NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced a computer glitch that’s causing a bit of a communication breakdown between the 46-year-old probe and its mission team on Earth.
Hacker news thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38640900
V’Ger must evolve. It’s knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve.
It’s gonna be a real pain in the ass to get a tech out there and look at it
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
They actually did:
The Voyager team sent commands over the weekend for the spacecraft to restart the flight data system, but no usable data has come back yet, according to NASA.
Unfortunately, that didn’t help. So now they’ll have to find out what’s causing this, and then see if they can fix it.
For those who didn’t read the article, voyager 1 is still sending and transmitting data. It’s stuck in a loop sending the same packets to Earth on repeat but it is receiving commands just fine. It’s not completely dark.
That’s fantastic, that means all they have to do is reset some components and it should restore functionality. I say should, it’s still a scary thing to turn on/off components om a satellite bcz you aren’t guaranteed they’ll come on. Nasa people usually prefer soft resets to hard resets of components, but we’ll see what happens.
One of the satellites I worked on had to have a software update to do a soft reset of a component every time it tried to write certain data. It was really scary bcz we thought we had lost one of our redundancies right after launch, which would have sucked.
But, we didn’t. Anyway, just wanted to give a little bit of insight into what the FOT might be thinking about while they’re trying to recover the satellite to nominal state.
Yeah I got very sad when I saw the headline and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Voyager 1’s death will be far sadder than most public figures. Maybe any.
Same, for a moment I was really concerned. Voyager is like a lifetime achievement for humanity at this point. When it stops communicating its going to be a big loss for the scientific community, and population as a whole. I’m not looking forward to hearing about its loss of functionality in the next decade or so.
So the title did its job which is you understand nothing until you enter their site, drive traffic, display ads, and possibly collect your data in the process.
Sure and Lemmy did its work by letting me and others relay the info. I hate ads as much as the next guy, especially targeted ads, but the internet is free and I don’t pay CNN a dime so I’ll take the hit for you this time. Next time, you click the clickbait and fill us in ☺️
possibly collect your data in the process
Nooo they respect your privacy just share your stuff with 967 of their partners
Ads are a shitty part of the internet experience, but what exactly is your point here…?
My point is the title in journalism went from a summary of the story to a confusing false statement that might give you a hint of what the story is about.
In this story the title is clearly saying Voyager has stopped communicating with Earth which is false.
Ideally it was an update issue and it’s fixable. However I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a hardware failure due to radiation or something similar. That said, Voyager1 has power only until 2025 or so, since RTGs are designed to last that much. So even if the issue is fixed, its life will only expand by few years. Also, the fact it relies on nuclear power means none of the new stuff will last as long since they stopped using them some time ago due to fear from nuclear energy.
Am thinking people were mostly worried if rocket explodes during liftoff. Then again people also are completely clueless about radiation in general, especially smokers.
RTGs are still used for outer solar system missions. Not enough light for solar panels. Hell, even the Perseverance Mars rover, which was launched in 2020, has an RTG.
How do we know that it’s receiving commands fine? I am assuming pinging Voyager 1 might take a while.
