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pkorzeniewski
zitterbewegung
A large amount of Voyager 1 & 2 's success isn't just technological it is the ability to take advantage of a specific planetary alignment for a gravity assist [1] that can only occur every 175 years [2] .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#/media/File:Voyager_...
ahazred8ta
Every 20 years, Jupiter and Saturn are in position for a gravity assist, which allows you to reach half the outer solar system. In the 1970s, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were all in the right half.
brador
I wonder what the optimal most fastest speed out of the solar system gravity assist path ever possible is and when that occurs?
joe_mamba
Fingers crossed, if we manage not to blow each other up until then, we have 126 years to go till we can try again.
toomuchtodo
You might enjoy "A Canticle for Leibowitz" on this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz | https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2626638W/A_Canticle_for_Leib...
mememememememo
Ideally cattle not pets. We are continually shooting stuff out and in 126 years it'll be as nerveracking and watching a train departure, but still exciting knowing the train is going further.
joezydeco
Don't forget that the mission planners figured out the "Grand Tour", calculating orbits and trajectories to slingshot around the Solar System. All with 1960s technology.
JKCalhoun
And scrambled to get two machines ready for the small window we had to take advantage of it.
hydrogen7800
I have a ~20 in x 30 in poster of the Grand Tour from this collection[0]. I considered printing the whole series, but not enough wall space.
[0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/visions-of-the-future/
joezydeco
Okay those are pretty rad.
jgalt212
Voyager, Apollo, and Hubble. Everything else NASA has done is a distant 4th place. And it's not like 4th place is trash, it's just that the big 3 are just so impressive.
pja
James Webb Telescope is up there with Hubble.
hparadiz
The rovers on Mars as well and New Horizons that went to Pluto. That is also at escape velocity so it will leave this solar system and most likely no human will ever lay eyes on it again. Voy 1 and 2 are still faster but hey they're all going in different directions so it's not exactly a race.
throwaway27448
I don't think Apollo was very interesting or useful beyond cold war propaganda. Yes, we're capable of amazing things—but putting a man on the moon pales in comparison to basic healthcare funding. Why must we insist on wasting billions on histrionic braggadocio when we can't perform the basics of a modern society?
kadoban
There's better things to dump instead of Apollo if you want a basically functioning society. Pick your couple of least favorite wars of choice in America's recent history. Apollo at least gave the country hope and showed that we could accomplish big ideas.
mikkupikku
> ""useful"
Fuck all of it is useful besides satellites. Even the HST is only marginally useful; useful for fields of research which will almost certainly never have tangible benefits for life on Earth, built to satisfy our curiosity about phenomena too large and far from Earth to ever be put into use here on Earth.
Nonetheless, interesting? You're bonkers if a system like the Apollo program and all associated hardware isn't at least interesting.
alnwlsn
I cannot take anyone making this argument seriously unless they are similarly furious at the expenditure on arts, humanities, historical preservation, luxury goods, entertainment, or other similar vanity projects.
Why is is that science and technology exploration ventures are held to a much higher scrutiny?
GuB-42
I hate this argument. Every time there is some big and expensive technical achievement, someone is going to say that the poor are dying somewhere in the world. As if not going to the moon would have saved them.
I would argue that a healthy population is what allows great things like Apollo to happen. For such a program to succeed, we need lots of highly skilled people. Scientists, engineers, astronauts, tradesmen, managers, etc... Everyone needs to be at the top of their game. Such talent doesn't develop when you are struggling for your life, you need good conditions like health, confort and stability to be able to focus on your craft.
If we use life expectancy as a proxy, we could say that the US had a healthier population during the cold war than the USSR, and they are the ones who succeeded on the most ambitious project in the space race, despite the USSR having a head start. To me, it is not a coincidence.
Also, the cold war era was not just about space, it is also a time of major advance when it comes to medicine, life expectancy has seen a dramatic improvement, so we can put men on the moon and keep a population heathy.
aorloff
Which country do you think got basic healthcare funding right ?
janez2
your link has a "si=..." tracking identifier
andai
>despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up.
Could you elaborate on this?
wongarsu
Take decades to catch up to the location of either voyager probe. The probes have be traveling for a long time. They have also taken advantage of a rare planetary alignment that allowed them to visit a lot of planets and get gravity assists from them (converting a tiny portion of the planet's angular momentum into orbital speed for the spacecraft)
anovikov
Won't ion engines power by something like Kilopower reactor let us do better?
cedilla
Voyager 1 and 2 are 25 and 21 billion kilometres away, respectively.
Even if we built a rocket just designed to get stuff as far away as quickly away as possible, it would take decades to catch up to where they are now.
Narishma
Could we even catch up to them at all with the current propulsion technology? Not only did they have decades of head start but they took advantage of a unique planetary alignment that I don't think will come back around anytime soon.
gautamcgoel
I assume OP means that a probe launched today would take decades to exit the solar system.
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whatrocks
Yes, yes! I got really into the Voyager-inspiration vibes for a while and wrote this little short story about a secret "Voyager 3" mission - thought you might enjoy it: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/
trvz
They are dangerous and reckless. They were also done in the name of humanity, but without humanity’s consent.
I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
fanatic2pope
Earth's "radio bubble" is well over 100 light years across now. If there are aliens out there, they are probably already on their way to ask us in person why Ross, the largest Friend, doesn't simply eat the others.
krapp
Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space. Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave background in a few light years depending on their strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv and radio just isn't plausible.
dcanelhas
After the transition to digital TV our broadcasted signals mostly look like noise, though. Maybe an outside observer would assume that our civilization ended sometime in 2010.
dcminter
I think you're not appreciating how big space is. They're not going to be near any star for thousands of years - and near here is still very distant. If we're still around then, we'll probably be able to look after ourselves.
jacquesm
The chances of either Voyager ending up in the hands of intelligent aliens are remote compared to the chances of us blowing ourselves up. Be happy that there is at least a tiny possibility of a tombstone for a race which once upon a time aeons ago showed some promise. Personally I think they should have stuck a mummy in there.
TeMPOraL
They're not even wrong about both their complaints. The "damocletian sword of nuclear weapons" is actually what's been keeping humanity from setting the planet on fire for the past 60+ years.
ChrisMarshallNY
Could be, they find friends: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger
wongarsu
I assume you are against them due to the silent forest hypothesis? Better not announce ourselves, because anything out there might not be friendly to us?
cyberax
The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators.
The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing.
Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
whattheheckheck
The vast space of everything seems to me that any intelligent life eventually discovers physics to get out of this dimension. Dune space feudalism is unlikely
ravenstine
Good thing those gold plates give aliens the wrong directions to Earth anyway.
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mikkupikku
There is zero empirical evidence that aliens actually exist. All the arguments for why they should exist despite this lack of evidence are borderline theology.
dbacar
For some good portion of the earth's population, I dont think things would go worse than it is even if there were an alian invasion.
thegrim33
I'm firmly against METI, but the Voyagers aren't evenly remotely METI / risky.
saadn92
The thruster fix is the part that gets me. They sent a command that would either revive thrusters dead since 2004 or cause a catastrophic explosion, then waited 46 hours for the round trip with zero ability to intervene. That's a production deployment with no rollback, no monitoring dashboard, and a 23-hour latency on your logs. They nailed it.
hnthrowaway0315
I'd argue that once you have a very well defined requirement doc that mostly kicks humans out of the picture, as well as a patient boss who doesn't want anything ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing", engineering is not that hard, and is almost...enjoyment.
KellyCriterion
> ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing"
like in "fast pacing environments" with "flat hierarchies" and "agile mindset"? :-D
prymitive
As ASAP As Possible
armanj
A well defined doc evolves over time. it gets sharper with real-world scenarios, incidents, and experiments. Before Voyager 1, we didn’t have that kind of experience. You can’t predict everything upfront.
> Theory only takes you so far
y1n0
I’d argue that you must not be working on interesting problems if you think that “engineering is not that hard”
SpaceNoodled
I think their point is that the challenge becomes more enjoyable than tedious.
TeMPOraL
Most of us are working on problems that are boring and tedious, not hard.
hnthrowaway0315
That's the point. I haven't but I would like to, and I realize that the so called "engineering" problems I work on is NOT real engineering.
OK I was probably wrong about that "not hard" though.
trgn
Would sending voyager have been a real definite deadline?
wongarsu
Visiting this many planets was only possible due to a very rare alignment. It's a once a century event. That's why we sent two probes, not just one
reaperducer
Absolutely. You could wait decades or centuries for a useful planetary alignment.
quotemstr
That was ballsy! But, sadly, it was a temporary hack. Both Voyager have degrading, unfixable thrusters. The rubber diaphragms in the hydrazine fuel tanks are degrading, shedding silicon dioxide (i.e. sand) microparticles into the thruster fuel. These particles are gradually clogging the thruster nozzles and reducing their thrust. Eventually, thrust will decline to the point that they could fire the thrusters all day long and still not impart enough momentum to point the probes at Earth. Once that happens, we'll lose contact with the probes.
They'd switched away from the primary thrusters in 2004 due to this degradation. Now the backups are so degraded that the primary thrusters are better again in comparison.
Thruster clogging will kill Voyagers in about five years if nothing else gets them first. The least degraded thrusters nozzles are down to 2% of their diameter --- 0.035mm of free-flow area remaining.
The Voyagers will probably celebrate their 50th anniversary, but not much beyond that. :-(
Kind of ignominious to be done in not by the inexorable decline of radioactivity but by an everyday materials science error of the sort we make on earth all the time. In the 1970s, we knew how to make hydrazine-compatible rubber. We just didn't use it for the Voyagers.
zerd
Based on the communication fix, they also didn't have a simulator, or tests, or complete source code, on a custom instruction set that wasn't well documented, so they had to reverse engineer how it worked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg&t=2366s
bazzert
There is a terrific documentary, 'Its quieter in the twilight', about the aging and dwindling team that still runs both Voyager missions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI
pan69
> Video unavailable > The uploader has not made this video available in your country
I'd love to watch this but unfortunately. My country being AU.
UltraMagnus
This YouTube video is just a trailer for the documentary, it does look amazing. It looks like the entire documentary is available on some free streaming sites, here's one: https://play.xumo.com/free-movies/it-s-quieter-in-the-twilig...
If that doesn't work, try using a VPN set to the US as country.
joshvm
https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/trailer is the official site.
qingcharles
I think I watched it on Amazon Prime in the USA. I don't know if Oz has Prime or what rights they have.
I checked the usual sites on the high seas and it is available for instant download there too :)
pramsey
Such a wonderful meditation on career and meaning and fellowship and purpose. I loved it.
manytimesaway
Very depressing to see this next to the "LinkedIn uses 2.4GB of RAM" post.
divbzero
Any website that uses more memory than Voyager 1 should be considered bloated.
amiga-workbench
There's almost certainly less than 69KB of useful human-readable information on any given page.
tombert
I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's probably the lightest site that I frequent.
According to Brave's dev tools, looks like just shy of about 90kb on this comment page as of the time of this writing.
Obviously some of that is going to be CSS rules, a small amount of JS (I think for the upvotes and the comment-collapse), but I don't think anyone here called HN "bloated". Even that one page wouldn't fit on Voyager.
greenavocado
640K is all anybody actually needs
varjag
Any development team larger than Apollo programming team of 350 is overstaffed.
reaperducer
Any development team larger than Apollo programming team of 350 is overstaffed
We put a man on the moon mostly with pencils and slide rules.
Today we have massive data centers full of "AI" supercomputers, and we get… TikTok?
undefined
jacquesm
Vindication, finally.
jagged-chisel
Takes a lot of resources to track your users rather than just cruising through space
echelon
It takes a lot to deliver value at velocity with a team of engineers that couldn't give a damn about the product and just want to get a paycheck, move up the ladder, etc.
LinkedIn is not a fun problem.
The UI, the design, the dark patterns - all of it sucks.
It's a job. Nobody particularly wants to be there. There's nothing sacred about the product. Engineers don't worship it.
It isn't a place you'd take a pay cut for the opportunity to work there.
Hence the bloat.
kermatt
Voyager only needs to track itself. Plus, no ads.
flykespice
""just""
tape_measure
Seems that both of these articles are written by LLMs.
layer8
You have to spin it positively: LinkedIn is 350.000 x Voyager.
winnie_ua
To be fair. this HN thread useees 40-70 MB of ram in Chrome.
rcaught
[dead]
dn3500
Here's a photo of the tape recorder:
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
sbinnee
Pretty cool. Thanks for sharing
kmaitreys
Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal"
> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.
The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.
wookmaster
Duh its space you have to use Turbo pascal
vardump
Duh, turbo doesn't work in space. Surely you meant High Speed Pascal!
qingcharles
At least Voyager has enough space to carry Turbo Pascal if we wanted to send a copy to our galactic neighbors:
undefined
voidUpdate
> "Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart"
is that actually true? During the voyager memory problems of 2023, I seem to recall that there were significant issues uploading entirely new programs to it because there was so little documentation around the internal workings of the hardware and software, and creating a virtual machine to actually test on was a significant achievement
mghackerlady
well duh, if they knew it by heart why would they write it down?
LeoPanthera
There’s a lot of LLM text in that article. It’s very offputting.
armadsen
Yeah, it’s really starting to depress me how much text published to the web is written using an LLM now. Things that seem interesting at first glance become much less appealing when they have that telltale LLM quality to them, and I also start questioning whether they’re full of factual errors (“hallucinations”). I don’t know why I should spend my time reading something the author couldn’t even be bothered to spend time writing.
sbinnee
Indeed. I also had this weird feeling while reading through the article. It got hooked up in the beginning. And then at some point, my brain just noticed that it was LLM-generated. I wonder how this article was written. Did the author accidentally find about Voyager 1's tiny memory and its primitive tape technology while reading something else, or did he just ask LLMs to write something interesting that he could publish with a few prompts.
stared
Good they launched Voyager 1 before invention of Docker, Electron and NPM projects with thousands of padLefts.
tkocmathla
It's very distracting to have every sentence in this article be its own paragraph.
branon
It's LLM slop unfortunately, bears the hallmarks at least :(
LorenDB
[dead]
bradley13
Amazing engineering. Today's software development: Write a program running on a framework (of which you need 1%, but get it all), that framework depends on dozens of libraries (but again, you only needed 1% of them), which in turn depends on dozens more.
Result: Your starter program takes 1GB of memory and needs 6 cores to display "Hello, World!"
We waste resources, because Moore's Law gave us resources to waste.
jmclnx
I knew about the memory, but an 8-track tape ? That is a surprise. But when you think of it, what else could you use for this in 1977.
What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years. I knew tapes back then could last a while, 30 years being bombarded with cosmic rays ? inconceivable :)
reaperducer
What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years
Yesterday I loaded a program on tape bought at Radio Shack in 1985 into my TRS-80.
That's 41 years ago.
I suspect the key is using commercial-grade recorders and thick tape.
PepperdineG
I suspect the key was you used Dr Emmett Brown to tune up the equipment then plugged your electric guitar into his amplifier.
duskwuff
A tape with eight tracks, yes. But not the audio cartridge format commonly known as "8-track"; that wouldn't have been suitable to the task. Here's a photo:
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
RiverCrochet
An old 1970's arcade game, Quiz Show, used an 8-track tape to store the questions and answers. There's a YouTube video about it, and audio dumps of the 8-track on archive.org I think.
2OEH8eoCRo0
We are so detached from the software "engineering" in our jobs that we are amazed when we see it.
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Voyager 1 & 2 is one of my favourite human science achievements, not even so much from technology standpoint, as it's relatively simple compared to what we have now (although that's one of the charms), but just the fact that it's so far away, it still more or less works long after the scheduled mission end time, we can communicate with it and despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up. Absolutely amazing and inspiring!