Since the NRO was created fifteen years earlier to build and fly spy satellites, we can presume that they had a working idea of the problems involved in building a chip designed for long durations in space.
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Very impressive
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Objectively… yes.
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Looks like the new telemetry is coming in. Let’s see…
We…have…been…trying…to…reach…you…about…your…car’s…warranty…
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Excellent. Thank you! In answer the burning question in my brain:
“The original software for the Voyager probes was written using Fortran 5 then ported to Fortran 77, and today there is some porting in C”
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This reminded me of a case where a group of enthusiasts working outside NASA were able to contact and command a spacecraft that was launched after Voyagers 1 and 2. The ISEE-3 Reboot Project obtained documentation on the communication protocols used by the ISEE-3 spacecraft and attempted to command it to fire its thrusters to recapture it into Earth orbit in 2014, but unfortunately the thrusters had become non-functional after so many years in space.
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Also probably the fact that anyone with the technical knowledge to do this is probably appropriately in awe of the achievement Voyager represents that they wouldn’t want to mess with it.
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I cut my programming teeth on fortran 77. I still have the refs!
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I’m not sure if it’s the same spacecraft (probably) but I read about NASA having to wipe the cassette tape (yes!) and rerecord the programming on it at some point. To wipe it, they got it hot enough (using FF and REW, in this vacuum-insulated environment) to demagnetize but not to melt. That involved having a computer simulation of heat flow within the spacecraft, which of course accounts for the angle that the Sun is shining on its various parts.
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I wonder how many layers of emulation their test system uses? I mean, if it originally ran on something like a PDP-10… emulator Inception!
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My head struggles with how they deal with the doppler shifts involved between a transmitter sitting on a spinning planet that’s orbiting the Sun sending a precise frequency to a retreating spacecraft.
Something tells me, that the simplest part of the whole thing!
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That’s probably smarter than my suggestion, which was to have it collide with an alien probe, let them both repair themselves into one unit, and let it return to Earth to sterilize all inferior life forms.
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An idea so nice you can try it twice!
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I work in radio astronomy, where we do Doppler shift corrections to the spectral lines resulting from the Earth’s motion as a matter of course. It’s pretty simple math if you are a rocket scientist.
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I suspect most “millenials” would trade all those things for a guaranteed pension and a salary that allowed entry-level technicians, much less engineers, to buy a house on Day 1 of employment instead of paying down hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans for decades first…
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Nah, they should just stop buying starbucks and avocado toast, and acting all entitled… /s
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This fix was more than likely made by Millennials, along with Gen X and younger Boomers who were in high school in 1977. Voyager 1 is coming up to 50 years old now, the youngest people involved then are likely to have retired by now.
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