NASA Brings Voyager 2 Fully Back Online, 11.5 Billion Miles From Earth (inverse.com) 56
A reader quotes Inverse: In an incredible feat of remote engineering, NASA has fixed one of the most intrepid explorers in human history. Voyager 2, currently some 11.5 billion miles from Earth, is back online and resuming its mission to collect scientific data on the solar system and the interstellar space beyond.
On Wednesday, February 5 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern, NASA's Voyager Twitter account gave out the good news: Voyager 2 is not only stable, but is back at its critical science mission.
"My twin is back to taking science data, and the team at @NASAJPL is evaluating the health of the instruments after their brief shutoff," the account tweeted... In a statement, NASA confirmed that Voyager 2 is back in business. "Mission operators report that Voyager 2 continues to be stable and that communications between the Earth and the spacecraft are good...."
The fix is no mean feat: It takes 17 hours one-way to communicate with Voyager 2 from Earth, which is the furthest away manmade object in space. That means a single information relay takes 34 hours.
On Wednesday, February 5 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern, NASA's Voyager Twitter account gave out the good news: Voyager 2 is not only stable, but is back at its critical science mission.
"My twin is back to taking science data, and the team at @NASAJPL is evaluating the health of the instruments after their brief shutoff," the account tweeted... In a statement, NASA confirmed that Voyager 2 is back in business. "Mission operators report that Voyager 2 continues to be stable and that communications between the Earth and the spacecraft are good...."
The fix is no mean feat: It takes 17 hours one-way to communicate with Voyager 2 from Earth, which is the furthest away manmade object in space. That means a single information relay takes 34 hours.
Except it's not... (Score:2, Informative)
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Correct. The power source is from the heat generated by radioactive decay and has been in decline since the day the vehicle was launched. The amount of heat the source can generated has been predictably declining and they've had to power off the majority of the science equipment to not exceed the available power throughout the mission so far. There is very little left running, for instance the cameras haven't been operating for decades, having been shut off after the last planet became just a small dot.
Whe
They don’t make them like they used to (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They don’t make them like they used to (Score:5, Insightful)
To add to the awesomeness, V2's primary receiver failed not long after launch. Essentially the entire time it has been using its backup receiver.
There was even a backup plan in case the spacecraft lost both receivers: to use the Planetary Radio Astronomy experiment (on which I was a Co-I) to receive commands and send them to the other onboard systems. It would have worked only as far as Jupiter or possibly Saturn, but the mere fact that the idea was mooted and tested to the point of confidence that it should work if there were no other options says an awful lot about the engineering team.
Re:They don’t make them like they used to (Score:4, Informative)
We should be glad nasa budget funding wasnâ(TM)t cut For this program.
Actually, Voyager was the cheaper fallback after a larger 'Grand Tour' program was cut. NASA was in the middle of Space Shuttle development which meant funding for other programs wasn't great.
The Voyagers' longevity is a testament to the engineers' sneakiness: the official mission was for Jupiter and Saturn only. The team decided to build the probes for a much longer lifespan anyway.
Imagine what could have been achieved (Score:4, Insightful)
If NASA had not wasted so much money on that white elephant, the Shuttle.
I suspect that their managers spent too much time watching star wars instead of listening to their engineers.
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The real customer for the Shuttle wasn't NASA, it was the air force and three-letter agencies. That's why it was built with the cross-range capability necessary for doing single-orbit missions. The whole reason Hubble Space Telescope fits the Shuttle's cargo bay perfectly is that the Shuttle was designed to service Keyhole spy satellites, and Hubble is just a Keyhole satellite adapted to look away from earth rather than towards it. When the Shuttle was being designed, spy satellites still relied on retur
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They got one too, it's unmanned but it's reusable - Boeing X-37. Seems the Air Force, err, Space force, has at least two of them.
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USA had real engineers then (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking at the fiasco with 737 Max, Boeings issues with rockets recently, one is shocked, how did we lose our way this badly...
Re:USA had real engineers then (Score:5, Funny)
how did we lose our way this badly...
We stopped using nazis [xkcd.com] in our space program.
That comic is almost 10 years old, (Score:2)
And it's still 10 years away from flying. :(
And Shania Twain is Old now, lol.
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And Shania Twain is Old now, lol.
I still wouldn't kick her out of my bed. :)
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Well the supply of nazi engineers is higher now than it's been in decades...
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They just went from engineering into politics.
Re:USA had real engineers then (Score:4, Insightful)
Knew how to build stuff, knew what they were doing.
Apparently at least some current NASA engineers still fit the description, given they pulled this off.
That's one long cycle time (Score:5, Funny)
And I thought MY edit-compile-test loop took too long only a few years ago! And that's without communication uncertainty! Doesn't the firmware in one of these also control the antenna aiming?
Re:That's one long cycle time (Score:4, Insightful)
a. the spacecraft don't change attitude very often, if at all, they're mostly in a stable attitude. Computer problems just mean the spacecraft keeps flying in the same attitude.
b. Antenna aiming isn't critical at this distance. The beam width of Voyager's high gain antenna is more than 1 AU at their current distance, so Voyager can communicate with Earth for months at a time without repointing.
Awesome news (Score:2)
This made my morning better.
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Roddenberry correct? About what? I worked with the guy once for a few days, he was an amiable but old drunken man back in the late 80's who was barely sober enough by show time to speak understandably and give his "talk" about Star Trek and answer a few questions. Most of the show was him showing a black and white copy of the Pilot episode which is horribly acted, horribly written and obviously filed on a shoestring budget.
Roddenberry was Friendly enough, but not a scientist, theorist or even all that g
Meanwhile, back on Earth... (Score:2)
Microsoft keeps crashing PCs world-wide with their updates.
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reboot time (Score:2)
The big difference is time :
Computer crashes, once in 4 days. User restarts it in 3 minutes.
Space probe from the '70s crashes, once in 40 years. User restarts it in 17 hours.
Fix was not so exciting (Score:5, Informative)
As for not building things like they used to, part of the reason for its reliability is because it's a much simpler spacecraft. Its computers aboard it only have about 70 kB of of plated wire memory [technikum29.de] in total, meaning each bit is stored in a much larger volume of material than on modern computers. Coupled with the shielding and radiation hardening, that makes it much harder for cosmic rays to cause a random bit flip which can cause errors. (Long-term storage is on a tape drive [hackaday.com].) There is simply less that can go wrong, making it a lot easier for the designers to think of possible failure modes.
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It may have encountered aliens.... (Score:3, Informative)
17 years for data delivery??? ... (Score:3)
... it's apparent that NASA doesn't have Amazon Prime.
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Re:17 years for data delivery??? .
hours, not years.
... it's apparent that NASA doesn't have Amazon Prime.
17 hours still beats Prime. Most of the time.
Go, v'ger, go!
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Re:17 years for data delivery??? .
hours, not years.
... it's apparent that NASA doesn't have Amazon Prime.
17 hours still beats Prime. Most of the time.
Go, v'ger, go!
Thanks for the correction.
I hate when I ruin a good joke.
Where did the buy electrolytic capacitors? (Score:2)
As are the main case of power supply failures, these I'd think would be the first to go...so that is amazing they still work after 40+ years.
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The "capacitor plague" which affected so many PCs was from parts made long ago, between 1999 and 2007.
Voyager 2 launched in 1977.
And NASA would never have used capacitors with liquid electrolyte. Might as well ask if they used a lead-acid battery, or CP/M.
Re:Where did the buy electrolytic capacitors? (Score:4, Informative)
Capacitors failed long before there was anything like a PC. They were a weak point in 1925, and remain that today. Not just electrolytic, also, the non-polar capacitors. You replace them by the bucketful restoring old radios and the like.
Lots of space missions used sealed lead-acid batteries. They are still very common on boosters. They didn't use anything as complex and sophisticated as CP/M - I don't know for sure but it wouldn't remotely surprise me if the operating system consisted of "receive strobe, move PC to 060 octal, start executing".
As far as electrolytic capacitors go, it was not uncommon at all, far after this, to use sealed wet electrolytic capacitors very much like you would find in a TV or radio of the time. Properly coformally coated, potted, or just carefully sealed and screened, the electrolyte isn't going anywhere, and the environment (vacuum but moderate temperatures) would be fairly benign. The power source is DC, it's on the time, and that's going to keep the oxide layer formed nicely. There are plenty of tube audio amplifiers that have been used regularly since the late 50's with good electrolytic capacitors - as long as you don't let it just sit unused - and the thermal environment is *much worse* than a nice room-temperature satellite.
Tantalum caps were also probably used, but I would almost guarantee that most of them are more-or-less standard aluminum electrolytic.
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That's an interesting point I did not realise (or forgotten) about electrolytic caps: they do better when things are always on to keep them well formed.
On side note, I have turned few old HP laptops into picture frames. The circa'95 laptop still works solid. The one from early 2000 survived only few years... 20th century was so good!
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Interesting, thanks.
They were a weak point in 1925, and remain that today.
Which is why I would not expect NASA to use them if possible.
Lots of space missions used sealed lead-acid batteries. They are still very common on boosters.
Wow. I thought they'd use something more solid state. And boosters don't need rechargeables, so why lead ever, instead of zinc or other lighter metals? :-)
And when you say "still common", I hope you mean the 1960s Russian designs that are still flying?
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Voyager has three computer systems: Computer Command System (CCS), the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), and the Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS).
They are all a bit different, and all based on earlier hardware. The CCS for example was a slight evolution of the Viking one and used a custom RTOS. By that point NASA had standardised on using an RTOS of some kind in most of their systems after it worked reasonably well for the Apollo programme.
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CP/M, eh? Well, they did use VxWorks on Mars rover, did then not?
https://www.windriver.com/news... [windriver.com]
That's nothing. (Score:1)
The fix is no mean feat: It takes 17 hours one-way to communicate with Voyager 2 from Earth, which is the furthest away manmade object in space. That means a single information relay takes 34 hours.
Try carrying on a conversation with Ben Carson [politico.com] -- before his late-afternoon, early-evening double espresso. :-)
If it really exists: how can I hear it? (Score:1)
I think Never A Straight Answer; however, I'll give them the benefit of doubt: tell me where to point my telescope, what frequencies to listen for, and I'll tell you if it's really there or not.
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I wonder what kind of security there is on the uplink, and whether the recent problems were the result of hackers trying to take it over.
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Farthest manmade object (Score:3)
That would be a manhole cover.
just happy it accepts commands (Score:2)
ctrl alt del (Score:2)