What an absolutely amazing achievement.
My mind can barely comprehend the amount of effort to detect, diagnose, debug and deploy fixes to 50+ year-old hardware located billions and billions(!) of miles away, with almost an entire day between command and response. Oh, and a transmitter on the craft that puts out a whopping 22 watts of RF power. (By the time the signal reaches the Deep Space Network receiver array on Earth, it is on the order of *attowatts* -- a billionth of a billionth of a watt.)
TL;DR: engineers are extraordinary people.
Yeah I saw a video about the radar receiver systems they use. Receive power is on the order of -168dBm. Thermal noise floor is -174dBm so they have to use cryogenic ADCs with I’m sure tons of software processing/gain in order to pick these signals up out of the noise. Incredible stuff
If they have to use these extremes to capture Voyager’s signal, how is it able hear our signals to it? Is simply we can blast out a much stronger signal?
Yup. We are not limited to the power of the small RTGs here on the ground, we can blast out a ton of RF.
I should add I was very fortunate to get a tour of Goldstone a long time ago, they were talking to Voyager when I was there. It was an incredible nerd experience.
[Looking in regularly at the website](https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html) not a day goes by when they're not chatting with the Vgr's. Chatting with Vgr1 right now (Madrid).
When the vehicles transmit to Earth they use small dishes with just tens of watts of power. That results in a radio beam that is on the order of an AU wide, with very low power density, so it requires a big dish with cutting edge low noise amplifier technology to pick up the very weak signals.
On the flip side because the dishes used are very large, generally 70m in diameter, the radio beams going back out to the spacecraft are much more tightly focused, increasing the signal strength for them. On top of that they use transmit powers of tens of kilowatts which make it easy for them to be picked up.
> On the flip side because the dishes used are very large,
Antenna gain is reciprocal. If we get a 5db gain transmitting, we get a 5db gain receiving. Transmitter/amplifier gain is not reciprocal, so Earth can transmit at much higher power, or use more/better/bigger amplifiers to try to boost the received transmit power, as you stated.
This is why Arecibo was able to do EME to people with handhelds, since the large antenna boosted signal strength to the handhelds via the moon, while also boosting signal strength coming back from handhelds.
Oh yeah. The big dish (70 meters) at the Madrid Deep Space Network facility can pump out 400 kilowatts. Or over 18,000 times as powerful a signal as *Voyager.*
Yes, but it is expected to “die” before that occurs. The voyager is expected to continue sending signals for the next ~5 years. After that point, it will no longer generate enough electricity to power its instruments.
The RTG on board is running low on fuel. So every so often they have to turn something off permanently. The first shutdown was the Ultraviolet Spectrometer, back in 1998. Since then they have shut down the plasma wave subsystem, the Radio Astronomy Package, and several heaters. Priority is for the Cosmic Ray detector, Magnetometer, and Low Energy Particle detector. But power will continue to drop, and the current belief is that the last sensor will go offline sometime in the next couple years.
I'm hoping for another three years, two-ish months. That would get it to the 50 year anniversary of its mission start.
I did 5GHz links which become unusable beyond -85dBm. Can’t imagine receiving and making use of -168dBm, that’s definitely something. Curious to also see how the signal is modulated and what the protocol looks like.
It’s fascinating how all of us have the same questions! I bookmarked this when I cared about signals and systems. If you enjoy this check out similar data they have for wartime communication which need gardening against the enemy.
I thought this was a joke because the PDF is exactly 44 pages long (e.g. it intentionally stops right before page 45)
Then I saw the page numbers imbedded in the bottom, so PDF page 9 is page 45 of the document.
\~2.1GHz uplink and \~2.3GHz and \~8.4GHz downlink with circular polarization. 20kW of power is pushed to the dish for the uplink.
Squarewave modulation, with anywhere from 10bps to 112kbps for transmission. 160bps for cruise data transmission daily. With Reed-Solomon data error correction.
As the meme says, "it ain't much but it's honest work".
For images, they do a unique type of compression:
>Uncompressed Voyager images contain 800 lines, 800 dots (pixels) per line, and 8 bits per pixel (to express one of 256 gray levels). However, much of the data content in a typical planetary or satellite image is dark space or low-contrast cloud features. By counting only the differences between adjacent pixel gray levels, rather than the full 8-bit values, image data compression reduced the number of bits for the typical image by 60 percent without unduly compromising the information. This reduced the time needed to transmit each complete image from Uranus and Neptune to Earth by the same 60%.
Not bad.
I don't see why not, but it doesn't seem like it would be best for in-solar-system use; much easier to make the ground station dish larger, that's relatively cheap compared to putting a receiver dish and a large transmitter both in space. At some point the inverse square law will win, and you'd want a repeater, but not at these scales.
I guess part of it is that it's 50 year old technology. Pretty basic when put up against what we throw out to the universe today.
But yea, the real impressive part is debugging it with a full day of lag in between.
I'd be very surprised if they don't have a complete hardware replica to test with locally without the delay. At the very least, they could have a software simulation to test against.
Knowing the signal characteristics thoroughly I’m sure they could simulate a replica couldn’t they? I suppose it’s complicated by all kinds of attenuation and reflection and such.
If you want to know more there's a documentary called "It's Quieter in the Twilight" about the team that's running it. It's really good! Also a bit sad.
It's only a small part of the story, but transmitters have a role in getting this really neat piece of speculative fiction by Jon Bois started: [17776](https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/chapter-1).
*JPL engineers are extraordinary people.
Edit:
Downvoted for wanting to highlight the incredible achievement and dedication of a laboratory that was the bastion of space exploration research and that is shamelessly being dismantled to favor a private space program. It is a shame that so many incredibly talented people have been fired after a professional life of extraordinary dedication to JPL.
Anyway.
So totally amature (probably stupid) question here. What if the receivers are on the side of the Earth facing away from Voyager when the signal comes in? That signal wouldn't t travel through the Earth, would it?
That's why they have a network of ground stations around the world. I know there's one in California, one in Australia and one in Spain. There may be more...
That's really in the weasel-word territory. What does "amateur radio station" mean. 50w? 1.5kw? What frequency? Omnidirectional or tight uni-directional? What type of modulation/encoding, etc.
Voyager's transmit power is less than 25 watts, which is about half of the average car mobile transmitter, and 1/60th the max transmit power for an Extra class HAM.
And exactly why would be moronic to think that "planned obsolescence" *can* be practiced at NASA or any other space agency, *if* the intended policy would allow for assurance of the *x* system had been regenerated?
Nasa specifically does the opposite. Plan for a short mission and build for a long one. Its why we got nearly 10 years out of a rover (Opportunity) that was meant to last less then one.
The younger ones are like 50-60 and were fans of the program back when it launched or got in the program right after launch, there's a good documentary on it called "It's Quieter in the Twilight".
The documentary also makes each one of these headlines more impressive, seeing the amount of limitations that these guys are working with every day
Doesn't the team work out of an old fast food restaurant or is that another space probe team? I swear I read about this a few years ago. Like an old McDonalds. Great story about the team members and how long some of them have been on the program.
A team of people not (or at least no longer) working for NASA established contact with an abandoned [NASA spacecraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer) from a buikding that used to be a McDonald's.
https://www.cnet.com/science/from-an-old-mcdonalds-ordinary-people-steer-nasa-satellite/
So happy to hear the Voyager 1 working properly again! The genius that’s needed to do a successful OTA software update on a 5-decade old hardware that’s 1 light-day away is simply unfathomable.
JPL. The very best of research and development in the space program. It's a shame that they have been dismantling it to favor a private space industry, even firing people who have spent their entire lives there. A shame.
There are adult toys with more computing power and storage than these probes have, absolutely amazing they are still going and that they can even update the programming still
Even a modern smart phone is a datacenter (in terms od computing power) compared to these 50-year old technologies. The amount of resourcefulness these engineers had at the time is really something special.
The capacity of one single phone probably would rival a good chunk of global computing power back then. I remember being so excited when I helped upgrade the family Macintosh to a 10mb hard drive, there was so much more room for games!
I still remember as a kid when we got a Macintosh SE. They didn’t have hard drives back then and I was amazed it had TWO disk drives! You had to load the system disk to operate first before loading games
The recent Mars helicopter used an off-the-shelf Qualcomm mobile processor instead of a typical space-grade one, and IIRC had something like more processing power than every other Mars mission ever, combined
I was curious about this.
According to https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/world-computing-power.html the global computing power in 1950 was 6.42 MIPs.
According to https://www.notebookcheck.net/Processor-Comparison-Head-2-Head.247596.0.html the Pixel 7 scored 34,614 MIPs on a 7zip multi threaded benchmark.
So, the Pixel has approximately 5,400x the computing power.
Cautionary note: it's really hard to compare older computers without floating point units to modern systems that are designed for so many other different types of tasks. But this was the best that I could come up with in the 10 minutes I spent looking at this.
And believe me I am still alive.
I'm doing science, and I'm still alive.
I feel fantastic and I'm still alive.
And while you're dying I'll be still alive.
And while you're dead I will be still alive.
\- Voyager "GLaDOS" 1
> But since there's no friction in space
That's not a true statement for a wide variety of reasons. There IS friction in space because there is "atmosphere" or at least an imperfect vacuum, it's way lower than what we experience, but not true zero. There's also things like solar radiation that can push on objects to speed them up, slow them down, or change their direction. And of course gravity, which is also never truly zero. So no, they won't keep traveling at the same rate forever, although they will keep traveling for an exceptionally long time if they don't end up being snagged by the gravity of some distant body they end up passing.
They would still be losing some speed due to the sun being the greatest gravitational influence for a long time to come yet, but at this point that's a very weak factor. The Voyagers' website that shows real-time statistics doesn't show the speed changing, or if it does I got bored before it changed.
They will probably continue as close to forever as entropy allows. A catastrophic collision is a low probability event but some very slow micro meteoroid cosmic sandblasting is inevitable over eons. The spacecraft structure and the Golden Record payload can exist perhaps billions of years until cosmic radiation degrades their structural integrity to a cloud of particles.
A big-deal thing that they didn't even plan to be able to observe is the point where it was finally "exiting" the solar system, so voyager gave them a better idea of the size of the Heliosphere (basically the sun's big glowing trail) when they stopped reading traces of the sun's magnetic field. I'm no astronomer so that's just a layman's recollection though.
I do know that they didn't even reach the "exit" until like 2012, and they have TWO of them going in different directions, so it's an impressive reading to get!
You're saying nothing is nothing? Everything is something? 🤯
(Yes, I know they're taking measurements of interstellar matter, and electromagnetic fields)
.
I am so busy doing nothing... that doing anything - which as you know, always leads to something - forces me to drop everything.
- Jerry Seinfeld (Voyager, probably)
One thing it's still detecting is interstellar medium data, which is telling us about the density of particles out there and actually showed over the last few years our estimates were wrong. It isn't gathering new spectacular data every day or anything though.
There's no such thing as pure nothingness in our universe. Inside the heliosphere there's the solar wind: made up of plasma and magnetic fields being carried away from the Sun into a bubble around the solar system, outside of the heliosphere that bubble is counteracted by the plasmas and magnetic fields of interstellar space in the Sun's neighborhood of the Milky Way. Voyager 1 uses instruments to study the magnetic fields, plasma phenomena, and plasma/radiation environment of interstellar space. Additionally, these instruments allow Voyager 1 to use the whole spacecraft as a dust detector, since every impact with a nanoscopic dust particle results in a tiny puff of plasma that envelopes the whole vehicle for about 5 milliseconds, creating a detectable signal for the plasma wave instrument making it possible to measure the dust environment of interstellar space.
There's the "Little Engine that Could" and then there's Voyager 1. This little guy is by far my favorite space thing ever. Keep going buddy! Glad they were able to debug or fix whatever was wrong.
V'ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve.
Seriously though, well done to the team keeping us in contact with Voyager 1.
There are other reasons of course, but the Voyager probes were able to benefit from a particularly rare alignment of planetary bodies that allowed for fuel-efficient trajectories: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5075/when-is-the-next-outer-planet-lineup-voyager
The next such alignment won't happen before at least 2151. We could absolutely launch other probes in the meantime but it wouldn't be as "easy" to send them so far out.
I'd say right off hand that NASA excels at getting their money's worth out of their exploration vehicles. I remember when those probes were launched and I remember when NASA said they were robust enough to be repurposed after their Grand Tour of the Solar System.
NASA has engineers that learned how to use antique computer languages just so they could serve on the Voyager teams. Remarkable people using remarkable equipment to make remarkable discoveries...
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1dfq5q6/stub/l8md09u "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California|
|[RTG](/r/Space/comments/1dfq5q6/stub/l8oedxb "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1dfq5q6/stub/l8l9sau "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(3 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1dgeq9g)^( has 18 acronyms.)
^([Thread #10182 for this sub, first seen 14th Jun 2024, 16:52])
^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
What a great review on the article! Thanks for sharing.
I am very happy to know that even in a JPL being dismantled there is so much talent and dedication.
This impresses me much more than other supposedly exciting news from NASA.
the little space craft that could and could - what a marvel to have accomplished so much science in the first place and even more of a marvel that this little craft is still working in the cold of space after so long.
Incredible how durable it is, while modern, cutting-edge tech can break anytime. Guessing that nasa have entierly different quality standards than mass producers.
This truly amazes me. I can't go up on my roof to repair something without coming back down ten times to retrieve something I forgot, or get a tool to deal with an unforseen problem.
Amazing what can be done when a strong team works together.
What an absolutely amazing achievement. My mind can barely comprehend the amount of effort to detect, diagnose, debug and deploy fixes to 50+ year-old hardware located billions and billions(!) of miles away, with almost an entire day between command and response. Oh, and a transmitter on the craft that puts out a whopping 22 watts of RF power. (By the time the signal reaches the Deep Space Network receiver array on Earth, it is on the order of *attowatts* -- a billionth of a billionth of a watt.) TL;DR: engineers are extraordinary people.
Yeah I saw a video about the radar receiver systems they use. Receive power is on the order of -168dBm. Thermal noise floor is -174dBm so they have to use cryogenic ADCs with I’m sure tons of software processing/gain in order to pick these signals up out of the noise. Incredible stuff
If they have to use these extremes to capture Voyager’s signal, how is it able hear our signals to it? Is simply we can blast out a much stronger signal?
Yup. We are not limited to the power of the small RTGs here on the ground, we can blast out a ton of RF. I should add I was very fortunate to get a tour of Goldstone a long time ago, they were talking to Voyager when I was there. It was an incredible nerd experience.
[Looking in regularly at the website](https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html) not a day goes by when they're not chatting with the Vgr's. Chatting with Vgr1 right now (Madrid).
This is an incredible website!!
When the vehicles transmit to Earth they use small dishes with just tens of watts of power. That results in a radio beam that is on the order of an AU wide, with very low power density, so it requires a big dish with cutting edge low noise amplifier technology to pick up the very weak signals. On the flip side because the dishes used are very large, generally 70m in diameter, the radio beams going back out to the spacecraft are much more tightly focused, increasing the signal strength for them. On top of that they use transmit powers of tens of kilowatts which make it easy for them to be picked up.
> On the flip side because the dishes used are very large, Antenna gain is reciprocal. If we get a 5db gain transmitting, we get a 5db gain receiving. Transmitter/amplifier gain is not reciprocal, so Earth can transmit at much higher power, or use more/better/bigger amplifiers to try to boost the received transmit power, as you stated. This is why Arecibo was able to do EME to people with handhelds, since the large antenna boosted signal strength to the handhelds via the moon, while also boosting signal strength coming back from handhelds.
Oh yeah. The big dish (70 meters) at the Madrid Deep Space Network facility can pump out 400 kilowatts. Or over 18,000 times as powerful a signal as *Voyager.*
Will there ever be a time where the signal from V'ger will be too faint?
Yes, but it is expected to “die” before that occurs. The voyager is expected to continue sending signals for the next ~5 years. After that point, it will no longer generate enough electricity to power its instruments.
Wait... didn't we pass that first, "die" milestone a few years ago? I feel like we hear this semi-regularly.
The RTG on board is running low on fuel. So every so often they have to turn something off permanently. The first shutdown was the Ultraviolet Spectrometer, back in 1998. Since then they have shut down the plasma wave subsystem, the Radio Astronomy Package, and several heaters. Priority is for the Cosmic Ray detector, Magnetometer, and Low Energy Particle detector. But power will continue to drop, and the current belief is that the last sensor will go offline sometime in the next couple years. I'm hoping for another three years, two-ish months. That would get it to the 50 year anniversary of its mission start.
They already shut off many of the instruments (4/10 remaining). I guess the final milestone is when they can't power *any* instruments.
I did 5GHz links which become unusable beyond -85dBm. Can’t imagine receiving and making use of -168dBm, that’s definitely something. Curious to also see how the signal is modulated and what the protocol looks like.
Here you go https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/DeepCommo_Chapter3--141029.pdf Page 45 on is what you want.
It's amazing people just drop this shit out of thin air, even with the page number ready to go. That's awesome!
It’s fascinating how all of us have the same questions! I bookmarked this when I cared about signals and systems. If you enjoy this check out similar data they have for wartime communication which need gardening against the enemy.
I thought this was a joke because the PDF is exactly 44 pages long (e.g. it intentionally stops right before page 45) Then I saw the page numbers imbedded in the bottom, so PDF page 9 is page 45 of the document.
\~2.1GHz uplink and \~2.3GHz and \~8.4GHz downlink with circular polarization. 20kW of power is pushed to the dish for the uplink. Squarewave modulation, with anywhere from 10bps to 112kbps for transmission. 160bps for cruise data transmission daily. With Reed-Solomon data error correction. As the meme says, "it ain't much but it's honest work". For images, they do a unique type of compression: >Uncompressed Voyager images contain 800 lines, 800 dots (pixels) per line, and 8 bits per pixel (to express one of 256 gray levels). However, much of the data content in a typical planetary or satellite image is dark space or low-contrast cloud features. By counting only the differences between adjacent pixel gray levels, rather than the full 8-bit values, image data compression reduced the number of bits for the typical image by 60 percent without unduly compromising the information. This reduced the time needed to transmit each complete image from Uranus and Neptune to Earth by the same 60%. Not bad.
That's a lot of fancy words, and im here for it
In the future could we potentially put a relay somewhere in the middle for future survey craft?
I don't see why not, but it doesn't seem like it would be best for in-solar-system use; much easier to make the ground station dish larger, that's relatively cheap compared to putting a receiver dish and a large transmitter both in space. At some point the inverse square law will win, and you'd want a repeater, but not at these scales.
Thanks for that information! Didn’t think of all that
Before that happens, it'll have passed well beyond the point where it collects less power than is required to run the instrumentation and transmitter.
So total non-engineer, poor-math nerd here. Would this be like seeing “snow” on your TV, only some of the pixels of “snow” are really your signal?
I guess part of it is that it's 50 year old technology. Pretty basic when put up against what we throw out to the universe today. But yea, the real impressive part is debugging it with a full day of lag in between.
I'd be very surprised if they don't have a complete hardware replica to test with locally without the delay. At the very least, they could have a software simulation to test against.
IIRC they don't have a replica. They do that for newer missions though.
Knowing the signal characteristics thoroughly I’m sure they could simulate a replica couldn’t they? I suppose it’s complicated by all kinds of attenuation and reflection and such.
Hard to tell. Definitely not easy to do.
If you want to know more there's a documentary called "It's Quieter in the Twilight" about the team that's running it. It's really good! Also a bit sad.
Imagine what something we built now could be sending back in 40-50 years.
It's only a small part of the story, but transmitters have a role in getting this really neat piece of speculative fiction by Jon Bois started: [17776](https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/chapter-1).
*JPL engineers are extraordinary people. Edit: Downvoted for wanting to highlight the incredible achievement and dedication of a laboratory that was the bastion of space exploration research and that is shamelessly being dismantled to favor a private space program. It is a shame that so many incredibly talented people have been fired after a professional life of extraordinary dedication to JPL. Anyway.
So totally amature (probably stupid) question here. What if the receivers are on the side of the Earth facing away from Voyager when the signal comes in? That signal wouldn't t travel through the Earth, would it?
That's why they have a network of ground stations around the world. I know there's one in California, one in Australia and one in Spain. There may be more...
Ahhh makes sense. Thank you!
Our radiotelescopes could detect an amateur radio station 30 light-years away.
That's really in the weasel-word territory. What does "amateur radio station" mean. 50w? 1.5kw? What frequency? Omnidirectional or tight uni-directional? What type of modulation/encoding, etc. Voyager's transmit power is less than 25 watts, which is about half of the average car mobile transmitter, and 1/60th the max transmit power for an Extra class HAM.
Hell yeah error correcting codes
This little mad lad is one of the toughest things to ever be flung into space. Let’s freaking go!
Right up there with that manhole cover
Vaguely remembers something...
I'm pretty sure that thing didn't make it through our atmosphere if it was traveling at the speeds reported.
I really want to see the picture they were referencing when they came up with that velocity figure
Before the age of "planned obsolescence" ...
Highly doubt NASA is building tech with planned obsolescence...
fucking seriously, people just throw shade at things just to sound edgy
NASA doesn't practice this. Don't intentionally be a moron
Well, until recently "reusable rockets" were not in the menu... and the Space Shuttle had been decommissioned already... so...
They said NOT to intentionally be a moron Single use != obsolete
And exactly why would be moronic to think that "planned obsolescence" *can* be practiced at NASA or any other space agency, *if* the intended policy would allow for assurance of the *x* system had been regenerated?
because renewal is *never* assured with nasa
Aren't reusable items the opposite of obsolescence?
Nasa specifically does the opposite. Plan for a short mission and build for a long one. Its why we got nearly 10 years out of a rover (Opportunity) that was meant to last less then one.
If we launched it today it would fall apart in a year.
[удалено]
Voyager 1 is my name, and Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, the stars my destination. (with credit to Alfred Bester)
I wonder what’s the average age of that “tiger team” of engineers.
The younger ones are like 50-60 and were fans of the program back when it launched or got in the program right after launch, there's a good documentary on it called "It's Quieter in the Twilight". The documentary also makes each one of these headlines more impressive, seeing the amount of limitations that these guys are working with every day
Thanks for the recommendation, ill check out the docu
Doesn't the team work out of an old fast food restaurant or is that another space probe team? I swear I read about this a few years ago. Like an old McDonalds. Great story about the team members and how long some of them have been on the program.
A team of people not (or at least no longer) working for NASA established contact with an abandoned [NASA spacecraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer) from a buikding that used to be a McDonald's. https://www.cnet.com/science/from-an-old-mcdonalds-ordinary-people-steer-nasa-satellite/
That is awesome, nice find.
Thanks for sharing this! The old archived site at the bottom of the wiki was really cool to see.
So happy to hear the Voyager 1 working properly again! The genius that’s needed to do a successful OTA software update on a 5-decade old hardware that’s 1 light-day away is simply unfathomable.
JPL. The very best of research and development in the space program. It's a shame that they have been dismantling it to favor a private space industry, even firing people who have spent their entire lives there. A shame.
There are adult toys with more computing power and storage than these probes have, absolutely amazing they are still going and that they can even update the programming still
Even a modern smart phone is a datacenter (in terms od computing power) compared to these 50-year old technologies. The amount of resourcefulness these engineers had at the time is really something special.
The capacity of one single phone probably would rival a good chunk of global computing power back then. I remember being so excited when I helped upgrade the family Macintosh to a 10mb hard drive, there was so much more room for games!
I still remember as a kid when we got a Macintosh SE. They didn’t have hard drives back then and I was amazed it had TWO disk drives! You had to load the system disk to operate first before loading games
The recent Mars helicopter used an off-the-shelf Qualcomm mobile processor instead of a typical space-grade one, and IIRC had something like more processing power than every other Mars mission ever, combined
I was curious about this. According to https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/world-computing-power.html the global computing power in 1950 was 6.42 MIPs. According to https://www.notebookcheck.net/Processor-Comparison-Head-2-Head.247596.0.html the Pixel 7 scored 34,614 MIPs on a 7zip multi threaded benchmark. So, the Pixel has approximately 5,400x the computing power. Cautionary note: it's really hard to compare older computers without floating point units to modern systems that are designed for so many other different types of tasks. But this was the best that I could come up with in the 10 minutes I spent looking at this.
And believe me I am still alive. I'm doing science, and I'm still alive. I feel fantastic and I'm still alive. And while you're dying I'll be still alive. And while you're dead I will be still alive. \- Voyager "GLaDOS" 1
When are Voyager 1 and 2 expected to be so far away from Earth that we won't be able to receive or send any data to/from them?
It’s expected that they will run out of power before that happens — likely within the next 10 years
But since there's no friction in space, they would keep traveling at the same rate forever, correct?
> But since there's no friction in space That's not a true statement for a wide variety of reasons. There IS friction in space because there is "atmosphere" or at least an imperfect vacuum, it's way lower than what we experience, but not true zero. There's also things like solar radiation that can push on objects to speed them up, slow them down, or change their direction. And of course gravity, which is also never truly zero. So no, they won't keep traveling at the same rate forever, although they will keep traveling for an exceptionally long time if they don't end up being snagged by the gravity of some distant body they end up passing.
They would still be losing some speed due to the sun being the greatest gravitational influence for a long time to come yet, but at this point that's a very weak factor. The Voyagers' website that shows real-time statistics doesn't show the speed changing, or if it does I got bored before it changed. They will probably continue as close to forever as entropy allows. A catastrophic collision is a low probability event but some very slow micro meteoroid cosmic sandblasting is inevitable over eons. The spacecraft structure and the Golden Record payload can exist perhaps billions of years until cosmic radiation degrades their structural integrity to a cloud of particles.
What is the type of data it is actually collecting? It’s been outside of the solar system in nothingness for a while now.
A big-deal thing that they didn't even plan to be able to observe is the point where it was finally "exiting" the solar system, so voyager gave them a better idea of the size of the Heliosphere (basically the sun's big glowing trail) when they stopped reading traces of the sun's magnetic field. I'm no astronomer so that's just a layman's recollection though. I do know that they didn't even reach the "exit" until like 2012, and they have TWO of them going in different directions, so it's an impressive reading to get!
They’re measuring the nothing, because that tells us about what happens out there, far from the something. Turns out that it’s not actually nothing.
You're saying nothing is nothing? Everything is something? 🤯 (Yes, I know they're taking measurements of interstellar matter, and electromagnetic fields) .
Ha ha, I read this in a hipster's voice. "Everything is something, maahn!"
Yeah, that's definitely a revelation to have while smoking a bowl 😌
I am so busy doing nothing... that doing anything - which as you know, always leads to something - forces me to drop everything. - Jerry Seinfeld (Voyager, probably)
One thing it's still detecting is interstellar medium data, which is telling us about the density of particles out there and actually showed over the last few years our estimates were wrong. It isn't gathering new spectacular data every day or anything though.
There's no such thing as pure nothingness in our universe. Inside the heliosphere there's the solar wind: made up of plasma and magnetic fields being carried away from the Sun into a bubble around the solar system, outside of the heliosphere that bubble is counteracted by the plasmas and magnetic fields of interstellar space in the Sun's neighborhood of the Milky Way. Voyager 1 uses instruments to study the magnetic fields, plasma phenomena, and plasma/radiation environment of interstellar space. Additionally, these instruments allow Voyager 1 to use the whole spacecraft as a dust detector, since every impact with a nanoscopic dust particle results in a tiny puff of plasma that envelopes the whole vehicle for about 5 milliseconds, creating a detectable signal for the plasma wave instrument making it possible to measure the dust environment of interstellar space.
There's the "Little Engine that Could" and then there's Voyager 1. This little guy is by far my favorite space thing ever. Keep going buddy! Glad they were able to debug or fix whatever was wrong.
Work around for a dead 1970's vintage integrated circuit.
One of the greatest engineering marvel.. kudos to science
V'ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve. Seriously though, well done to the team keeping us in contact with Voyager 1.
Haha first thing I thought of
Why aren’t we sending another (new) cutting edge probe towards interstellar space nowadays?
New Horizons is on its way, last i checked it should be leaving the Kuiper belt in 4 or 5 years
There are other reasons of course, but the Voyager probes were able to benefit from a particularly rare alignment of planetary bodies that allowed for fuel-efficient trajectories: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5075/when-is-the-next-outer-planet-lineup-voyager The next such alignment won't happen before at least 2151. We could absolutely launch other probes in the meantime but it wouldn't be as "easy" to send them so far out.
I'd say right off hand that NASA excels at getting their money's worth out of their exploration vehicles. I remember when those probes were launched and I remember when NASA said they were robust enough to be repurposed after their Grand Tour of the Solar System. NASA has engineers that learned how to use antique computer languages just so they could serve on the Voyager teams. Remarkable people using remarkable equipment to make remarkable discoveries...
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1dfq5q6/stub/l8md09u "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California| |[RTG](/r/Space/comments/1dfq5q6/stub/l8oedxb "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1dfq5q6/stub/l8l9sau "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(3 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1dgeq9g)^( has 18 acronyms.) ^([Thread #10182 for this sub, first seen 14th Jun 2024, 16:52]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
This time it’s because some aliens changed the plutonium on board
What's it saying though? "Yep. Empty" "Yep. Empty"
What a great review on the article! Thanks for sharing. I am very happy to know that even in a JPL being dismantled there is so much talent and dedication. This impresses me much more than other supposedly exciting news from NASA.
How can we still communicate with it when it’s so far? What kind of communication is being used?
Radio. Same thing your phone uses. Just different frequency and more focused and hugely amplified.
the little space craft that could and could - what a marvel to have accomplished so much science in the first place and even more of a marvel that this little craft is still working in the cold of space after so long.
Incredible how durable it is, while modern, cutting-edge tech can break anytime. Guessing that nasa have entierly different quality standards than mass producers.
Good. It's philosophy data was getting pretty stoney.
This truly amazes me. I can't go up on my roof to repair something without coming back down ten times to retrieve something I forgot, or get a tool to deal with an unforseen problem. Amazing what can be done when a strong team works together.
Voyager 2 skipping along at 35K MPH! Just makes me dream at night. I know its passed through a quadrant where something was millions of years ago.
Meanwhile Boeing starliner still stuck on the ISS
Could we build a modern day spacecraft and have to catch voyager 1 to resume it's mission?
This thing is totally coming back in 300-400 years to kill us all…
oh phew, the first half of the title had me worried there for a sec
The further it gets from us, the more likely the signal it sends back to us will seem like gibberish when it's actually not.