picafrost 3 days ago

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.

  • procarch2019 3 days ago

    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.

    • turtledragonfly 3 days ago

      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 (:

      • qingcharles 3 days ago

        Especially when it was cartridge games. I remember when PC games started to get updates and you'd wait for next month's cover disc to get them. I seem to remember Frontier Elite having about a dozen...

        I just checked the one commercial game I developed and there are two patches I can see released by Eidos for it.

      • cazum 3 days ago

        I'm curious, what was the bug that was so critical the publisher decided it was best to perform such a (what I assume was) costly operation post-distribution?

        • gambiting 2 days ago

          I'm aware of one game that the company I worked for made that nearly released and that would have broken every GameCube that played it, Nintendo had to pull 50k discs from distribution just before they were sent to retailers and destroy them.

          The issue was that one programmer used an unauthorized system call to make the disc drive spin twice as fast, as they thought it was a great way to resolve some of the data streaming issues the game had. And yeah it worked - but after few hours of playing it would kill the GameCube. It wasn't really noticed because no one tests the game on actual discs right until actual gold master is made(usually), and then when the devkits died it was considered a random hardware fault and Nintendo just replaced them.

          • AStonesThrow 2 days ago

            Ah, the HCF system call?

            • gambiting 2 days ago

              Honestly it was just before my time at that studio so I don't know exactly how that was done, but everyone knew about it because it cost us a lot of money and damaged our relationship with Nintendo somewhat. The game actually went on to be pretty successful after that, but yeah, would have been a disaster.

        • turtledragonfly 3 days ago

          It was a crash bug, but I'm not really sure the details (and it has been some years...). Even at the time, I wasn't personally involved in it, just heard about it through the grapevine.

          But yes, my understanding is it was quite expensive and the publisher was none too pleased (:

        • elzbardico 3 days ago

          The cynical in me thinks that probably it was bug in the anti-piracy code.

  • jamesfinlayson 3 days ago

    > 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).

  • ge96 3 days ago

    The error correction on the signal must be great for 15 billion miles+ distance

    • ahazred8ta 2 days ago

      The signal we receive is about one RF photon per second per square meter.

      • mmooss 2 days ago

        That's too incredible to be true. I'd love to quote it though - where does it come from?

        • ahazred8ta 2 days ago

          Ah. This writeup https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240604-voyager-1-photons-... says that the 70m dish collects 240,000 photons per second, which is about 60 per second per square meter. The 1/sec figure was from the recent outage when Voyager's transmitter glitched and fell back to S-band. Received energy per bit is 4.5e-21 Joule across the whole dish, or 1e-24J per square meter.

          • mmooss 2 days ago

            Too bad; it was a great story. Still, they managed to communicate, in an emergency, using 1 photon/sec/m^2 !?

    • ForOldHack 3 days ago

      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.

jedberg 3 days ago

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.

  • mixmastamyk 2 days ago

    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.

niwtsol 3 days ago

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

  • ForOldHack 3 days ago

    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."

  • ListeningPie 2 days ago

    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).

rglover 3 days ago

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.

  • bgirard 3 days ago

    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.

    • moregrist 3 days ago

      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.

      • mmooss 2 days ago

        > NASA flight control software of that era is a different league of fault tolerance and engineering.

        What makes you say that? I suspect it's improved with decades of lessons learned.

    • rglover 3 days ago

      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.

      • tim333 2 days ago

        As someone who was around in the 1970s, delusional thinking, greed, and shortsightedness in pursuit of ephemera like money and status were a thing then too, if anything a bit worse.

        In fact Money, Money, Money was recorded in 1976 just before the Voyager launch. (https://youtu.be/ETxmCCsMoD0)

    • me_me_me 3 days ago

      yeah... but there is a counterargument. we can't go back to the moon. We did, now we can't.

      • Bjartr 3 days ago

        But that's incorrect, we can go back to the moon any time, there just hasn't been a strong enough incentive to really make the cost worth it for either science or commerce until recently.

      • Spooky23 3 days ago

        We don't need make-work in 2025, spending 4% of the Federal budget on Apollo to push the edge and accelerate ICBM development. We have rockets and invisible jets, now we're scaling down to drones, etc that are dominating future warfare.

        • fwip 3 days ago

          Economically, make-work programs would probably be useful right about now.

          • Spooky23 2 days ago

            Perhaps, but we’re in the process of burning down essential services to satisfy the rabble.

      • protocolture 3 days ago

        They cant rebuild Saturn V (well they can now they reverse engineered the engine) but they literally are going back, its just the most junkyard expensive nonsense in Artemis.

        • ForOldHack 3 days ago

          We have two left ( Saturn V first stages ), and nine engines, and the engines are absolutely unique. Many scientists say that they cannot be reproduced.

          "Reproducing the Saturn V rocket engines, specifically the F-1 engines used on the first stage, is a highly complex task due to their immense size, powerful thrust, and intricate design, requiring advanced engineering and manufacturing capabilities to accurately replicate the combustion chamber, fuel injectors, nozzle, and other critical components, making it a significant undertaking even for modern aerospace companies; essentially, recreating them would involve detailed reverse engineering of the original designs, access to specialized materials and manufacturing techniques, and extensive testing to ensure proper functionality and safety. "

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1

          • protocolture 3 days ago

            My understanding, based on a documentary I watched, is that a bit of funding for Artemis bled off into a reverse engineering study, where they designed a new one, but Artemis went with the shuttle engines in the end so it never got produced.

      • redeux 3 days ago

        We can land robots on Mars and a private company just landed a craft on the moon, but we can’t go back?

      • Bluestrike2 3 days ago

        It's not really accurate to say that we can't go back to the moon. Setting aside the fact that there have been a number of successful unmanned lunar missions in recent years, whenever your point gets made, it usually glosses over why people make that claim.

        The immediate answer is that we simply weren't interested in supporting major new manned missions. Manned spaceflight in general requires serious, ongoing political support across administrations. At the height of the space race, public support pretty much never rose above 50 percent in the United States.[1] The literal high mark was 53% immediately after Apollo 11 successfully landed on the moon, which is honestly mind-boggling to think about. We've completely white-washed the existence of serious political opposition[1] to the Apollo program that plagued it from the beginning to the end because--looking back--it seems almost absurd, as if the very idea that half the country had no interest in going to the moon is an insult to the American psyche.

        It's honestly amazing that we managed to follow up with the Space Shuttle at all. The STS program was shaped by a great many compromises NASA had to make in order to elicit political and military support. John Logsdon's After Apollo is a wonderful read on the subject.

        Anyhow, it's not like we can't go back. It's not like orbital mechanics changed on us at some point and now we're all stuck in LEO. It's just a political choice, and we can make a new one whenever we want. It's just hard, in large part because we don't have the cold war and constant fear of imminent nuclear war to push the program through congress.

        Beyond the political, to go back means redesigning everything that was done for Apollo. That's not a slight on American engineering or manufacturing capabilities. Everything--from the Saturn V, to the lunar module, and the countless pieces of equipment that helped get both where they needed to go--was designed for the manufacturing capabilities and techniques of the 1960s. You can't just grab the plans for the old Rocketdyne F-1 and start building them anew. The welds alone[2] represent a fundamental shift in capabilities and thinking. Common CAD design and analysis programs would have had Apollo engineers singing in the hallways in joy once they got over the shock.

        They took what they had, and they made it work brilliantly. Change that context, and they would have designed a different engine, and the same goes for everything else.

        0. https://www.space.com/10601-apollo-moon-program-public-suppo...

        1. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...

        2. https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...

        • AStonesThrow 2 days ago

          It's interesting how the “scientific we” is used for “we... go to the Moon”, where most folks seem to be referring to the USA? Or the subset of nations with capable space programs, excluding China? But the people writing, “we”: are they engineers working for NASA, or parroting the P.R.?

          Because I personally haven't landed on the Moon, and I don't plan to, but “we” is typically assumed to include the speaker.

          I'm beginning to suspect that those who perpetuate the meme of “we never landed on the Moon” are coyly defining “we” in a restrictive way that excludes the astronauts who did. “We [our family in California] never landed there!”

          Cheap word-games. See also, political slogans designed to be misinterpreted and energize the base.

  • ilamont 3 days ago

    > 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...

    https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity/

    https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/

    • CamperBob2 3 days ago

      Unfortunately, that word is probably going to be "Are you hiring?"

    • ForOldHack 3 days ago

      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.

JackFr 3 days ago

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!

HenryBemis 3 days ago

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!!

  • hackeraccount 3 days ago

    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.

    • HankB99 3 days ago

      > What would be found here in a thousand years much less a million?

      Possibly an advanced civilization that says "No, not ours."

      • netsharc 2 days ago

        Hah..

        "That belongs to the previous tenants. The probe is one of the few interesting things they did, otherwise they were terrible planet owners, they fought with each other and didn't appreaciate what they had, they wrecked the whole place."

  • outworlder 3 days ago

    > 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.

  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 3 days ago

    It's spooky to know that it will outlive Earth and likely be the last remaining physical evidence that humans were ever here.

    • jacobgkau 3 days ago

      Why do you think it's particularly likely that two tiny objects running out of power will not only outlive Earth, but also any future objects sent from Earth to do the same things they're doing now? Or are you betting on the lack of future space exploration probes and relatively quick destruction of the Earth?

      • misnome 3 days ago

        The chance of them hitting anything in the time it takes the sun to swallow the earth is probably tiny?

        As for more probes - getting more speed than these did efficiently is probably hard, let alone the fact that they don’t generate personal profit probably stops them being politically viable for a while…

        • hackeraccount 3 days ago

          I was just reading a book that touched on Ancient Rome. The author tried to convey the significance of the Council of Nicaea by comparing it to the furor over Global Warming.

          I only mention that to say that the motivations of people in the future will probably seem odd to us and it's possible ours may seem equally odd to them. Not odd in the sense that they are intellectually inscrutable but - like people getting excited over the matters theological - that they're emotionally inscrutable.

          • linguaz 2 days ago

            > I was just reading a book that touched on Ancient Rome. The author tried to convey the significance of the Council of Nicaea by comparing it to the furor over Global Warming.

            Could you please share the title of this book?

        • jacobgkau 3 days ago

          > getting more speed than these did efficiently is probably hard,

          A new probe wouldn't necessarily need to travel faster than these to not be on Earth when the sun dies.

          The idea of there being a minuscule chance the Voyager probes hit anything is fair, but even a third one of the exact same model launched in the exact same direction has just as much chance of surviving just as long, barring wild speculation that could easily go either way.

          • misnome 3 days ago

            Right, of course, I think I misread the parents’

            > but also any future objects sent from Earth to do the same things

            As somehow saying something about the “furthest”

      • mystified5016 3 days ago

        IIRC we've projected that there's nothing in their path for millions of years, as far as we can reasonably predict.

        Whether humans will still exist or our planet is a glowing radioactive waste by the time the voyagers encounter a new star is not a given.

      • f001 3 days ago

        If I were to guess it would be the latter. We seem to be heading for it rather quickly at least.

    • ars 3 days ago

      Actually that's pretty unlikely - Earth will last longer than Voyager. The Sun becoming a red giant is the risk for Earth. We're talking 5 billion years here.

      But the voyagers have interstellar particles and dust to contend with, 5 billion years of abrasion from particles will wear them away to nothing.

      On top of that they will eventually come near a random star which will eat them, or at least damage them. For example in 40,000 years they'll come pretty near some stars. In 5 billion years? Lots of stars.

      Earth will easily outlive them.

      • ChocolateGod 2 days ago

        > come near a random star which will eat them

        Not a physicist, but I thought this didn't really happen in orbital mechanics, instead they'll just orbit said star.

        • ars 11 hours ago

          If they are far enough away from the star that's correct. i.e. if the star was a point source.

          But if they get close they'll slow down by interaction with the atmosphere of the star. Which is more likely than random chance because the star is attracting them.

        • wkat4242 2 days ago

          Depends on their relative speed and angle.

    • nyokodo 3 days ago

      > It's spooky to know that it will outlive Earth and likely be the last remaining physical evidence that humans were ever here.

      Although eventually a rather obscure form of evidence as it'll gradually become a melted blob of constituent materials from cosmic rays.

  • smolder 3 days ago

    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.

  • immibis 3 days ago

    "We determine that previous generations of earthlings believed spacecraft could be powered by lumps of lead. Silly earthlings."

  • 0cf8612b2e1e 3 days ago

    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)

wkat4242 2 days ago

> 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.

vzaliva 3 days ago

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.

  • outworlder 3 days ago

    Take a day for them to send commands. If anything goes wrong and they use too much power, that's it.

  • ChocolateGod 2 days ago

    Could the heat changes from being powered on/off multiple times not risk damage?

amelius 3 days ago

Curious how many people were still working full-time on that mission.

rich_sasha 3 days ago

When I saw the headline, I was briefly worried this is DOGE...

  • LightBug1 3 days ago

    Shhhhhh... seriously ... don't give the clowns ideas

  • sampton 3 days ago

    Beep twice to resign.

    • chgs 3 days ago

      It didn’t respond within 24 hours…

    • JackFr 3 days ago

      "Ok Voyager, 5 things you did last week! You only have 3 instruments? Boo-hoo. You're fired!"

  • gblargg 3 days ago

    Same concept, to keep things operating.

aaroninsf 3 days ago

[flagged]

  • tchbnl 3 days ago

    Not sure if this is a joke, but it was powered off to extend battery life.