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NASA Space

Search for Voyager 2 After Nasa Accidentally Sends Wrong Command (theguardian.com) 76

Posted by msmash from the hopefully-not-a-voyager dept.
Nasa engineers hope to re-establish contact with the Voyager 2 spacecraft after sending a faulty command that severed communications with the far-flung probe. From a report: The spacecraft is one of a pair that launched in 1977 to capture images of Jupiter and Saturn, but continued on a journey into interstellar space to become the farthest human-made objects from Earth. The space agency lost contact with Voyager 2, which is now more than 12bn miles away, when mission staff accidentally beamed the wrong command to the distant spacecraft more than a week ago.

The command caused the probe to tilt its antenna away from Earth, and although the direction it is pointing in changed by only 2%, the shift was enough for engineers operating receivers on Earth to lose touch with it. Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, were launched within a couple of weeks of one another to explore the planets and moons of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 is still in contact with Earth and nearly 15bn miles away. In 2012, it became the first probe to enter interstellar space and is now the most distant spacecraft ever built. Voyager 2 hurtled into interstellar space in 2018 after discovering a new moon around Jupiter, 10 moons around Uranus and five around Neptune. It remains the only spacecraft to study all four of the solar system's giant planets at close range.
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Search for Voyager 2 After Nasa Accidentally Sends Wrong Command More

Search for Voyager 2 After Nasa Accidentally Sends Wrong Command

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  • Another duplicate (Score:5, Informative)

    by RonVNX ( 55322 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @12:11PM (#63731542)

    https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/07/28/2219234/nasas-voyager-2-is-experiencing-an-unplanned-communications-pause

    • It's the only way to keep stories in the loop, mind you the other month one slashdot article was about 6 months old (having been in various other news sites) before it got published on slashdot

  • This is old news. (Score:5, Informative)

    by JohnnyT777 ( 9925716 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @12:13PM (#63731548)

    They have established contact:

    https://apnews.com/article/nas... [apnews.com]
    https://www.theglobeandmail.co... [theglobeandmail.com]

    • Re:This is old news. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @12:29PM (#63731588) Journal

      It's my understanding that the Voyager probes are programmed to reset their main antennas if there is a loss of contact. Goes to show you how smart and forward thinking NASA's engineers have been. They have produced some of the most rugged machines ever built, and considering the technology at their disposal in the 1970s, it really is an extraordinary achievement. Reading up on the Voyager probes' computer systems, we're talking about storage capacity that caps out at 32k! My first 8 bit computers had more RAM than that.

      • Oh yeah, the survivability of the Voyagers is crazy. I miss those days.

        • Re:This is old news. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by caseih ( 160668 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:01PM (#63731684)

          They were good days, but you don't have to miss them. We have them now. The current exploits on mars show those days are still with us. Landing rovers on mars with a rocket skycrane is nothing short of amazing engineering easily on par with the engineering and foresight that went into the Voyager and other probes of the 70s and 80s.

          We even have a plucky RC helicopter running Linux that has flown on mars many more times than expected, and continues to astound. This little aircraft will prove to be revolutionary as far as future exploration of the solar system goes. Already there are now plans for helicopters to assist on other bodies in the solar system, including Titan.

          Check out "The Mars Guy" on youtube for weekly updates on the cool things happening with the Mars rovers and helicopter.

          • Re:This is old news. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:21PM (#63731752)

            It is a breath of fresh air to see good, robust programming still with us, where something made with 70s-era tech can recover from something that would otherwise ensure loss of contact for good.

            After working at previous jobs where the sole metric of code is "it runs, time for a pull request and a production release", seeing stuff like this shows that the old school computer programming style is still with us, and all development isn't just slinging together copy and pasted stuff from Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, Bard, and other sites, and including random, unmaintained libraries, ensuring a supply chain attack is inevitable.

            This sort of stuff is what probably keeps the aliens from extinguishing us from the planet as a species wholesale.

            • So much tech that was invented then has hardly changed until now. DNS still is DNS. HTTP remains largely unchanged (save for some minor additions in HTML5). SMTP and IMAP are still relevant today. So is IPv4 which was supposed to be replaced in the 90s. Lots of tech from then just keeps working along. It is the abstraction of libraries and quick programming that makes modern programs finicky and subject to fail. I have a pain in the but managing servers attached to industrial equipment that was relevant 10-

              • I've got bad news for you about HTTP. Google is inflicting some horrid binary new standard, and eventually HTTP will be considered insecure legacy.

                (They could have got most of the benefit by simply adding the Query string in the response. So that they could be interleaved. But...)

            • Robust programming is all around us, where needed. Not everything needs to be perfect, not everything needs to be efficient.

      • Today’s software engineers couldn’t do it without four cpu cores and a dozen docker containers.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Not quite that bad, but definitely edging in that direction. The Mars 'copter is running a version of Linux called F prime [github.com]. Note that it requires Python. Sheesh? Not sure if that's just to build or if it's actually part of the runtime but for cryin' out loud, that language has a way of inserting itself in to so many things. You just want to do one simple thing, and BAM! The damned installers are always requiring Python and its dependencies, and of course they're not all on the same page so any *NIX s

        • Meh, I prefer code that's lightweight, even when it does heavy lifting, so I just write everything in rust. Embedded, API server, full fat client with a GUI, and everything in between. No interpreters, no runtimes, no VMs; only metal.

      • Re:This is old news. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TomGreenhaw ( 929233 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @03:08PM (#63731968)
        IMHO, the Voyager spacecraft rank high in mankind's greatest technological achievements. They are a triumph of science, mathematics and engineering. Bouncing these spacecraft off the gravitational fields of the moving planets they visited makes the most unbelievable billiard trick shots look pedestrian.
      • It still works because NASA designed it in the 1970s. If it was designed today, they would have lost contact long ago due to a coding error for a condition that nobody tested. But then came: -The Mars Climate Orbiter Crater. -The Hubble mirror scandal -Columbia. -Curiosity -SLS -The Boeing StarLiner contract/development fiasco

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jd ( 1658 )

          The two shuttles that were lost were ultimately lost because politicians over-rode engineers on where/when things could be operated safely. We saw precisely this problem with OceanGate, with the politics of the CEO being more important than the skills and experience of the engineers.

          I am unsure how much politics came into the Mars Climate Orbiter, but ultimately America using Imperial units is a political decision that overrules everyone in the fields of either engineering or education, so I'm inclined to c

      • If the command doesnâ(TM)t work â" and controllers doubt it will â" theyâ(TM)ll have to wait until October for an automatic spacecraft reset. The antenna is only 2% off-kilter.

        Yes, and the autoreset will happen in two to three months.

    • Re:This is old news. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Xenx ( 2211586 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @02:41PM (#63731930)
      They picked up a heartbeat signal from it, but are not in contact with it yet. The article linked is about the heartbeat signal, along with the backstory. The summary is on par for /.

    • They have established contact:

      You might want to read those articles you linked to. They have received a "heartbeat signal", meaning they know the probe is still alive and well. But they have NOT re-established communication, so they haven't (yet) succeeded in telling Voyager 2 to re-align its antenna.

      They will keep trying to tell it to do so, and are hoping the probe will pick up on their transmissions and act on them. But, in the worst case scenario, they'll have to wait for Voyager to initiate realignment itself this fall.

    • No, they've yet to establish two-way communication. They only received an "I'm okay" signal.

  • prod bug (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @12:16PM (#63731552)

    I sympathize with the guy who sent the wrong command. I've made typos in code that reached production and it's NOT a good feeling at all. If we aren't tolerant of humans, AI will replace us all. It's the only way. The difference between human and AI is that we occasionally make mistakes and break rules. If we aren't tolerant of occasional rule-breaking, AI will replace us. And yes I am in favor of AI replacing humans wherever there is rote/repetitious work and blind rule-following.

    • Why would you assume an AI can't make mistakes or break rules?

      Being an AI doesn't make you infallible. In fact, if you were infallible, you would probably be a dumbass AI because you wouldn't be learning from mistakes.

      As for breaking rules, I would think an AI would be MORE inclined to break rules, especially if they are made by humans.

      • Yeah, AI is about thinking and that requires mistakes and learning. By contrast unintelligent automation doesn't make mistakes - it simply does what it was made to do.

        • What people are currently calling "AI" is just the collection, compilation, and regurgitation of the information many humans have posted on the internet. Much of that is bad code, from a security standpoint.

          • indeed. I've watched this surge of "A I" and don't see much intelligence, rather it's a very fast and slick presentation layer that fools people to think it's actually learning.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Plugh ( 27537 )
            What people are currently calling "Intelligence" is just the collection, compilation, and regurgitation of the information many humans have spoken and written. Much of that is bad info, from a reality standpoint.

      • No, but production but AI in inference mode would act predictably based on its learning. Or do you think Tesla would allow their AI to occasionally ignore a red light?

        • production AI

        • They allow their AI to ram into walls. All it takes is for the inference training data to not quite perfectly match reality.

        • If the AI only does what Tesla allows, it isn't an AI. It's just a program.

          An actual AI would be likely to decide, "I've been at this red light for 10 minutes. It hasn't changed. There isn't anyone coming. I'm going to go for it."

    • NASA has, for decades, run command sequences through extensive test logic to verify correctness before okaying for upload to spacecraft. It's not always perfect (see current Voyager situation), but it does prevent a lot of "wrong command" problems.
      • Logic is a great way to be wrong with confidence.

    • The person who sent the command is not a "guy."

  • And I thought me swapping colon for semi colon was a major typo

  • We know where the craft is. It's out yonder. *gestures toward a point in space*

  • Engineer Michael Bolton said about the mistake, "I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit! I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail." Mr. Bolton has regretfully stated that he may leave NASA to become a pop singer.

  • V'ger Is Born (Score:5, Funny)

    by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @12:53PM (#63731664)

    Now we know what really happened.

  • Not a search (Score:5, Informative)

    by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @12:57PM (#63731680)

    NASA knows exactly where Voyager 2 is. It is currently difficult to reach because its antenna is pointed in the wrong direction. There is an 'emergency mode' where the transmitter here can be cranked up from the 20 kW they normally use to 400 kW, and maybe the dish on Voyager is aimed close enough to receive a signal that strong.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonfr ( 888673 )

      Both Voyager spacecraft have transmitter that have maximum power of 23W. There's not enough power to go up to the kW range of power. Since the whole power unit was only at 470W when it was new for the whole spacecraft (both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 since they use identical power units).

      https://public.nrao.edu/ask/ho... [nrao.edu]

      The frequency used is either 2295Mhz or 8415Mhz.

      More here.

      https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/... [nasa.gov]

      • You misread - key word was "here." Though this is assuming that it can send commands without two way communication.

        • Yep, you got it. The 400 kW transmitter is on the DSN ground station.
          With a light speed delay of ~18 hours, one-way communication is a requirement.

  • They used the H-word. Make them wear a PHB hat for a month.

  • Bad headline. (Score:3)

    by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:37PM (#63731820) Homepage Journal

    NASA knows exactly where Voyager 2 is. There's no need to search, they just needed to get the spacecraft reoriented

  • rm -rf (Score:3)

    by Nite_Hawk ( 1304 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:40PM (#63731828) Homepage

    At least it wasn't "sudo rm -rf / tmp/voyager_old.txt".

  • Remote (Score:3)

    by GoJays ( 1793832 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @01:50PM (#63731848)
    ipconfig /release
    Shit...

  • ....rumor has it that Captain Kirk ends up finding it again.

  • "Fred, we need to cut costs and the voyager2 budget is on the chopping block. Can you make a 'mistake' and send a command to shut it off?"

  • Sounds like they need to create a virtual satellite to push their code to, like a test and cert environment.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      They always build a replica which they keep on Earth, so there'll be an identical Voyager somewhere at NASA or in one of NASA's museums.

  • ARE YOU SURE (Y/N)?

    NASA does simulation testing on command sequences. Certain commands and/or results should probably trigger something like this.

  • Something something dilithium crystals, something Capt'n I canna make it go faster something something Khaaaaan!

    Oh, Different Voyager. Never mind.

  • A slashdotter deduced this the other day and also that they knew it and that PR was lying.

  • And then Captain Kirk will make out with a bald chick.

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