I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.
That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.
It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.
Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.
This is why slack is bullshit. And discord. We should all go back to email. It can be stored and archived and organized and get off my lawn.
IBM is 100, but the Internet didn’t exist in 1924, so we’ll say the clock starts in 1989. I’m pretty sure at least MS or IBM will be around in 15 years.
To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/
They don’t use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/
That means “written in assembly” means “written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn’t document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke”.
They also released the source code of the Apollo 11 guidance computer. So if you want to fly to the moon, here is one part of how to do it.
I realize the Voyager project may not be super well funded today (how is it funded, just general NASA funds now?), just wondering what they have hardware-wise (or ever had). Certainly the Voyager system had to have precursors (versions)?
Or do they have a simulator of it today - we’re talking about early 70’s hardware, should be fairly straightforward to replicate in software? Perhaps some independent geeks have done this for fun? (I’ve read of some old hardware such as 8088 being replicated in software because some geeks just like doing things like that).
I have no idea how NASA functions with old projects like this, and I’m surely not saying I have better ideas - they’ve probably thought of a million more ways to validate what they’re doing.
You sure? The smell off some of the corpses will have been terrible.
I’m not saying they’re all dead, but an intern at the time of launch would now be 70. Anybody who actually designed anything is… Well… The odds of them still being around are low.
There is an fascinating documentary about the team that sends the commands to Voyager 1 and 2 called It’s Quieter in the Twilight
100% they’ve got an emulator, they’ve had dedicated test environments since the moon landing for emulating disaster recovery scenarios since the moon landings, they’ve likely got at least one functioning hardware replica and very likely can spin up a hardware emulation as a virtual machine at will.
Source: I made this up, but I have a good understanding of systems admin and have a interest in space stuff so I’m pretty confident they would have this stuff at bare minimum
That’s my assumption too, but we’re talking about a different era, and I really have no idea how they approached validation and test/troubleshooting.
I’ve seen some test environments for manned missions, but that’s really for humans to validate what they’re doing.
V’ger was quick 'n dirty by comparison (with no criticism of the process or folks involved…they had one chance to get these missions out there).
To me, the physics of the situation makes this all the more impressive.
Voyager has a 23 watt radio. That’s about 10x as much power as a cell phone’s radio, but it’s still small. Voyager is so far away it takes 22.5 hours for the signal to get to earth traveling at light speed. This is a radio beam, not a laser, but it’s extraordinarily tight beam for a radio, with the focus only 0.5 degrees wide, but that means it’s still 1000x wider than the earth when it arrives. It’s being received by some of the biggest antennas ever made, but they’re still only 70m wide, so each one only receives a tiny fraction of the power the power transmitted. So, they’re decoding a signal that’s 10^-18 watts.
So, not only are you debugging a system created half a century ago without being able to see or touch it, you’re doing it with a 2-day delay to see what your changes do, and using the most absurdly powerful radios just to send signals.
The computer side of things is also even more impressive than this makes it sound. A memory chip failed. On Earth, you’d probably try to figure that out by physically looking at the hardware, and then probing it with a multimeter or an oscilloscope or something. They couldn’t do that. They had to debug it by watching the program as it ran and as it tried to use this faulty memory chip and failed in interesting ways. They could interact with it, but only on a 2 day delay. They also had to know that any wrong move and the little control they had over it could fail and it would be fully dead.
So, a malfunctioning computer that you can only interact with at 40 bits per second, that takes 2 full days between every send and receive, that has flaky hardware and was designed more than 50 years ago.
And you explained all of that WITHOUT THE OBNOXIOUS GODDAMNS and FUCKIN SCIENCE AMIRITEs
Finally I can put some take into this. I’ve worked in memory testing for years and I’ll tell you that it’s actually pretty expected for a memory cell to fail after some time. So much so that what we typically do is build in redundancy into the memory cells. We add more memory cells than we might activate at any given time. When shit goes awry, we can reprogram the memory controller to remap the used memory cells so that the bad cells are mapped out and unused ones are mapped in. We don’t probe memory cells typically unless we’re doing some type of in depth failure analysis. usually we just run a series of algorithms that test each cell and identify which ones aren’t responding correctly, then map those out.
None of this is to diminish the engineering challenges that they faced, just to help give an appreciation for the technical mechanisms we’ve improved over the last few decades
pretty expected for a memory cell to fail after some time
50 years is plenty of time for the first memory chip to fail most systems would face total failure by multiple defects in half the time WITH physical maintenance.
Also remember it was built with tools from the 70s. Which is probably an advantage, given everything else is still going
Is there a Voyager 1, uh…emulator or something? Like something NASA would use to test the new programming on before hitting send?
Still faster than the average Windows update.
Microsoft can’t even release a fix for Window’s recovery partition being too small to stage updates. I had to do it myself, fucking amateurs.
Can’t or won’t? The same issue exists for both windows 10 and 11, but they haven’t closed the ticket for windows 11… Typical bullshit. It’s not exactly planned obsolescence, but when a bug comes up like that they’re just gonna grab the opportunity to go “sry impossible, plz buy new products”
I didn’t know that. So the ticket is still open for 11 but there’s still no fix?
Not to mention what a bitch that partition is when you need to shrink or increase the size of your windows partition. If you need to upgrade your storage, or resize to partition to make room for other operating systems, you have to follow like 20 steps of voodoo magic commands to do it.
Whoa learned that one at the weekend. Added a new nvme drive, cloned the old drive. I wanted to expand my linux partition, but it was at the start of the drive. So shifted all the windows stuff to the end and grew the Linux partition.
Thought I’d boot into windows to make sure it was okay, just in case (even though I’ve apparently not booted it in 3 years). BSOD. 2-3hrs later it was working again, I’m still not sure what fixed it of I’m honest, I seemed to just rerun the same bootrec commands and repair startup multiple times, but it works now, so yay!
Windows 13 update log:
Change kernel to Linux.
Build custom OS for astrophysics and space science applications.
happy rocket engineer noises
Well, they only had to test it for a single hardware deployment. Windows has to be tested for millions if not billions of deployments. Say what you want, but Microsoft testers are god like.
Interviewer: Tell me an interesting debugging story
Interviewee: …
It’s hard to explain how significant the Voyager 1 probe is in terms of human history. Scientists knew as they were building it that they were making something that would have a significant impact on humanity. It’s the first man made object to leave the heliosphere and properly enter the interstellar medium, and this was always just a secondary goal of the probe. It was primarily intended to explore the gas giants, especially the Jovian lunar system. It did its job perfectly and gave us so many scientific discoveries just within our solar system.
And I think there’s something sobering about the image of it going on a long, endless road trip into the galactic ether with no destination. It’s a pretty amazing way to retire. The fact that even today we get scientific data from Voyager, that so far away we can still communicate with it and control it, is an unbelievable achievement of human ingenuity and scientific progress. If you’ve never seen the image the Pale Blue Dot you should see it. That linked picture is a revised version of the image made by Nasa and released in 2020. It’s part of a group of the last pictures ever taken by Voyager 1 on February 14th 1990, a picture of Earth from 6 billion kilometers away. It’s one of my favorite pictures, and it kinda blows my mind every time I see it.
The pale blue dot photo always makes me tear up. We’re so small and insignificant in such a grand universe and I’m crushed that I can’t explore it.
There will always be a “step further we’d love to see but won’t”. Let’s be glad we’re in that step which included this photo and the inherent magnificence in it.
It totally beats being one of the earlier humans who just wondered what the lights in the sky might be. Probably gods or something.
There will always be a “step further we’d love to see but won’t”
I dunno, it could be really bad out there. We like to have really romanticized versions of space exploration in our brain. Like finding I habitable planets and other intelligent life. But what if that other intelligent life is super far advanced, and also capitalists. And they figured out how to inject advertisements into brains. And they want to share their technology with us.
