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Voyager 1 loses contact with NASA, turns on retro transmitter not used since 1981
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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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Always have a backup. You may not use it for 43 years, but youβll be glad itβs there when you do.
I'm only 41 years old.
This recievier has been working for my whole life, goes out of service 15 billion miles away, turns on a backup reciever, and is now back in contact with NASA.
.........but the ice cream machine at McDonalds is still broken.
Both are by design. The ice cream machine actually just got a DMCA exception so the company that makes it no longer can dictate who repairs it.
I'm picturing the Voyager 1 terminal is an ancient computer from the 1970s hooked up to a large parabolic antenna, and everyone is afraid to upgrade it because they might mess something up. I'm sure that's not the case, but its what lives in my mind.
Since I was thinking about it I looked up some stuff: "So Voyager-1 does not βreallyβ have a computer, in the sense that it does not have an operating system or RAM or a microprocessor. It was built in the 60s before any of this was invented and used CMOS-based microcontroller chips from Texas Instruments. Overall, it has a 16-bit processor and a MASSIVE memory of 70 KILOBYTES. That is smaller memory than a thumbnail of a phone image today, but it was enough to send images through which we discovered Jupiter has rings and much more."
From: https://medium.com/towards-generative-ai/voyager-1-what-computer-system-it-has-that-is-still-running-strong-a269aaea316b
Although it doesn't compare to modern systems, the computer systems on Voyager is a computer by all means. It's even the longest running computer that ever existed, having never been shut off. It runs Fortran code.
The image data that the camera made didnn't have to fit in the computers memory. It was written directly to tape, which was then transmitted by the computer. The resolution is 800x800 pixels with only one colour at a time. The colour images or in larger resolutions were combinations of several images. The camera has been shut off by now.
Speaking of not wanting to touch the code, it did have an issue last year, where the code seemed to have stopped or gone into a loop for unknown reasons making it inaccessible for the operators on Earth. Thankfully another part of the computer was instructed to periodically overwrite the main code, so it managed to correct the error by itself. At least that's what I remember reading.
You can cram a load of machine language into 70K. Seems far more than needed, bet a bunch is for redundancy.
It's probably not too far off. The ground station probably uses the same antenna, the computer running it is probably relatively new, but I'm sure there's some kind of emulation for the control software. Like a Fortran emulator, not like WINE or an old DOS VM.
The obvious solution is to launch the ice cream machines into space.
Holy fuck is that* the real distance?
Yep, here's the Voyager pair's live distances: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1-and-voyager-2-now/
That's awesome
Hank, don't spray WD into your locks, you're better than that Hank
The guy is in Texas and not cooking over pecan wood. I'm making this point to show that he's ignorant. That doesn't mean dumb, it just means he doesn't know any better.
We all know you shouldn't use that on your locks these days and can easily Google why. He wasn't a technology guy and only really knew what he read or what an old guy who didn't know shit told him. He did things the way he thought was right but he had some pretty big blind spots. Maybe he didn't know about 3-in-1 oil.
Plus it was a cartoon written by people who probably didn't know any better and I'm taking both that fact and your comment far too seriously (or I'm just making an elaborate joke, that's for the reader to decide).
In case you're wondering, the correct substance is graphite powder
Yep, I had completely forgotten about graphite because I was looking at my 3-in-1 oil at the time. My mistake, and I'm leaving it to show my own hubris and blind spots, much like the Texan pictured above.
Aha, the famous back door: https://youtu.be/Joed0P3hhbc