. The project deserves better, even in a puff piece!
I hope & wonder that if some spaceship find this space object a thousand or a million years from now (a-la Star Trek), the captain will tell with a stern voice (ofc like Patrick Stewart's) to the Science Officer "calculate the trajectory of the object, and give the coordinates to the Helm. then engage with Warp 9. I will be in my quarters getting some tea".
EDIT: I hope it's Jean-Luc and not The Borg!!
What would be found here in a thousand years much less a million?
My attitude is that it's something similar to getting ready for the end of the world by putting money in a savings account. If the money (or gold under your bed, cans of beans in the basement or even a pistol in your nightstand) does any good then it's not the end of the world.
If the universe is so crowded or so good at finding things like voyager that it's found in a meaningful (i.e. before humanity goes extinct or joins the godhead) time frame then we would have that encounter if voyager existed or not.
> calculate the trajectory of the object
Easier said than done. The Earth will be nowhere near where it is today. I assume such advanced civilization would be able to do the calculations, but it's going to be tricky. I hope they share with us their ways to solve the n-body problem.
It's spooky to know that it will outlive Earth and likely be the last remaining physical evidence that humans were ever here.
Unfortunately the sort of exponential advance of technology we imagined through Star Trek seems to have been overoptimistic. If humans ever leave the solar system it'll be on something like a generational ship, or in some kind of freezedried/informational form where we're reconstituted much later at our destination.
I assume you are aware of the plot of the first Star Trek movie (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur...)? Picard was not involved however...
"We determine that previous generations of earthlings believed spacecraft could be powered by lumps of lead. Silly earthlings."
It might also be used by the Deceptions to record history in an attempt to prevent the Autobots from winning the war in Cybertron.
(Assuming my hazy memories of Beast Wars are correct)
> The Voyagers are powered by heat from decaying plutonium, which is converted into electricity. Each year, the aging spacecraft lose about 4 watts of power.
From the article. This is not really correct. The plutonium doesn't decay that fast. Its half life is about 87 years. So it's still way above half. I Unfortunately the thermoelectric converters that are losing efficiency too. Otherwise there'd still be enough power for a long time. Still pretty awesome they lasted so long of course.
I wonder if they could use a time-sharing approach. Instead of permanently shutting down instruments, they could run different sets, with a maximum of three at a time.
Take a day for them to send commands. If anything goes wrong and they use too much power, that's it.
Could the heat changes from being powered on/off multiple times not risk damage?
[dupe] Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43274184
Curious how many people were still working full-time on that mission.
When I saw the headline, I was briefly worried this is DOGE...
Shhhhhh... seriously ... don't give the clowns ideas
Beep twice to resign.
Same concept, to keep things operating.